How do you spell "America" in 2009? The names of the
championship finalists of the National Spelling Bee may tell us
something important. There was a Tim and a Kyle, a Kennyi, but
there was also a Ramya, who is fluent in Tamil, and Neetu, who is
fluent in Hindi. And, the winner from Olathe, Kansas was Kavya
Shivashankar. There's not much more American than the National
Spelling Bee. The names of the finalists give us some hint as to
who we have become, and who we now are.
May 13, 2009 marked the first anniversary of the federal
government's raid at the Agriprocessors, Inc. meat packing
facility in Postville, Iowa. To the United States Immigration and
Customs Enforcement agency (USICE),Postville was an experiment. For
the first time, USICE sought to criminalize immigrants on a mass
scale by prosecuting them criminally for the use of invalid social
security cards and other documentation. Using the Federal
IdentityTheft statute, the prosecutors secured convictions of
