Posted on 01/16/2004 7:43:48 AM PST by knighthawk
Poke around the Polish bakeries, liquor stores and beauty shops of Milwaukee Avenue all you want. Chances are, you won't find a terrorist.
You'll find a kid with an expired student visa who sleeps on his cousin's couch all day. She tells him to get a job or go home.
You'll find a waitress who's afraid of getting caught for not reporting all of her tips on her 1040-EZ form. As if there's a waitress in town who does.
But a terrorist? Not unless you mean the occasional building inspector.
"I always dreamed about coming to this country," said Joseph Keo Kowalski, 48, who owns a health store, Herbaland, on Milwaukee near Belmont. "Everyone here has an equal chance."
An equal chance. But not necessarily equal treatment. At least not for friends and family who fly in for a visit.
Under a new federal law, every time visitors from Poland go through customs at O'Hare, they must have a fingerprint scanned, while -- get this -- visitors from France and Germany do not.
But wasn't it Poland, they ask, who joined the United States in the war in Iraq? And wasn't it France and Germany who gave the U.S. so much grief?
"We were arm in arm in Iraq," Kowalski said Thursday, "and this is what they do."
This month, in a Homeland Security measure to prevent terrorists from slipping into the country, customs officials at U.S. airports began fingerprinting foreign visitors. Travelers from 28 countries, including France and Germany, were exempt because they had deals to allow their citizens to visit without visas.
The fingerprinting requirement has riled the mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczynski. In protest Tuesday, he canceled a trip in April to Chicago and New York.
Chicago's Poles are less than thrilled, as well. But they say, with a sideways smile, it's not like Poland has never been dumped on before.
"Everybody should be fingerprinted, that's all," said Ewa Kolodziej, 27, who was getting her hair done at Maryla's Beauty Salon. "If everybody is, then it's fine -- everybody is protected."
Although Kolodziej immigrated from Poland just 10 years ago, she has only the softest accent. She is a Realtor, and doing well. She's an American Girl in a single decade.
Chicago is home to about 210,000 people of Polish ancestry. Another 610,000 live in the suburbs. Most are second- and third-generation Americans. Their folks settled on the North and South sides, especially near the steel mills and along Archer and Milwaukee avenues. They took the toughest jobs, the ones you'd snort at if you had a handle on English or a friend in politics.
They worked absurdly hard, and life got better, and before long they moved up Milwaukee and down Archer, rowing against the current. Today, their children and grandchildren live in solid suburbs like Niles and Arlington Heights.
They had a lot to do with building Chicago, and they know it -- and that's another problem with this fingerprinting.
"It's not polite," said Anna Holmberg, who came to Chicago from Poland 25 years ago. "It makes a Polish man feel very down. It's Polish honor."
Business was slow Thursday in Holmberg's clothing store, Anna's, on Milwaukee. So she settled into an arm chair near the back, trained an eye on the door, and listened to a Polish-language news show. On the radio just the other day, she said, a woman from Poland called in to complain about being strip-searched at an airport.
When Holmberg was a girl growing up in Poland in the 1950s, she took a trip to Lithuania with her father. When they stepped off the ship, she said, they were searched by Russian police waving automatic rifles. Now, every time she hears about another Homeland Security measure, she said, that bad old memory stirs.
But most of those who were interviewed on Milwaukee on Thursday said they had no problem with the fingerprinting law, as long as it applied to everybody.
"Poles are people who consider themselves the United States' close friends and allies, and yet they are treated differently," said Bohdan Gorczynski, curator at the Polish Museum of America. "There are big Islamic communities in Germany and France, so the threat of extremists and terrorism might be greater there. Where's the threat from Poland?"
Don't like it? Stay home. We'll get by without you.
Tell the whole truth, bozo!
Got an answer to that?
I'm a citizen; those being fingerprinted are not.
Here's the whole truth, bozo: "Travelers from 28 countries, including France and Germany, were exempt because they had deals to allow their citizens to visit without visas."
I know of no specific threat---it sounds like ALL foreign visitors (except those from countries with whom we have pre-existing special arrangements) are fingerprinted.
I might or might not think it wise (how many countries have been attacked as the USA was?), but if I was so against being fingerprinted I'd stay home instead of ranting about 'American pride.'
The Warsaw Pact isn't the enemy any more. If "security" is really the reason for fingerprinting incoming foreigners, we should be carefully scrutinizing visitors from France, Germany, Sweden, England, and other European countries with substantial mohammedan immigrant populations.
The Poles have a valid point.
FYI, Poles do not have any significant Muslim population.
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