Legal Rule (rant)

Immigration is complicated--just the paperwork alone is often enough to snow people under for weeks. "Oh, you didn't get this piece? Well, you'll have to resubmit your entire application, then. It'll mean that you'll be past the deadline? Too bad. Well, I don't care that you didn't get that when you first came in. It's not my fault you didn't check...okay, then, it's not my fault you didn't know." The questions of identity, fitting in, deciding which bits of your own identity to keep, which ones to shed--well, books have been written about that.

But as exasperated as I am with the Dutch authorities (mostly the gemeente; as long as I don't end up in prison I'm pretty sure the INS is more than happy to forget about me), at least I am here legally. I have documents to prove I am who I say I am, and that I can live here. But for a brief time, I was technically in the Netherlands illegally--though we started the process of getting my residence approved before I would have needed a visa, my 90-day grace period ran out before my residence permit arrived. It was a jittery period, if only because I couldn't do anything by myself--and I'm a law-abiding person.

The idea that "the law is the law and if you break it you pay" forms the core of most "dialogues" (I use that word loosely, as most discussions tend to devolve into name-calling and what-all) on the subject of illegal immmigration. But the law isn't black-and-white: many examples in history show plainly that the law can be wrong (Dredd Scott) and lawbreakers (Rosa Parks) can be right. Does anybody who's not a white supremacist disagree with Brown v. Board of Education? People still fight--hell, they'll happily kill others--to bring us back before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal. How many people wouldn't talk their way out of a speeding ticket if they could? Laws are not immutable (see: gay marriage), nor can they encapsulate the full extent of human morality. And that's the point: the law may indeed be the law, but it's not always what's right, or what's good, or what's just--and unfortunately, it takes good people breaking bad laws to make us realize that. If it were as simple as black-and-white, then Nelson Mandela should never have been released, and Ghandi should've gone down in history as a thug. If the law were the law, there would be no Arab Spring.

When you're talking about human lives, it's much more complicated than black-and-white. People hide/cheat/lie about something as mundane as money, for Chrissakes, pretending to spend a lot more or a lot less than what they did, all in the name of preserving something so nebulous as "status". The stakes in immigration are much greater than "just" a bank account: they're families, employers, communities, colleagues. When the stakes are so high, you have to tread carefully, especially given the "shoot first questions later" mentality that pervades most bureaucracies. To lose everything because of a simple misunderstanding is, I would imagine, more gut-wrenching than to lose everything because of something that you actually did(n't) do. To ignore what's just and what's right in the interest of observing the letter of the law does not always better a people or a nation. After all, Hitler had an army of law-abiding model citizens, too.

/rant

A rose is a rose

I have an identity issue. And I don't mean this in an existential, "who am I" kind of way. I mean this quite literally.

See, when I lived in the US, I always went by "Jules" (not really, but close enough). I went to school as Jules, I opened (and closed) several bank accounts as Jules, and I voted as Jules. Technically, I suppose you could consider me an identity thief, as in the official world of bureaucratic whatsits, there is no Jules. There is only *two Chinese characters of my given name*, as I was born in Taiwan. I didn't get to be Jules until I was 3-4 years old, when my parents moved to the US. There, they appended an English name to my Chinese one, but apparently failed to officially register it at any office that matters, as I would find out 23 years later.

When I applied for residence in the Netherlands, therefore, it was under my Chinese name again. I didn't think too much of it--after all, according to the US government I am also *my Chinese name*, and I could still be Jules to everybody else. However, this was not to be: when I found my first job, the people in Human Resources literally could not wrap their heads around the fact that I prefer to go by my very-easy-to-pronounce English name, rather than the easily-botched-pronunciation-attempts of my Chinese name. So I am employed under my Chinese name, which again, wouldn't be such a big deal, except that my work emails are also given by my Chinese name.

This creates issues, to put it mildly, when I need to give my email out. My work emails are usually some permutation of "last name and first letter of first name". Needless to say, the first letter of the English transliteration of my Chinese name is not "J", which causes some hard-core bafflement if I've introduced myself as Jules, as I am still wont to do, because it's easier to say and nobody can screw it up. It is even more confusing over the phone, as in Dutch, the pronunciation of the letter "J" can sound surprisingly similar to the way an English speaker would pronounce the letter "Y" (my Chinese name). On top of everything else, in Dutch, the letter "J" is often pronounced as a "Y" would be in English. Several people have given up trying to figure out which name I go by altogether (in spite of me always signing my emails with the same name) and have just started randomly mashing together bits and pieces of my Chinese name and Jules. It makes for an interesting collection of greetings.

However, all of this could be chalked up to stiff-necked bureaucrats from hell if it weren't for one thing: I sign everything as "Jules". There is no way you could possibly mistake my signature as anything even remotely close to my Chinese name, and if anybody bothered to glance at my signature they'd see that it does not match the name printed on the form. Clearly, then, nobody gives a rat's ass what my name actually is--so then why can't I be Jules?