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ہفتہ 18 مارچ 2006Saturday, March 18, 2006
پاکستان میں اجنبی
میں پاکستان میں پیدا ہوا اور عمر کا ایک طویل عرصہ میں نے وہیں گزارا۔ پھر آج میں پاکستان میں اجنبی کیسے بن گیا؟ اس بار جب میں پاکستان گیا تو وہاں اپنے تو تھے مگر ملک اور شہر میں میں نے خود کو غیرملکی تصور کیا۔ شاید وقت نے مجھے بدل دیا ہے اور شاید پاکستان بھی آٹھ سال پہلے والا نہیں رہا۔
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Posted by Zack at 11:36 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
منگل 16 نومبر 2004Tuesday, November 16, 2004
US Visa Issues
Colin Powell on US visas (hat tip: Perverse Access Memory): It is in our interest to have foreigners come to our institutions, come to our medical facilities, come to our entertainment facilities, visit the United States as tourists to get...
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Posted by Zack at 12:08 AM | Comments (36) | TrackBack
بدھ 29 ستمبر 2004Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Legal Torture
Obsidian Wings has a very important post about a bill in Congress which will allow the US to legally send suspected terrorists to any country for torture. The Republican leadership of Congress is attempting to legalize extraordinary rendition. “Extraordinary rendition”...
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Posted by Zack at 2:51 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
منگل 24 اگست 2004Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Immigration Tales
I have ranted about USCIS on this weblog a number of times. Today, we bring you stories of the stupidity of immigration authorities around the world. Let’s start with the United States. Via Head Heeb comes the story of poor...
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Posted by Zack at 3:39 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
جمعرات 22 جولائی 2004Thursday, July 22, 2004
Do They Look Like Me?
You might have heard about the terror induced by 14 Syrian musicians on a Northwestern flight. There is no doubt that something out of the ordinary happened on Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on June 29....
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Posted by Zack at 12:12 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
جمعہ 16 جولائی 2004Friday, July 16, 2004
USCIS Efficiency
It took a month to happen for Amber. That was two years ago. I had to wait 2 years and 2 months for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to do what was just a printing job. During those...
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Posted by Zack at 3:31 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
بدھ 21 اپریل 2004Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Miscellaneous
I have read a number of books in the past month or so and owe you guys about five reviews. Hopefully, I’ll get to them in the next couple of weeks. Asad has informed me that he has created a...
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Posted by Zack at 9:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
بدھ 24 مارچ 2004Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Mexican Immigration Threat
Samuel Huntington has written an article about the threat of Mexican immigration to the US. His article is full of assumptions, half-truths and ignoring data that doesn’t fit his thesis. In some ways, it is worse than his Clash of...
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Posted by Zack at 1:01 AM | Comments (56) | TrackBack
پیر 5 جنوری 2004Monday, January 05, 2004
Finger Printing Visitors
I don’t have time for a real post, but wanted to note that the US-VISIT program has started. Foreigners arriving at U.S. airports were photographed and had their fingerprints scanned Monday in the start of a government effort to use...
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Posted by Zack at 10:43 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
منگل 23 دسمبر 2003Tuesday, December 23, 2003
Regularizing Immigration
Via Mark Kleiman and Perverse Access Memory comes this statement from Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has called for millions of illegal immigrants in the United States to be given some sort of legal status...
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Posted by Zack at 4:22 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
ہفتہ 18 اکتوبر 2003Saturday, October 18, 2003
What I am Reading
I am busy, so no regular posts today. However, here is some stuff I am reading: A New York Times article about the Lackawanna Six, the Yemeni-Americans in Buffalo who trained at an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. An interesting...
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Posted by Zack at 8:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
ہفتہ 4 اکتوبر 2003Saturday, October 04, 2003
Immigration Arbitrariness
This news story is about a Turkish physician whose visa extension hit some snags at BCIS until his congressman intervened. I think it shows how arbitrary of the immigration process in the US is and how much depends on the...
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Posted by Zack at 4:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
بدھ 17 ستمبر 2003Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Busy Busy Busy
Sorry for the lack of posts. Amber was here for the weekend and I have been really busy with work and stuff. I have a couple of Kashmir posts in the pipeline. Hopefully, I should post them in a day...
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Posted by Zack at 12:53 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
منگل 26 اگست 2003Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Immigration Reading
Here’s some stuff I have been reading (via Perverse Access Memory). Matt Welch posts about some of the problems immigrants had in the US in the past and how people consider that era now to be whitewashed into nice assimilation...
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Posted by Zack at 3:33 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
بدھ 6 اگست 2003Wednesday, August 06, 2003
BCIS Sucks Big Time
Repeat after me, BCIS people are fucking assholes. Now, it seems they have lost information from their system of the approval of my application from 1.5 years ago. I think I need to contact my Congressman or Senator. POSTSCRIPT: That...
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Posted by Zack at 1:06 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack
منگل 5 اگست 2003Tuesday, August 05, 2003
BCIS Sucks
That is the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). But you already knew that....
Posted by Zack at 2:56 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
اتوار 13 جولائی 2003Sunday, July 13, 2003
Immigration and National Security Report
As I promised, here are some of the highlights from the report by the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute. Our new security measures must be effective rather than merely dramatic, and must not destroy what we are trying to defend. The...
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Posted by Zack at 11:11 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
جمعرات 3 جولائی 2003Thursday, July 03, 2003
Immigration and National Security
The Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, has published a report that says that the post-September 11 roundup of immigrants was actually bad for national security. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems interesting because one of the...
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Posted by Zack at 11:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
منگل 10 جون 2003Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Illegal Immigrants and Special Registration
Special Registration is having the effects I thought it would (see here, here, here, and here). According to the New York Times: More than 13,000 of the Arab and Muslim men who came forward earlier this year to register with...
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Posted by Zack at 4:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
جمعہ 6 جون 2003Friday, June 06, 2003
Treatment of Sept 11 Detainees
The Inspector General in the Department of Justice has issued a report criticizing the government conduct in detaining 762 people on suspicion of terrorism after September 11. According to the report, 491 people were arrested in New York and 70...
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Posted by Zack at 1:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
منگل 27 مئی 2003Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Arab Americans in Michigan
An interesting post by Patrick Belton on Oxblog. Quite simply, I fell in love with Dearborn. The largest concentration of Arabs or Muslims in the United States, it’s a study in contrasts - in between miles upon miles of depopulated...
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Posted by Zack at 9:35 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
منگل 18 مارچ 2003Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Asylum in Canada
The Manifest Border, a legal blog focussed on immigration, pointed me to this story in the Washington Times: Thousands of illegal immigrants from Middle Eastern countries are seeking asylum in Canada, massing in run-down motels and refugee sanctuaries on the...
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Posted by Zack at 1:45 AM | Comments (65) | TrackBack
منگل 11 مارچ 2003Tuesday, March 11, 2003
Language Ability
Looking at the Census data, I came across what languages people spoke in the US and how it correlated with their speaking ability in English. The following two tables give the percentage of people who cannot speak English well, divided...
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Posted by Zack at 10:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
An Illegal Immigrant
From Dawn: US authorities kept a nephew of President Pervez Musharraf in detention for two weeks for a visa violation, US and Pakistani officials said on Saturday. Aamir Javed Musharraf was detained on Feb 19 and released on Friday on...
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Posted by Zack at 1:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
بدھ 5 مارچ 2003Wednesday, March 05, 2003
INS Prevented me from Blogging Yesterday
Yes, that’s true because I wasted a full day at an INS office. And all because of a mistake by INS. What happened was that my fingerprints on an INS document (done by INS officials themselves) were not identifiable. Why...
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Posted by Zack at 1:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
جمعرات 13 فروری 2003Thursday, February 13, 2003
Snitch Visas
Via Perverse Access Memory, I found the news about snitch visas for informants about criminals and terrorists. The logic looked impeccable: Foreign terrorists lurk among foreigners, and foreigners want to live in America. So why not give foreigners a visa...
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Posted by Zack at 1:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
پیر 3 فروری 2003Monday, February 03, 2003
INS Document Shredding Case
Previous post here. Here is the INS side of the story: In response to the discovery of the document destruction, those who had filed applications and petitions at the California Service Center but had not yet received a receipt for...
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Posted by Zack at 7:06 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
جمعہ 31 جنوری 2003Friday, January 31, 2003
INS gets rid of backlog
From the NY Times: Tens of thousands of pieces of mail come into the huge Immigration and Naturalization Service data processing center in Laguna Niguel, Calif., every day, and as at so many government agencies, it tends to pile up....
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Posted by Zack at 6:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
جمعرات 30 جنوری 2003Thursday, January 30, 2003
INS Problems
I can tell you a lot of horror stories of INS bungling, but I’ll desist for now and point out a post on Ginger Stampley’s blog. She is one of the few bloggers who knows something about immigration issues. It’s...
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Posted by Zack at 5:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
جمعہ 24 جنوری 2003Friday, January 24, 2003
Special Registration Questionnaire
AILA (American Immigration Lawyers Association) has the list of standard questions being asked of all special registrants. Seems fairly innocuous....
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Posted by Zack at 1:51 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
پیر 20 جنوری 2003Monday, January 20, 2003
Deported Pakistanis: Illegal Immigrants
The New York Times has a story on some Pakistanis who were deported after September 11. All of them were illegal immigrants, so they do not get any sympathy from me for their plight. In my opinion, an illegal immigrant...
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Posted by Zack at 4:26 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
ہفتہ 18 جنوری 2003Saturday, January 18, 2003
Special Registration: Turning a blind eye to violations
The Pakistani Ambassador to the US, Javed Ashraf Qazi, met with Ashcroft regarding the special registration of Pakistanis by INS. [The Ambassador] asked Ashcroft to allow Pakistani nationals to take advantage of a general amnesty announced by the Clinton administration...
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Posted by Zack at 11:43 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
جمعہ 17 جنوری 2003Friday, January 17, 2003
Special Registration Advice
From the Pakistan embassy website: What if my last entry to the United States was not legal (without inspection and admission), do I have to register? This category applies to those Pakistanis whose entry to the US was not on...
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Posted by Zack at 1:44 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
بدھ 15 جنوری 2003Wednesday, January 15, 2003
INS Special Registration Procedures
A lot of people don’t have any idea of what special registration entails and how it is inconvenient to frequent travellers. Non-immigrants from mostly Muslim countries have to go through special registration at the airport as well as at INS...
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Posted by Zack at 2:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
ہفتہ 4 جنوری 2003Saturday, January 04, 2003
Special Registration: Pros and Cons
Suman Palit of the Kolkata Libertarian has two posts on the pros and cons of the special registration process: If I were a de-facto emigrant from Pakistan, like someone on a H1-B work visa or a F-1 student visa, or...
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Posted by Zack at 6:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
جمعرات 19 دسمبر 2002Thursday, December 19, 2002
Special Registration: Again
Iranians are protesting according to LA Times: In peaceful Irvine, where Iranians who fled the Ayatollah Khomeini established a tight-knit community of professionals and young families, the last thing anyone expected was to be tossed in jail. On Tuesday –...
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Posted by Zack at 1:10 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Special Registration: PR Failure
Here’s a news item from Reuters: Hundreds of Iranian and other Middle East citizens were in southern California jails on Wednesday after coming forward to comply with a new rule to register with immigration authorities only to wind up handcuffed...
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Posted by Zack at 10:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
پیر 16 دسمبر 2002Monday, December 16, 2002
Security: Pros and Cons: Part Deux
While we are on the subject of security policies, I should mention the FBI interviews of people from Middle Eastern and Muslim countries. I was also one of the people interviewed by US government agencies early this year. My interview...
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Posted by Zack at 2:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Security: Pros and Cons
More countries are being added to the special registration requirement by INS (see here.) Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy has just received an advance copy of a Federal Register notice, scheduled to be published on December 18, that adds...
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Posted by Zack at 1:11 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
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