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THIS IS MY FAVOURITE CONVERSATION TO HAVE WITH WHITE REPUBLICANS, I SWEAR:
Them: So how much does immigration cost?
Me: $$$$
Them: I BET YOU HAET ALL THOSE ILEEEEGAL IMMIGRANTS, THEN
Me: lolwat? you think I would fail to empathise with people who cannot afford all this bullshit?
I guess the concept of solidarity (of immigrants, against the state, but also in general) has bypassed certain people. They tend to (as this one did) outright identify undocumented status with Mexican-Americans, as if I ought to kneejerk identify with the white American who is speaking to me in opposition to my fellow immigrants (though obviously most anti-immigrant sentiment is just thinly-disguised, catch-all racism - you can tell from the way I'm expected to go along with it rather than smack it down even though I am a fucking immigrant what is wrong with you).
We are here to make things complicated. The god of foreigners has deemed it so.
Thinking about it further, I decided the main reason I hate EIC is that it's a poverty (primarily child poverty - poor adults like me have to pay it to people who earn over 3x as much as I do) reduction program that's coupled to the tax system, and this causes lots of pointless discrimination against certain children that's partly based on existing biases in the tax system and is partly all its own specialness. Some of it's general - discrimination against the children of acrimonious divorces, discrimination against children with unemployed parents (and if you cannot empathise with the long-term unemployed get out from under the rock you've been hiding under since 2006 'cause you're probably going to be next); much like Social Security, it also discriminates against married women who work. But. A lot of that discrimination is focused against immigrants and children of immigrants. American children with undocumented parents are bad kids, I guess. See also children of recent immigrants and of nonresident immigrants.
Hence all my screeds about the entitled parents of white american babies. Well, that and the fact that one of them cried all over my desk last year because she'd spent an enforced IRA withdrawal rather than rolling it over like a responsible adult and was therefore not qualified for EIC. Protip; do not mentally spend your so-called 'refund' before you get it.
I am still alive, though M is trying to persuade me to take a day off because it is getting harder to detect this aliveness from the outside. A few basic faculties are failing me at times - typing, concentration/attention span, arithmetic, memory (I think there was another immigrationfail I had this morning, but I can't recall what it was, and I hate knowing my memory is letting me down because it is usually the most efficient part of my brain). My social persona is much less tight than usual, too - I keep noticing myself reverting to realness (more swearing, less Yank mannerliness, less eye contact, increased ability to write pornography in public).
I really should try to take off a day this weekend but i feel like i can't afford luxuries, and an entire day of not being paid is kinda a gobsmackingly expensive one by my standards. I do get lie-ins for most of this week, though!
I can tell I am running on pure caffeine because I am not that fretful right now. We still haven't found M's passport, and the scary part is that we've already ransacked the entirety of our little abode. See, we saw it in August when looking for something else, therefore assumed until a few days ago that we totally knew where it was, and now we can only assume that when we saw it in August we put it somewhere very, very safe even from ourselves. (did i mention my fucking memory oh god) We have reached a point where we are effectively laying outcome bets - balancing the cost of [chance of finding the damn thing] vs [normal 2-3 week expediting procedures + chance of being late on the rent], vs [being 100% sure of the rent but paying extra for a courier service] vs [me taking an extra weekend off work so we can drive all the way down to fucking Miami on the 18th to stand in line for howeverlongittakes, because there is inexplicably no passport office in Atlanta which is the largest city in the southeast, and if you've ever wondered why Yanks in general Southerners in particular h8 government it's because they fucking suck at doing it right, I am so vicariously embarrassed for them at this point].
Obviously we are shining a big shiny light for option 1 there, but we can afford option 3 if needs be, and it would much less annoyance for pretty much the same cost as options 2 or 4.
I don't know what else to say; I'm slogging through days, now halfway between my last day off and my next one; given up on The Name Of The Wind, reading The City And The City instead, which is at least a very easy read so far (ikr, who is this and where did he hide my boycrush?); words when I has brane; forgetting things; thinking up terrible first lines for AUs I am probably not going to write.
Me: $$$$
Them: I BET YOU HAET ALL THOSE ILEEEEGAL IMMIGRANTS, THEN
Me: lolwat? you think I would fail to empathise with people who cannot afford all this bullshit?
I guess the concept of solidarity (of immigrants, against the state, but also in general) has bypassed certain people. They tend to (as this one did) outright identify undocumented status with Mexican-Americans, as if I ought to kneejerk identify with the white American who is speaking to me in opposition to my fellow immigrants (though obviously most anti-immigrant sentiment is just thinly-disguised, catch-all racism - you can tell from the way I'm expected to go along with it rather than smack it down even though I am a fucking immigrant what is wrong with you).
We are here to make things complicated. The god of foreigners has deemed it so.
Thinking about it further, I decided the main reason I hate EIC is that it's a poverty (primarily child poverty - poor adults like me have to pay it to people who earn over 3x as much as I do) reduction program that's coupled to the tax system, and this causes lots of pointless discrimination against certain children that's partly based on existing biases in the tax system and is partly all its own specialness. Some of it's general - discrimination against the children of acrimonious divorces, discrimination against children with unemployed parents (and if you cannot empathise with the long-term unemployed get out from under the rock you've been hiding under since 2006 'cause you're probably going to be next); much like Social Security, it also discriminates against married women who work. But. A lot of that discrimination is focused against immigrants and children of immigrants. American children with undocumented parents are bad kids, I guess. See also children of recent immigrants and of nonresident immigrants.
Hence all my screeds about the entitled parents of white american babies. Well, that and the fact that one of them cried all over my desk last year because she'd spent an enforced IRA withdrawal rather than rolling it over like a responsible adult and was therefore not qualified for EIC. Protip; do not mentally spend your so-called 'refund' before you get it.
I am still alive, though M is trying to persuade me to take a day off because it is getting harder to detect this aliveness from the outside. A few basic faculties are failing me at times - typing, concentration/attention span, arithmetic, memory (I think there was another immigrationfail I had this morning, but I can't recall what it was, and I hate knowing my memory is letting me down because it is usually the most efficient part of my brain). My social persona is much less tight than usual, too - I keep noticing myself reverting to realness (more swearing, less Yank mannerliness, less eye contact, increased ability to write pornography in public).
I really should try to take off a day this weekend but i feel like i can't afford luxuries, and an entire day of not being paid is kinda a gobsmackingly expensive one by my standards. I do get lie-ins for most of this week, though!
I can tell I am running on pure caffeine because I am not that fretful right now. We still haven't found M's passport, and the scary part is that we've already ransacked the entirety of our little abode. See, we saw it in August when looking for something else, therefore assumed until a few days ago that we totally knew where it was, and now we can only assume that when we saw it in August we put it somewhere very, very safe even from ourselves. (did i mention my fucking memory oh god) We have reached a point where we are effectively laying outcome bets - balancing the cost of [chance of finding the damn thing] vs [normal 2-3 week expediting procedures + chance of being late on the rent], vs [being 100% sure of the rent but paying extra for a courier service] vs [me taking an extra weekend off work so we can drive all the way down to fucking Miami on the 18th to stand in line for howeverlongittakes, because there is inexplicably no passport office in Atlanta which is the largest city in the southeast, and if you've ever wondered why Yanks in general Southerners in particular h8 government it's because they fucking suck at doing it right, I am so vicariously embarrassed for them at this point].
Obviously we are shining a big shiny light for option 1 there, but we can afford option 3 if needs be, and it would much less annoyance for pretty much the same cost as options 2 or 4.
I don't know what else to say; I'm slogging through days, now halfway between my last day off and my next one; given up on The Name Of The Wind, reading The City And The City instead, which is at least a very easy read so far (ikr, who is this and where did he hide my boycrush?); words when I has brane; forgetting things; thinking up terrible first lines for AUs I am probably not going to write.