Digital Immigration

Earlier this week, I had MP3 songs in digital immigration holdings because they did not have the right U.S. documentation to get off the Great Britain Amazon cloud.  They needed to come home to the U.S. 

It was a complicated and twisted tale of digital immigration legalities. It seems I had an old Amazon UK cloud account in 2006 when my sister lived there. I wanted to avoid large shipping costs and used her address for the account to send various holiday presents. At the time, I did not know about the international digital clouds that Amazon set up to store music and files for Kindle and various laptops and tablet. I think the clouds were just emerging and I was a digital peasant. So, when I recently reopened my Amazon.com account it somehow set up my cloud on the old UK account. I had no idea of this development when I started to download songs to listen to on my Kindle.

I was on the Amazon customer service chat sites for the UK and US for hours Monday night and into the early morning Tuesday trying to get the issue solved and have access to my songs via my account here in the US.  I wanted to surprise my daughter with the latest Adele song, “Let the Sky Fall.”  Finally, two songs were reloaded into my cloud here in the US, but one never came home. It is lost out there in cyberspace. Surely getting real, hard copy passports and papers to travel to the US can’t be this complicated.

Alas, however, people immigration issues are more tragic and complex. Real people and not digital copies of songs and files are waiting to find homes in the United States. Some desperate people decided to come here illegally in search of a better life for their families which created a crisis for young people who had no say in coming to America. They went to our schools and some even received scholarships and excelled but because of their families’ illegal statuses they faced deportation and an end to their dreams. These children received a special reprieve from deportation because of President Obama’s executive order which allows them to remain in the US. This order doesn’t begin to fix the huge problems of illegal immigration. 

Comprehensive immigration reform is desperately needed, but I fear this reform will get mired in politics while families await change and better opportunities. In the meantime, Adele’s lyrics are poetic and applicable too to the immigration issues:

“Skyfall is where we start
A thousand miles and poles apart 
When worlds collide, and days are dark
You may have my number, you can take my name
But you’ll never have my heart”



Read more at http://www.latinospost.com/articles/5030/20121005/adeles-james-bond-song-lyrics-video-new.htm#sbgEO5tfLmIwJFBU.99 

Immigration at its heart, I believe, is a real spiritual and moral issue.  I have found a great website on the issue faithandimmigration.org  .  Here, Janelle Tupper sums up my personal beliefs on the issue well:

“There are many reasons to support comprehensive immigration reform.  As Christians, we point to the Biblical call to welcome the stranger and love our neighbors as the top reasons for our support.”

I urge every Christian who cares about this issue to go to faithandimmigration.org  to sign their Evangelical Statement of Principle for Immigration Reform today.