In honor of Opening Week for Major League Baseball

Found this floating around the web. Not sure where it came from originally.

Citizenship revoked after 29 years as an American

We are often quick to point out the holes in keeping out illegal immigrants in the current system. But the fact is that the U.S. Immigration system is just as broken in dealing fairly with LEGAL immigrants. Consider the case of Angela Boneva, who was granted citizenship in 1981 only to be told now that she "was never a citizen". And all of her attempts to get clarification have come to naught as she faces an implacable, uncaring bureaucracy.

After she sought to renew her U.S. passport in 2003, the State Department informed her that a consular employee's decision to give her citizenship in 1981 broke a rule dictating that her father had to have lived in the U.S. for 10 years before she was born. His time in the U.S. before moving to Bulgaria totaled only six years.

But the letter pointed out, that same residency requirement was reduced in 1986 to five years, so someone in her position would be eligible for citizenship today — though not her.

Boneva received a form letter in 2003 saying "it does not appear" that she qualifies as a citizen anymore. She has made repeated but vain attempts to get a definitive answer from U.S. authorities. But just last month, she was sent the very same form letter again — this time with another woman's photograph stapled above her name. That letter recommended Boneva contact another U.S. agency, which had already turned her away.

Immigration turned out to be a "third rail" issue for President George W. Bush. But we need to bite the bullet and come to grips with a system that is short on justice and long on outrage

Three felonies a day?!

In politics, there is much hay to be made by passing laws and very little to be made by repealing them. This is often seen in my home state of Connecticut where many so-called "blue laws" exist, which are regulations put into place back in the Puritan era for specific reasons which no longer are relevant today, but which the legislature can't find the votes to repeal.

A civil liberties lawyer has begun an analysis of the U.S. legal system which has found that between this propensity to pass laws and never update or repeal obsolete ones, added to a new trend in American law to remove the idea of "criminal intent", has lead to a situation where he estimates the average American commits 3 felonies a day.

Technology moves so quickly we can barely keep up, and our legal system moves so slowly it can't keep up with itself. By design, the law is built up over time by court decisions, statutes and regulations. Sometimes even criminal laws are left vague, to be defined case by case. Technology exacerbates the problem of laws so open and vague that they are hard to abide by, to the point that we have all become potential criminals...

Other misunderstandings of the Web criminalize the exercise of First Amendment rights. A Saudi student in Idaho was charged in 2003 with offering "material support" to terrorists. He had operated Web sites for a Muslim charity that focused on normal religious training, but was prosecuted on the theory that if a user followed enough links off his site, he would find violent, anti-American comments on other sites. The Internet is a series of links, so if there's liability for anything in an online chain, it would be hard to avoid prosecution.