Today I waited in the Tokyo immigration office to apply for an employee’s visa. My observation is that the immigration process is the Great Equalizer. Various people were applying for professional visas, hostess visas, student visas, and refugee visas. Yet we were all the same. We were all refugees, begging for the refuge of Japan’s concrete shores.
America’s immigrants included “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” according to the Emma Lazarus poem. But Japan considers all its immigrants to be refuse. In fact, the immigration clearinghouse office is next door to a massive waste incinerator complex.
As I breathed in the carcinogenic fumes from the incinerator, I felt affinity with the other huddles masses. We are all the same.
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