2009-2-13, Heathrow International Airport, United Kingdom

The titanium rods in my arm don’t beep. So far, anyway, I’m two for two metal detector un-detected.

What if I pulled them out mid-flight, sharpened them in the lavatory, and then committed unspeakable acts of terror? This is very troubling. A one armed man – as I at a glance am sure to seem – is surely a prime bandit possibility. And I snuck through with 8 inch titanium potential weapons hidden fiendishly inside my bone!

And I have plenty of reason to lose control of myself, the way the year of 2009 has started for me. Not only am I broken and impoverished by my own recklessness, but I have now also lost my job before I even started it, a victim of the recklessness of nations. The Netherlands immigration agency has decided that the position in question is neither critical enough for the operation of the organization, nor specialized enough to warrant the hiring of a foreigner. They further claimed that the Max Planck Institute did not try hard enough to find a European for the job.

The institute has assured me that this has never once happened before, and that this month they’ve now had two work permit applications rejected. There are a great number of reasons why this is absurd. First off, I am quite sure that the Max Planck Institute tried very hard to find a European for the job. It was very much in their interest to avoid the delays of hiring me, even with confidence the the application would have been approved. Moreover, the reason the process took longer than my would-have-been boss thought, was that there was an extra pre-stage to submitting the application during which the job offer must be posted through an independent, government-approved job agency for five weeks. If no qualified European candidates apply, only then will the government process the application, giving their answer 6-8 weeks later.

Secondly, the requirements of the job are clearly specialized: they wanted someone with advanced computer skills, a strong background and interest in linguistics, teaching skills, and excellent English. Also, a willingness to relocate to a little Dutch city on the German border and not get paid a particularly huge amount of money. There must be few Europeans fitting this description, sure, but there really is only a certain amount of time that is reasonable to expect they be found.

As a kind of Dutch national protectionism the decision particularly does not make sense. The longer I’m not doing this job, the longer they keep looking for someone else to do it, the longer German money is not going into the Dutch economy and not contributing to Dutch income taxes. The most plausible theory I’ve heard is that this is the product of a European Union numbers game; after the financial crisis the national governments are getting demands to show they are being much stricter in applying protectionist EU labor laws. Regardless of how other countries follow these demands, the Dutch government is ever-keen to be a heroic EU team-player. And now I’m a statistic.

I’m flying home, after a night in Dublin, next Friday. In the meantime I’ll be in the Netherlands collecting my various belongings and eliciting pity from everyone I meet.

3 Responses to “2009-2-13, Heathrow International Airport, United Kingdom”

  1. Stephen Says:

    We ‘mericans are doing the same thing right now, too. Or at least thinking about it. Nationalism usually is perverted into protectionism.

  2. askory Says:

    We ‘mericans have been at it quite badly since late 2001. My story is nothing compared to what some of my Chinese friends had to go through to apply for American visas, only to get rejected because the dude at the consulate had his quotas to follow. The whole business is dehumanizing and rotten and the US has been worse than Europe for a while now.

  3. tt Says:

    we will take you out for a burrito when you get back to CA!!!

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