February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Two other people were also waiting in the embassy for the necessary permission to fly back across the Atlantic and into the arms of a deeply missed spouse.
And there are certainly more couples again who have suffered through long periods of enforced separation due to an immigration processing system that seems incapable of making and implementing sound judgments quickly.
First and foremost, it has to be said those who work for the various branches of the immigration service are conscientious employees performing a tough job, often under extraordinary pressure. So wouldn’t it be a good thing if that pressure could be eased a little?
It could certainly be eased if the system were better geared to dealing with relatively simple cases like those of Kane and Rodgers in a matter of days as opposed to years.
In the cases of both men, there was ample information to indicate that their presences in the United States had been legal to begin with, their marriages to U.S. citizens legitimate and above board.
Yes, they made mistakes by not properly ascertaining their precise immigration status before leaving the U.S. for family emergencies in Ireland, but the resulting complications should have been dealt with more promptly.
In an entirely separate, and clearly more complicated realm, stands the case of Joe Black, a former IRA man who was arrested and detained in Philadelphia two weeks ago while on his way to a family wedding in Pittsburgh.
Black’s arrest was within the law. He was required to own up to a past that is rooted in the Troubles of the 1970s. But a posse of agents, shackles and chains followed by imprisonment in a federal detention center — all carried out before the eyes of his wife and children — make Joe Black’s case a poster child for all that is wrong with an immigration-control system that seems to have a hard time grading the threat, real or potential, posed by admittedly sometimes less than squeaky clean visitors.
We have been witness to the comings and goings of former IRA members for some years now, some of them quite senior.
The broad principle that what is past is past in the context of the peace process has already been conceded by the U.S. In that spirit, the Joe Blacks of this world should be able to finally shed the bitter memories of more troubled times and travel freely with their loved ones, and to their loves ones, living in the U.S.
There are real bad guys out there and the most efficient possible border control is vital for the nation’s security. But the Kane and Rodgers cases, and, in a very different context, the Black case, suggest a skewed efficiency, an appearance of security and control rather than a real presence of it, and an unsettling sense that resources that should be focused on the real threats to national security are all too often brought to bear, with great fuss and flourish, on individuals who bear this country no ill will at all.