The Ethicist

Over the years, I have read the NYT advice column titled "The Ethicist."

It comes out every Sunday and the Ethicist is Randy Cohen who with a quirky admixture of intelligence, practicality and integrity, answers his readers' moral queries.

This week's moral query comes from a gentleman from Massachusetts. The man writes:

I know a woman, an undocumented immigrant, who wishes to get married in order to be able to return to Brazil to see her children (after an absence of nearly seven years). She works at a chain store and seems to be there 60 to 80 hours a week. She sends most of her money home to her children. She is always kind, decent and helpful to others. I’ve known her for three years and believe she would be an exemplary American citizen. She has saved money in order to pay someone to marry her; I believe this would be wrong. If I were to marry her, I’d expect nothing. I live alone, have no girlfriend and think this marriage thing would be the morally correct thing to do. What do you think? 

Here is The Ethicists' response, and it's a layered one to say the least:

Let me open by stating that you seem like a great person. Let me follow that compliment with this irrefutable fact: This is illegal. Don’t do it. You could receive an enormous fine and some jail time, and so could she (the maximum sentence for marriage fraud is five years in prison, a $250,000 penalty and her eventual deportation). I can’t justifiably instruct you to do this, regardless of its moral underpinnings. But let’s say you did do this, against my advice. Would it be ethical?
I don’t know you, and I don’t know this woman; you might be a horrible judge of character, and she might be a con artist. All I can do is take your letter at face value and assume what you’re claiming is accurate. And if it is, my conclusion would be this: If you married this woman, it would be positive for society. It would be transformative for her children, it would eliminate the possibility of her being taken advantage of by someone marrying her for financial gain and it would add a hardworking person to the American populace. I suppose some will argue it would unjustly place her in a position to take a job from a “more deserving” U.S. citizen, but I don’t believe mere citizenship entitles anyone to a job.
The ethical quandary is your entrenched motive. By writing this letter, you are openly defining this marriage as a loveless transaction that falls under the rubric of illegal activity. But something else strikes me about your letter: You seem to respect this woman. You see her as kind, and you see her as good. Have you considered asking her to dinner? Does she seem remotely interested in you as a person? Many long-term relationships begin with a physical attraction that evolves into a state of mutual appreciation; it’s not impossible to imagine that process happening in reverse. If you were to fall authentically in love, any subsequent marriage would not be a sham.
Now, is this suggestion realistic? Perhaps not. In fact, probably not. It’s almost as if I’m trying to persuade you not to steal a loaf of bread by advising you to open a bakery. But what have you got to lose? The worst that could happen is that you have one awkward date while coming to the realization that you’ve tried harder to help this person than perhaps anyone she has ever met.

Bollywood English

The new Eros International movie English Vinglish takes a look at ESL-lives or the lives of those who are classified as English as Second Language speakers in the United States.

Story:

The story of a quiet, sweet tempered housewife who endures small slights from her well educated husband and daughter everyday because of her inability to speak and understand English. She is resourceful and open-minded but somehow these traits don't get noticed by them. Then one day on a trip to visit her sister in Manhattan she decides to enroll in an English Learners class and meets a host of new people who teach her to value herself beyond the narrow perspective of her family.

Pretty, dirty and dignified

The short story, Checking Out, by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (I didn't know if the writer were a she or a he, till I saw a picture of her's) reminds me of the movie Dirty, Pretty Things (2002) directed by Stephen Frears. 

Both narratives have a Nigerian at the center of the immigration saga that unfolds. And both are set in Britain, and show the heartless attitude that Britain shows toward those who arrive at its shores from other worlds.

But what binds the two narratives together, in my eyes is the sublime dignity which form the core of the characters'--the "dirty," yet "pretty" people, who dot the margins of the nations' landscape but have to remain hidden.

In Adiche's story, the illegal Nigerian immigrant Obinze is the son of an University "staffer" back home in Lagos, Nigeria. He has a nice middle-class life, yet wants to have more--he wants to have more choices, he muses--and migrates to the UK in search of a life with a wider arc of choices. Tragically enough he migrates with a 6 month visa, which does not grant him the right to work for a living. So, Obinze works illegally with a fellow Nigerian's ID. 

His first encounter with the dirt underlying the illegal immigrant's experience is the inevitable toilet.

Obinze gets a job cleaning toilets in a real estate agent's office in a London building.

The job goes well till a moment of reckoning arrives:

The toilets were not bad--some urine outside the urinal, some unfinished flushing. So he was shocked, one evening, to walk into a stall and discover a mound of shit on the toilet lid, solid, tapering, centered, as though it had been carefully arranged. It looked like a puppy curled on a mat. It was a performance. He thought about the famed repression of the English. There was, in this performance, something of an unbuttoning. A person who had been fired? Obinze stared at the mound of shit for a long time, feeling smaller and smaller as he did so, until it became a personal affront, a punch to his jaw. And all for three quid an hour. He took off his gloves, placed them next to the mound of shit, and left the building.

Brown skin, white masks

A new book by Vijay Prashad, Professor of International Relations at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, has a provocative title: Uncle Swami.

It could be subtitled South Asians, part II, for his earlier book Karma of Brown Folks had discussed the history of the early South Asians immigrants in the US.

Swami is about South Asians in post-9/11 America.

I like the pun in the title, but the book doesn't do the usual "minoritization" of America thing; there is no danger of Sam getting Swami-ized. Excerpts tell me that Prashad is concerned about rising anti-Indian sentiments in the nation.

I'm a little doubtful of the blurb on the cover that hails Prashad as the new Franz Fanon, unless Prashad is accusing brown skin of putting on white masks.