Tuesday, April 27, 2010

A Brief Tale of Two Immigrants

Today I happened to read two unrelated news articles about two very different 31-year old males.

The first article was about Fabrice Tourre. Tourre, currently based in London, was born into an upper-class family in France. He attended elite schools in Europe and the US, and ultimately went on to a career in investment banking. The epitome of smug and sleazy, Tourre has given himself the nickname "Fabulous Fabrice" (or "Fab Fab" for short). In his work with Goldman Sachs, Tourre is alleged to have held a primary role in creating a collatoralized debt obligation investment deal that would royally screw investors while allowing select insiders to profit tremendously. Tourre was paid millions for partaking in this role. He's now on trial for accusations of fraud.

The second article was about Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax. Tale-Yax, who was recently living on the streets of Queens, was born into a working-class family in Guatemala. Regarded as a good person by those who knew him, Tale-Yax came to the US illegally in order to try to work in carpentry as a day laborer to scrape together some money so that his family could live a better life in their home country. This morning, however, his life sadly and violently came to an end as he tried to help a woman, a total stranger, who was being attacked by a man on the street in Jamaica, Queens. Tale-Yax was stabbed repeatedly and left to die on the sidewalk, ignored by dozens of passersby as he bled to death over the course of a little over an hour.

What do these unrelated articles about unrelated 31-year old men have in common? They both have led me to particularly misanthropic feelings and thoughts for the week. These two articles bring out lots of things that infuriate me... social class divides (upper-class children are groomed for "success" from the start and most poor or working class kids, even if they are very smart, have extremely limited opportunities to achieve a whole lot in life), dishonesty in business (Wall Street seems to think it's entirely acceptable to screw over as many people as you can, as long as you do not get caught), US immigration policy (making it next to impossible for hardworking immigrants from Central and South America to legally come to the US to do the grunt work that most US citizens have no interest in doing), and indifference to pain and suffering (walking by a man who is on the sidewalk bleeding to death and doing nothing to help him... not even a call to 9-1-1), just to name a few.