Author: Gaiutra Bahadur

Review by Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

The word incendiary was used to describe firebombs that dropped from planes during World War II. It sprang often from Edward R. Murrow’s lips during his broadcast sorties from London. Amitav Ghosh has chosen this word from another time to title his recently published anthology of essays. Intended or not, it’s a stroke of irony. These 17 pieces penned over the last two decades are devoted to the conflicts and dislocations peculiar to our own time, one in which the comfortable binaries of clear right and wrong no longer seem to apply.

The writer, a criss-crosser of the globe born in Calcutta, takes us to little-observed corners of the developing world in order to shed some light on the “incendiary circumstances” there. As Murrow brought the Blitz into American living rooms, so Ghosh transports us – and our consciences – to places that could be described as contemporary front lines. But the conflicts there are no longer between nation-states. They are within countries and among ethnicities, cultures and religious ideologies.

Ghosh treks across mountainous terrain with camouflaged guerrillas shouldering M-16s. They are dissidents, former university students who live in bamboo huts near the Thai-Burmese border as they carry forward a five-decade-old struggle by the Karenni ethnic minority to break away from Burma.

In the dissidents’ jungle camp, Ghosh sleeps on a pallet on the floor of a hut. The camp leader devises a makeshift pillow for the writer by wrapping books in a towel. One book, The Transformation of War by Martin Van Creveld, falls out. It predicts a shift from wars waged by states to those conducted by more chaotic elements. The author strikes Ghosh as a kind of oracle of insurgencies.

In a way, so is Ghosh. Long before Osama bin Laden brought terror onto U.S. soil and into U.S. consciousness, Ghosh was chronicling its dispossessing, widowing, orphaning presence and roots elsewhere. He describes, for instance, Sikhs burned alive in the streets of New Delhi in 1984, in the wake of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination by Sikh bodyguards sympathetic to insurgents in the Punjab.

But Ghosh’s first-person chronicles – ranging from Brooklyn after the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001, to the wrecked shores of the Andaman Islands after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 – are not macho dispatches from a Kevlar-vested correspondent in disaster zones.

Ghosh, a creative writing teacher at Harvard University, is no such thing. He is an intellectual, albeit the kind unafraid to speed past minefields on a scooter to the wooden house on stilts where Pol Pot was born. His essays are alive with the immediacy of the best reporting. But ideas also animate this collection. Some of the essays are thought arcs – not just narratives, but meditations crafted with a reporter’s attention to detail and a poet’s attention to metaphor and meaning.

So, Ghosh writes of the Burmese dictator Gen. Ne Win’s impact on his country: “He slammed the shutters and switched off the lights: Burma became the dark house of the neighborhood… .”

“Dancing in Cambodia,” the essay that peers into Pol Pot’s origins, begins in 1906, with the arrival of the Francophile monarch King Sisowath in the port of Marseilles with a troupe of classical dancers. Ghosh weaves the story of the dancers – immortalized in sketches by a smitten Rodin during that very same trip – with his own observations about Cambodia nearly 90 years later.

The salience of the dancers is withheld until the essay’s end. Ghosh is clearly exploring the theme of the fraught love affair between the colonizer and the colonized. He expresses curiosity about Pol Pot’s own days as an electronics student in Paris and mentions that many of the leaders of the country’s Communist revolution studied there. Then, Ghosh illuminates, with a description of the first postwar dance performance in Phnom Penh in 1981.

The audience sobbed from beginning to end.

“You could have sailed out of there in a boat,” one observer recalled.

“We thought everything was lost,” survivors of the war said, “that we would never hear our music again, never see our dance.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

Highly skilled workers on visas say the citizenship backlog in the United States leaves them frustrated.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

A photograph occupying a place of pride in banker Meenaish Damania’s Morrisville apartment shows her in a white sari, smiling and hopeful on her wedding day a year ago in India. She was about to come to the United States as the wife of one of India’s software studs with an H1B, the State Department’s highly coveted temporary work visa for skilled professionals.

She knew visa rules barred her from employment until the U.S. government accepted her husband’s application for a green card, the document that would allow him to stay in the country permanently.

What Damania did not know was that it could take nearly a decade.

With the Senate deadlocked over a bill that would give millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, the legal, highly educated H1Bs and their spouses say their struggle to become permanent residents has been overlooked.

The wait to be a new American is so long that former golden boys from India – homeland to about half the H1Bs, who tend to cluster in science, engineering and high-tech jobs – have seen their stock in the marriage market driven down.

The visa used to make bachelors returning home for brides instantly desirable. Now ads for grooms like the one published in a Kashmiri daily a few years ago – Seeking smart, USA based, IT/MBA, H1B, Brahmin Boy – have dwindled.

Because the permanent-residency application is sponsored by an employer and tied to a specific job description, H1Bs cannot change companies or be promoted. They’re stifled, they say, with no chance for advancement. And their spouses languish, bored and jobless, a half-world from friends and family.

Damania, whose husband, Nozer, is a Web developer, volunteers at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to stay sane.

“It was depressing,” Damania, 25, said. “I had to do something.”

Some guest workers say the backlog handcuffs them to exploitative bosses. Others, researchers in cutting-edge fields such as nanotechnology, can’t get grants. They are available only to green-card holders.

The backlog could hurt the U.S. economy as much as it hurts imported brainiacs and their families, the guest workers say.

“We’re talking about highly skilled labor that’s in short supply,” said Kartik Hosanagar, an H1B from India who is on the faculty at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

“That’s certainly something the U.S. economy cannot afford to lose,” Hosanagar said.

The State Department and Department of Homeland Security are uncertain how many H1Bs are in the country. B. Lindsay Lowell, a labor migration expert at Georgetown University, estimates there are 500,000.

The guest workers receive three-year visas that can be renewed once. During that time, many apply to stay permanently.

Backlogs have been a persistent problem for the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. In 2000, Congress told the agency it should take no more than 11/2 years to get a green card.

The number of applications for employment-based cards far exceeds the 140,000 available each year. Making things worse, the bureau’s ombudsman said, the federal agency squandered about a quarter of the slots available between 2001 and 2004 by failing to process paperwork efficiently.

Cyber Fuse Technologies, the Bucks County company that hired Nozer Damania, started his green-card process in 2003. It had to prove to the U.S. Labor Department that it advertised for the job at the prevailing wage and found no qualified Americans.

Nozer Damania, who is 28, also had to pass a background check. That was in 2005.

Now he is stuck waiting to enter the final phase. The government only this month began to consider applications from Indian H1Bs who cleared security and other hurdles in February 2001. Those lucky souls will get behind 168,000 to 271,000 – government entities disagree on the number – already in line.

“There’s no end in sight,” Nozer Damania, a 2002 Drexel University graduate, said. “Because of the whole stress on illegal immigration, we’ve been completely forgotten.”

The guest-worker professionals already have an unofficial house band. The H1Bees, as in “worker bees,” were started by a group of Washington-area computer geeks who were on the visas before winning permanent status. The “curry rock” bards have recorded an album that captures H1B culture shock and abuse by “body shops,” consulting firms that sponsor their green cards and farm them out for a cut of their wages.

Now, to remind Congress that they contribute to the U.S. economy, 2,500 foreign-born pharmaceutical, high-tech, finance and hospital employees have banded together via the Internet to form Immigration Voice.

The association is devoted to fixing the backlog, which it blames on hopeless bureaucracy and ill-conceived immigration quotas.
Congress’ attempt to address illegal workers has inflamed an “anti-immigration lobby” that acts as if “every immigrant is a guy who walked across the border, which is not the case,” said Shreyas Desai, 27, of Lafayette Hill, one of the group’s founders.

While Microsoft and other employers lobby Congress regularly to increase the number of H1B visas, capped at 65,000 annually, the association is the first effort by the guest workers themselves to influence the political process.

Since forming four months ago, members have raised $70,000, hired the Washington firm Quinn, Gillespie & Associates to lobby on their behalf, and eagle-eyed the evolution of arcane and complex immigration proposals.

The House passed a bill in December that did not address the H1B cap or the paperwork delays.

Desai, a software engineer for a Wilmington bank, said the proposal before the Senate could make the H1Bs’ plight worse.
While it would bring to 290,000 the annual number of employer-sponsored green cards, more than double the current allotment, the bill r eserves at least 87,000 for unskilled laborers who enter the country on newly created temporary work visas.

The bill would raise to 10 percent the maximum share of green cards available to applicants from any one nation, up from the current 7 percent. However, it eliminates an existing provision that gives guest workers from India and China, which account for most H1Bs, access to green cards left over from countries that don’t use up their quota.

Under the Senate plan, previously illegal workers who meet certain conditions could apply for residency on their own. H1Bs would still need an employer sponsor.

“It gives a lot of control to the employer,” said Amol Jakatdar, a Yardley software engineer for a consulting firm that contracts him out, most recently to Merck Pharma in New Jersey.

Allegations of second-class treatment of H1B holders are so common in that state that the U.S. Labor Department is hiring an investigator to focus on complaints by the guest workers, Kate Dugan, an agency spokeswoman in Philadelphia, said.

In the last two years, the agency found that employers in 10 South Jersey counties owed $376,900 in wages to 21 H1B workers. There have been no complaints in Pennsylvania.

Advocates for limiting H1B visas argue that the foreign whiz kids drag down wages for American professionals and that their quest to stay in the country proves there is no such thing as a guest worker.

“It’s a misnomer,” said Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors immigration restrictions.

The H1B isn’t supposed to be “the bullpen for green cards,” Camarota said.

Other countries, meanwhile, are wooing the disaffected guest workers. Faced with a high-tech labor shortage, New Zealand overhauled its laws two years ago to give qualified workers resident status immediately. It has lured 280 non-U.S. citizens, some from Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom also make it easier for highly skilled immigrant laborers to resettle there. And India and China are welcoming back talent they lost to the States.

A headhunter phoned Dilip Bearelly, a chief resident at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, with an offer in Australia.

The job would allow the Indian native to do research on hepatitis C that he can’t do here because he doesn’t have a green card.
” ‘We’ll do everything for you,’ ” he said they pitched him. ” ‘The pay will be comparable to the U.S., and you will not have any visa hassles.’ ”

If Washington does not address the green-card backlog soon, he said, “I’ll go.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

John Ryan is, as the slogan on his olive green T-shirt announces, an “undocumented U.S. Border Patrol agent.”

No one deputized the retired Quakertown telephone repairman to stare into the hardscrabble desert between Mexico and the United States, protecting the U.S. border from the estimated million people who cross it illegally each year.

Yet today, as the Senate begins debate on sweeping changes to the nation’s immigration laws, Ryan is planning an April trip to Yuma, Ariz., where, 9mm pistol at his side, he will be a lookout for undocumented immigrants.

Ryan, desert sentry at 58, founded the Pennsylvania Minutemen last summer. The presence of the group here, almost 2,000 miles from Mexico, reflects the growing influence of the Minuteman movement.

Its border-control campaign was born a year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with the Tombstone (Ariz.) Militia, which evolved into the national Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. The mission of the controversial organization – and of loosely allied groups such as Ryan’s – is to keep out illegal immigrants it believes could be terrorists, drug traffickers or disease carriers and who depress U.S. wages, founder Chris Simcox says.

From its 6,800 members, the Arizona-based group dispatches volunteers bearing walkie-talkies, binoculars and, often, guns to border hot spots overlooking Mexico and Canada.

Thirty-one official chapters in 24 states, including central New Jersey, have sprouted in the last year. Some focus on confronting day laborers they believe are illegal and contractors who hire them. Chapter members also lobby for tougher immigration enforcement.

While Simcox and his followers call themselves a “national town watch,” others, including President Bush, have used the word “vigilantes.” They are the Minute Klan, opponents say, a group whose rhetoric has racist overtones, particularly toward Latinos and Muslims.

Last April, at the group’s monthlong Minuteman Project, 1,200 volunteers converged along 23 miles of the Arizona border and reported 200 attempted crossings to the U.S. Border Patrol, Simcox said. Their role is reconnaissance, he said. The Minutemen do not become physically involved.

“The only thing they’re doing is putting themselves in danger,” said Maria Valencia, spokeswoman for the U.S. Border Patrol. “It’s inappropriate for a civilian to do. They’re not trained.”

The Minutemen are undaunted. This year’s monthlong jamboree, which begins Saturday, will involve 7,000 border-watchers encamped in Texas, New Mexico, California and Arizona, organizers say.

Many will not be members of the parent group. The increase in freelance supporters pleases the national Minutemen at the same time it makes them nervous.

A rancher who led the Texas chapter resigned last year, saying that some in his own small-town unit talked of shooting illegal immigrants and letting them die of dehydration. The group’s loose structure, he e-mailed Simcox, was “a recipe for disaster.”

Simcox defends his members against charges of racism and says that group leaders now submit to criminal background checks and interviews.

Of the sympathizers who also call themselves Minutemen, “as long as they don’t step outside the law… I don’t have a problem,” Simcox said.

“Because our focus is strictly national security,” he added, “we cannot afford to have anyone go down to that border who’s anti-immigrant.”

Ryan’s fledgling Pennsylvania Minutemen, with a half-dozen active members and nearly 100 supporters, is independent.

“I have a natural disinclination to corporations,” Ryan said.

The Pennsylvania Minutemen do not perform background checks. He plans to let the state do the legwork by having members apply for concealed-weapons permits, which are unavailable to convicted criminals.

In Yuma, Ryan will not be on Simcox’s list of official Minuteman Civil Defense Corps border-watchers. Yet Simcox backs the Pennsylvania Minutemen.

He spoke at the group’s first recruitment meeting, which attracted 50 participants, two dozen protesters, and a protective ring of eight police cruisers to a King of Prussia hotel last month.

Taking the stage after a George Washington reenactor, who evoked the image of the patriot defending America from invasion, Simcox issued his message: Illegal immigrants are a threat to U.S. security and public health.

“If I catch you breaking into my country in the middle of the night and we’re at war… you’re a potential enemy,” he said. “I don’t care if you’re a busboy coming to wash dishes.”

Simcox, who travels with a bodyguard and wears a bulletproof vest, said he was tired of detractors “looking for Billy Joe Bob Redneck Vigilante, out to shoot a Mexican…”

The band PokerFace performed at the meeting. Its leader, Paul Topete, is a Minuteman supporter and the son of a legal Mexican immigrant. He and Simcox have lobbied U.S. legislators side by side in the fight to thwart illegal immigrants.

“Why should they have to do anything less than what my father had to?” said Topete, 39, of Allentown.

Monitors from the Southern Poverty Law Center have reported the presence of self-declared white supremacists at Minuteman border events. Simcox acknowledges that he sent a half-dozen groups home last year.

“We just didn’t like their attitude, and they didn’t like our rules,” he said.

Ryan also polices his Minutemen, he said. He banned a member of the group’s Yahoo listserv for anti-Semitic posts.

The Minutemen group “doubtless contains some well-meaning people,” said Mark Potok, a director at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “However, it embodies a lot of what’s scary about the [border-control] movement: a mix of weapons, bigotry and conspiracy theories.”

Many Minutemen supporters say they believe illegal Mexican immigrants come here as part of reconquista, a scheme by their government and others to take back the American Southwest.

“It’s a demographic invasion to reclaim the territories that Mexico had given to the U.S,” Ryan said. “Many Mexicans come over with the attitude that ‘this is our land.’ ”

Kathleen Appell, 62, a Minuteman donor, recounted seeing men advertising a Mexican restaurant while en route to a July 4 barbecue in Southampton.

“There are these Mexicans with sombreros, dressed in Mexican outfits,” she said. “It was an American holiday. I felt like I was in another country. How did this neighborhood change so fast… that there even is a Mexican restaurant?”

She said she has no quarrel with legal immigrants – and, indeed, is outraged on their behalf that illegal immigrants cut in the line to get to America.

“It really burns me,” said Frank Shiery, 47, whose wife had to wait nine months to emigrate from China on a fiancee visa.

But that’s not the main reason the martial-arts instructor, from Willow Grove, will patrol the Canadian border from a Mohawk reservation in New York next month. He fears Islamic terrorists.

“I view Islam as the scourge of the earth,” Shiery said. “It is pure unadulterated evil.”

At the King of Prussia meeting, former Chester County Commissioner Colin Hanna told the Minutemen that ranchers on the Mexican border have found copies of the Koran and Arabic-to-Spanish crib sheets intended to help Middle Easterners pass as Mexican.

Hanna started the We Need a Fence project to advocate for a 700-mile steel wall the Senate may soon vote to erect on the southern border. He will monitor the border from a Texas ranch next month as a guest of the national Minutemen.

For Ryan, his affiliation with the Minutemen has changed his life. The widower discovered the national group on the Internet and traveled to the border for the first time last year.

He sat in a lawn chair at the mile-long Huachuca crossing in Arizona every night for two weeks and bunked with Minutemen at a nearby Bible college.

“It was like meeting a family,” he said.

It was also like finding a purpose. During a vigil last fall near the Colorado River in Arizona, government agents drove by to show him migrants apprehended because of his call, Ryan said. There were 20 people sitting in the back of a van.

“You say, ‘Hey, maybe they would have gotten into the country if I wasn’t here.’ ”

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