Migrant Workers – Girl Behind The Orange Curtain

Today at Target in Aliso Viejo, I saw some guy getting signatures for a petition to deny illegal immigrants financial aid. Last time I checked, financial aid is merely a school loan that you have to pay back anyway. It’s not always free money. Giving financial aid to anybody (including illegal immigrants) is actually a good thing for this country because 1. The government can charge interest on those loans which brings in more revenue, and 2. By giving out more loans to go to school, there will be a larger educated workforce.
Who’s to say that the next illegal immigrant seeking an education couldn’t be the next Steve Jobs or Nobel winning economist.
This country was built on the the backs of immigrants, with sweat and blood and sacrifice. We pride ourselves on our tenacity and drive for innovation. But I guess now that that guy’s family has been in the country long enough and gained enough prosperity, we can go ahead and close the doors of opportunity on everyone else? I didn’t realize the we’ve reached our capacity? This is not the first time I’ve seen this discrimination against illegal immigrants. During the GOP Debate in Las Vegas, a series of commercials were aired here in California about “Immigration Stabilization,” clearly aimed at keeping more Latin American immigrants from coming into our state.
And on the day that we should be celebrating the 125th birthday of the Statue of Liberty. Happy Birthday Lady Liberty, see what it’s come to?

The world of blogging has shown it’s dark underbelly again this week with the revelation that the “Gay Girl in Damascus” blogger Amina Arraf was actually Tom McMaster, an American graduate student studying in Edinburgh, Scotland. While he claimed that he was blogging to bring to light the plight of the LGBT community in Syria, he’ll probably set their cause back, and further diminish the Western readers’ concerns for the welfare of the protesters in Syria and the MENA region as a whole.

On May 18, 2011, The Stream on Al Jazeera English highlighted the story of “Dubai Sally” a Filipino domestic worker in the United Arab Emirates, here’s the link to the Al Jazeera site: http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/migrant-workers-blog.

The author of the blog seems well-intentioned enough, the plight of migrant workers, especially in countries with relaxed laws regarding the treatment of migrant workers, should be brought to the surface and shoved in the face of the world that turns a blind eye to the people who pick our crops and turn down our sheets.

But is writing in the first-person the best way to go about it? Are these dramatic accounts the only way to get readership in this world that everyone has a chance to voice their own opinion, either on a blog or on You Tube? I am a trained journalist, I earned my degree in Communications by telling the stories of my subjects with compassion, but with a certain degree of detachment so that I can tell both sides of the story, good or bad. But that’s not enough for the public nowadays, is it? In this climate of celebrity sensationalism, the public feeds off of the misfortune of others. And with each story, the public grows more and more desensitized with the “facts” of the story. Have we learned nothing from James Frey’s downfall, publicly called out by Oprah herself for enhancing his memoir A Million Little Pieces to grab more readers and get more sales?

The truth is that our lives really aren’t all that exciting, which is why I haven’t started blogging in earnest until now. I mean, do you really want to hear about my days of running to the store, pick-up dry cleaning and school runs, day in and day out? No, you don’t. But I will never try to pretend that I’m someone I’m not, no matter the cause that I am trying to bring attention to.

If you read my biography, you will read that I am pretty obsessed about the Middle East myself, but it came about in such an uneventful manner. I hope to bring my two passions together one day and write about women’s and children’s rights in the Middle East, just as so many wonderful, unsung journalists are doing right now, everyday in the region.

So why do we buy into these stories that bloggers post? Are the stories of abuse and torture so horrifying that we pray that they’re not true? I’ll tell you this, I could probably go to Damascus today, grab some guy off the street, and he would probably have a more truthful story of kidnapping and abuse at the hands of the government than “Amina” did. It’s usually the subject that doesn’t talk, that you have to pull the information out of that has a more compelling story to tell.

So, will we learn our lessons as readers to do a little more investigating before we buy into a blogger’s tales? Probably not.