D&D Web

During my stay in US last week, I learned that the current immigration debate is dividing the country. So here’s the thing. We all know that the US heavily depends on (illegal) immigration to renew the workforces. There are procedures like the ones we went through during our stay in the US. We entered the US through the frontdoor, bringing not only intellectual capital but also hard tax dollars to this country. The “reward” was a long process of visa acquisition, greencard processing, fingerprinting, photographing, medical examination and embarrasing and annoying interviews when re-entering the country at the border. All this to get the greencard (and at some point citizenship) eventually.

But the country demonstrates the other way right now quite publicly. Enter illegally (which supports, yes even enables entire industries that were not sustainable without illegal immigrants), demonstrate publicly (without fearing INS intervention) and demand your legalization, even citizenship, through creating facts forcefully.

So I’m wondering about the consequences. The signs to legal immigration are devastating. I mean why enduring the above described process (which takes years, BTW), while the current bill for legalizing illegal immigration makes this proccess now possible for illegal immigrants, too, without fearing any consequences!!

But also the consequences for the US economy are vast. Illegal immigrants, by demography, are much more likely to receive welfare and social benefits, putting a huge burden onto the social security systems of the US. And citizenship will also enable family immigration (parents), increasing this load even further.

But I’m also wondering as to what the consequence for the illegal immigrants themselves will be. Certainly one thing to learn is that with rights also obligations will come. Payment of taxes and social benefit contributions will be a new form of deduction to former illegal immigrants paycheques. But in the first place, the “legal” status makes it likely to be less of a job target for many of the jobs carried out by illegal immigrants (strawberry pickers, nannies, even firefighters in California as I read today). In other words, the legalization is likely to create a wave of new illegal immigrants for the market to replace the now “costly” legal ones, while the now legal ones will be put on welfare as a likely consequence.

Sounds like a vicious cycle to me…

Finally, the week is over here in Boston. It’s been crazy here. My mornings started almost every day around 6am (phone meetings) and ended in the evening after a full day of meetings or workshops. Being alone in town did not quite encourage me to cut down on work anyways. This evening I realized that I haven’t gone to Harvard Square in all these days nor to any other place. This evening I had a decent (although spicy) dinner since one of the MIT PIs (principal investigators) is leaving the program. So we went to an Afghan restaurant, a group of Brits, a Canadian living in San Diego, Sharon (the PI) and myself. It wasn’t Harvard Square but at least something

Tomorrow, I will finally fly home. I can’t wait to be back and see Dana and the small furbies (Cara and Peppe) again. It’s empty to be out alone…

So here I am back in the US for a one week trip to Boston. Finally I made it to a decent (all things are relative) dinner. Bertucci it is finally.
After a bad sandwich experience in the hotel on the first evening and a typical MIT Medialab dinner yesterday I found the strength to go a bit further to hit Bertucci this evening. I hope I will enjoy this.

Last night I stayed till 1 o’clock in the night to see the final of Eurovision song contest. It’s the first Eurovision I see since I left Romania back in 1996. It changed a lot: in my memories Eurovision was a very boring song contest where most of the songs were very calm (I remember Ireland won a few times with these types of songs). Anyway, while I was pleasantly surprised by a few songs I was extremely dissapointed by the result

Under different circumstances I would have been very happy about Finland winning but that group is horrible and the song un-memorable! The singer looked to me like Meatloaf decomposing! The only explanation is that the only people that got to vote last night (which is hard to do since the phone number cannot be reached and the sms was delayed till after the voting time ended) were teenagers that found this Lordi really cool and found even cooler that they should win a pop song contest!

My favorite songs/singers were from Romania, Ukraine, Greece and Russia. Most of the other songs I already forgot. Lithuania was very funny though

Apparently, everybody in Helsinki hit the pubs and got drunk last night because when Dirk tried to get a taxi to get to the airport the lady said that it would be impossible. Well, the good thing is that Finland will get to host the Eurovision next year!

Last weekend Finland celebrated the Vappu Day (May 1st)! We experienced it for the first time, so here is a short post about it. On Sunday evening, before 6pm, we went to the center, on Esplanade, with our neighbours Tuija and Vassilis, to see how the students wash the Havis Amanda statue and place a hat on her head. It was very crowded and dusty (remains from the winter gravel) but everybody was having fun At 6pm, everybody took out their graduation caps (some white some more yellowish from years) and started to wave them . Then placed them on their heads and opened their sparkling wine bottles, hugging, kissing and drinking. It felt exactly like New Year’s Eve, but it was sunny and relatively warm! Then people started to move towards restaurants and other party places. We did the same but we took a detour to see how the gathering in front of the Lutheran Chatedral looked: impressive! The stairs were totally full of people! That’s where the students gather to party and drink. So, we left and went to a Greek restaurant. I was not very willing to stay too long anyway since drunk people do not really interest me too much and after a few hours of “partying” it probably gets pretty bad.

Next day, on May 1st, there is another big tradition: people gather in the Kaivopuisto park to have picnic: some just sit around, others come with big, fancy outdoor tables and food. We also went with Eija and Timo, and had some food and drink . The weather was excellent but at some point we started to move towards home since it was getting a little too crowded When leaving, we passed this funny band, that was trying everything to not play at all correctly (it seems to be in purpose ) !

So, that was all for us on Vappu! We did not get drunk but also did not have the courage to get out in the evening in the center. Overall, it was really fun to be there and see this tradition.

Even though we came back from vacation a couple of weeks ago and I almost forgot we had it, I thought of putting a post about the trip with some photos. So, as it also says in the blog, we left on Monday, 10 April and we flied with GermanWings to Cologne-Bonn. We spent almost a day in Cologne, where the weather was very nice, the artists were out in the sun , the shopping area was very crowded, and we also met with Andreas , Dirk’s friend. Other interesting stuff: here are some perfume bottles from the first /second century: . Plus, in Cologne we saw the first blooming tree this year: ! After saying bye to Andreas and to Cologne, we traveled by train to Wittlich, where Dirk’s parents live. During the next days we went on various trips: to Idar-Oberstein (they have a huge amount of stones there, mostly semi-precious but also precious) , to Burg Eltz , to Cochem, and a few times to Bernkastel . We then spent the Easter with Dirk’s parents and his brother’s family and came back to Helsinki on Monday, the 17th.