I'm a better American citizen for having gone through this

I have to admit that if an American immigrant told me their hardship story about how awful it is to deal with American immigration, my reaction before I went through my own problems in the Czech Republic would have been "good, I"m glad it's hard. The whole world wants to come here and America should honor those who are gritty enough, determined enough, and persistent enough to go through whatever it takes to get in. How bad do you want it? "

Soooooooo, I've experienced a little personal growth here in compassion. I realize now my "survival of the fittest" mentality about American immigration is rude.

I now see how dehumanizing the mix of a language you don't speak and arcane immigration laws that seem to float can be. My friend Lenka, a Czech native, who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin says "Karen I spent hours and hours and thousands of dollars to get my American visa."

This experience has opened my eyes to see that an immigration interaction between a foreigner and my government is just as important to my nation's image as any other interaction. Maybe even more important because it so deeply impacts people's finances.

Prior to this, I could care less about immigration stories in the news because I knew people who were in my country illegally were doing jobs natives wouldn't do, for salaries natives wouldn't work for, and they were most likely leaving a place where they couldn't find work. My eyes would glaze over at descriptions of how awful the legal immigration process is.

However quixotic it sounds, I have learned that it now matters to me how my government treats people who are only trying to improve their life. I want my government to fund enough people to make it not such a laborious process so that even if the answer to whether someone can legally immigrate or not ends up "no," they leave feeling like they were treated with respect. I want there to be enough funding for people's paperwork to be processed quickly.

I was treated with respect by the immigration authorities in the Czech Republic. Yet that one day at the foreign police was enough to make me realize how awful the whole process can be, especially when I know that in my country, it's much worse.