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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (4976)	3/27/2002 7:41:43 AM
From: Bald Eagle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

RE: There is plenty of hate out there There's plenty here on SI too, unfortunately.

To: epicure who wrote (4976)	3/27/2002 8:37:27 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

The Post has an editorial today about that Pakistani in the article I posted the other day. I wonder if it will do any good. Free Ansar Mahmood Wednesday, March 27, 2002; Page A20 MOST OF THE 1,200 immigrants picked up and detained by the federal government after Sept. 11 have been cleared of any connection to the terrorists, or to any terrorists. But most, according to a Sunday article by Post staff writer Hanna Rosin, are being deported anyhow. In the course of police inquiries, almost all of the detainees were found to have violated some law or regulation, sufficient grounds for them to be kicked out and never permitted to return. The first reaction to this news may be: So what? They should have known better than to break a rule -- to overstay a visa, or help a friend without a green card find a job, or commit some other infraction. But the story of a Pakistani man, Ansar Mahmood, may have caused some readers, as it did us, to think twice about the administration's no-excuses policy. Mr. Mahmood seems in many ways to have been the ideal immigrant, the classic American story. He was here legally. He worked hard, legally, putting in 13 or 14 hours per day as a pizza delivery man. He lived frugally and sent money home so his sisters could go to school and his sick father could buy medicine. Mr. Mahmood, 24, came under suspicion because, on the afternoon of Oct. 9, he asked someone to snap his photo at a scenic overlook of the Hudson River near where he lived in New York state. As it happened, the site also overlooked a water treatment plant; officials wondered whether he was casing the facility for nefarious purposes. By the time they found that he wasn't doing any such thing, The Post article recounts, the authorities also discovered that Mr. Mahmood had once helped a Pakistani couple, friends of his sister, find an apartment. The couple was here illegally, so Mr. Mahmood was guilty of harboring an illegal immigrant. Now he faces deportation, with no possibility of return. In the general scheme of things, we suppose it's no big deal; one immigrant's bad luck, or maybe 1,200 immigrants' bad luck. But we wonder about the message this sends. There probably aren't many people on whom authorities couldn't pin something if they looked hard enough: a Social Security form filed late, some tips not reported to the IRS. For immigrants, even legal immigrants, that's particularly true, given the challenges of negotiating ever-changing immigration laws and an incompetent INS bureaucracy. The government should not tolerate lawbreakers. But by rounding up aliens from majority-Muslim countries and then finding something, anything, to pin on them, the government seems to be saying: Terrorist or not, we're better off without you. From what we know about him, it doesn't seem to us that America is better off without Mr. Mahmood. © 2002 The Washington Post Company