Saturday -- Naturalization in Houston

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On Saturday (after a minor rear-ending accident on that cursed freeway called Interstate 45; I always tell myself to avoid that trail of tears, but sometimes I don't listen to myself -- minor rear-end, other driver offered to pay for everything), I located the Leonel Castillo Community Center on South St in Houston where a few dozen folks seeking naturalization gathered for help with the monster of a form called N-400.

N-400 has 21 pages of questions, some getting to the intensely personal (marriage, former marriage, children, etc.), some ludicrous (were you a member of the Nazi Party? -- no not neo-nazis, the Nazi Party -- the one that got the headlines), and some just inane (have you been a habitual drunkard?). The whole form can be found here and is worth reviewing.

As a text, it's interesting. I realize that the Customs and Immigration Service is obligated to keep old Nazis out of the US, but several of the questions are meant to keep only a class of undesirables out, while not indicating any interest in other classes of undesirables. For example:

Here, obviously someone has decided that sins such as these are undesirable for American citizens -- drinking, sex, drugs, welfare. I'm sure we've never been any wealthy French cosmopolitan types who gambled illegally and became wealthy American citizens; that just doesn't happen. The rich never gamble illegally.  Here, we have a rhetoric of exclusion where traditional religious values have over the years dictated who should become a US citizen and who should not. This obsession with moral character is not new; the 1926 petition for naturalization was similarly concerned about good moral character (and required affidavits from citizens to that effect: "I affirm he is of good moral character" -- who is going to ask someone to affirm that one is not of good moral character? What kind of serious misunderstanding or misjudgment of friendship would that require?) Here, confectioner [aside: I want to be a confectioner] Nicholas Voltis of Charlottesville Virginia -- white, brunette, 5'5", 140 pounds, with black hair and dark brown eyes -- declares that he will forever forget his native citizenship of Greece and prefers to become an American. To do so, he cannot be a polygamist (because that's bad), nor an anarchist (because that's bad, and they've always been so successful). 

We don't know if he was a habitual drunkard, however. Or a prostitute, for that matter. He was a confectioner, remember. Great front for prostitution. I mean, just look at what's available behind those doors:

What is lacking in today's naturalization application, of course, is some other standard of citizenship which considers other sins of moral conscience that are not so plebeian, so lowly, so quotidian as prostitution, gambling, and drinking. Though there are a dozen questions that try to weed out genocidal types:

what is still lacking are the really tough questions that might have kept Rupert Murdoch out of the US. So, I propose we add or substitute questions for the N-400 application to include the following: 

Here, class and wealth has its own sins and character degradation; here, these moral pitfalls are permitted only by those with enormous wealth and power, much more than any working class migrant from Mexico or Central America could ever conceive of in the worst day of habitual drunkenness. Here, the power class is excluded from scrutiny and investigation because those same oligarchs have already made the immigration laws and rules to keep cock fighters from full citizenship privileges, but buying national elections cycle after cycle is something that doesn't merit the label of "bad character." This is exactly the kind of character that legislators want -- bringing in the oligarchs to fund the endless cycle of professional politicians to maintain that corporate-congressional-military alliance. 

Two worlds -- one of exclusion, pretending to keep alcohol, sex, and gambling away from the moral purity of the United States; the other of inclusion, bringing corruption and graft into the centers of power of the same.

So, I wasn't able to ask these questions, not that it would have applied to the very pleasant woman who sat across the table from me, tired of the hundred questions, thinking about lunch, feeling the warmth of the sun falling through the windows of the Castillo Community Center, one step closer to becoming a US citizen. 

BM