Thursday, May 11, 2006

A Day without Legal Immigrants in the works

Legal immigrants in America, impressed with the unqualified success of the just concluded "Day without Illegal immigrants" protest, have come together in a bid to focus public attention on their plight by organizing a corresponding "Day without Legal Immigrants". Legal immigrants in the US currently on a work visa face a long and arduous journey as they inch towards the goal of permanent residency and citizenship of this country one bureaucratic red tape at a time.

Negotiations are currently underway among the various legal immigrant factions in the country to agree upon a suitable date for this extraordinary event. However, due to the immense professional diversity of this group, it has been difficult to decide on a date that would be convenient for everyone.

"January and February just aren't good for me", said Mandar Joglekar, an engineer from Detroit. "Busiest month of the year for the manufacturing industry and we have huge orders to fill. But any other date will do", he added.

On the other hand, legal immigrants from the medical profession have reportedly declined to ratify any date in June or July since hospitals are quite busy due to an increase in Americans' propensity of driving into each other during the summer months. And finally, the Association of Legal Software Engineers or ASSLES(S) has confirmed that Autumn won't be a good time for them to walk out on their jobs. "We usually have our major software releases scheduled right before Christmas", said Chen Hwa, a project manager from New Jersey. "If I don't come to work, testing will be affected and there will be numerous bugs in the release", he said.

Finally, after an all-night brainstorming session conducted through instant messaging and teleconferencing, it was decided that December 25th would be the only date everyone could agree upon. "I've already run out of vacation days for the year so Christmas day is the only time I can get out of the office", said Rupali Malhotra, a junior software engineer.

"Great job, gang", said a tired Gautam Reddy, leader of the "Day Without Legal Immigrants " project team, as he emerged from the conference room at the break of dawn. "25th December it is. Now go ahead and cancel your trip to India 'cause we have some protesting to do", he added, tearing up his own JFK-London-Mumbai plane ticket as a symbolic gesture, but not before making copies of it just in case the date of the protest were to be changed.

"A Day Without Legal Immigrants" is expected to draw huge crowds of Indians, Chinese and the occasional Canadian in the software parks and industrial complexes of the country. Coverage of the event is expected to be sporadic, confined to cellphone video-messaged clips that will be posted on blogs not read by a single American. However, protesters hope that their message which won't be raucous and spectacular enough to be heard by the government or the mainstream media, will seep through to the government and the mainstream media, the message being, if their request for expedited permanent residency application processes were to be denied, every technology-based company in the US would face a mass exodus of employees every year on Christmas day.

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