Identify the genres for each of the following:

Immigration, Off the Books

Every American who has a job or wants one should be following the debates in Congress over bills to crack down on illegal hiring. Employment verification is one of the few ideas still lurching around the Capitol after last year’s Senate shootout mowed down a forest of immigration reforms. It’s boring and complicated — it’s about databases — but unlike other immigration fixes, it affects every worker and employer in America, native-born or not.
Two House bills — the SAVE Act, sponsored by Heath Shuler, and the New Employee Verification Act, sponsored by Sam Johnson — are designed to squeeze illegal immigrants out of the country by making it impossible for them to find work.
Immigration reform is always tricky, but employment verification is where the details get demonic.
It starts with a flawed database that everyone would have to rely on to get work or change jobs. Think of the “no-fly” list, the database of murky origins with mysterious flaws that you, the passenger, must fix if you are on it and want to fly. These immigration bills seek to take small, badly flawed “no-work” lists and explode them rapidly to a national scale. With an error rate of about 4 percent, millions of citizens could be flagged as ineligible to work, too.
That’s only part of the price. The Congressional Budget Office says the SAVE Act would cost $40 billion over 10 years, adding up lost tax revenue and spending on things like thousands of immigration judges. It is likely to overwhelm the Social Security Administration, which already is swamped with disability benefits and retiring baby boomers. It won’t do much for small businesses that would have to pay to comply.
The problem is not with employment verification itself. Illegal immigrants should not be allowed to work, and any system that is rational and lawful needs to be backed up with a hiring database. The trouble with these bills is that they don’t fix the database errors first, and they are strict enforcement-only measures, uncoupled from any path to legalization for undocumented workers.
Imagine that we end up with an airtight workplace verification system built on a perfect database — but without a path to legalization. In that world, an honest company that learns it has undocumented workers has the unhappy choice of firing them or taking them off the books. How many would choose option B?
Sleazy employers who already hire under the table would be encouraged, since the millions of workers stranded in the shadows would have nowhere else to go. (They will not deport themselves en masse, no matter what the Minutemen say.) American workers would then be more vulnerable to competition from illegal labor, not less.
Some employers, meanwhile, would readily abuse the system, prescreening job applicants, avoiding or discriminating against non-natives, not letting workers know their rights, firing them at will.
Remind us, again, why we wanted this so badly?
Oh, to protect American workers.
Doing that means, at the very least, fixing the employment database before beginning a huge, untested worker-verification experiment and imposing it only as part of a broader reform that allows the eight million undocumented workers to become legal. Otherwise, we would be giving countless employers and workers the incentive to go off the books, which would be exactly where we started, billions of dollars and countless lost jobs ago.


In Italy
by Derek Walcott April 21, 2008

I
Roads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow
cobbled tracks for streets, those hill towns with their
stamp-sized squares and a sea pinned by the arrow
of a quivering horizon, with names that never wither
for centuries and shadows that are the dial of time. Light
older than wine and a cloud like a tablecloth
spread for lunch under the leaves. I have come this late
to Italy, but better now, perhaps, than in youth
that is never satisfied, whose joys are treacherous,
while my hair rhymes with those far crests, and the bells
of the hilltop towers number my errors,
because we are never where we are, but somewhere else,
even in Italy. This is the bearable truth
of old age; but count your benedictions—those fields
of sunflowers, the torn light on the hills, the haze
of the unheard Adriatic—while the day still hopes
for possibility, cloud shadows racing the slopes.

II
The blue windows, the lemon-colored counterpane,
the knowing that the sea is behind the avenue
with balconies and bicycles, that the gelid traffic
mixes its fumes with coffee—transient interiors,
transient bedsheets, and the transient view
of sea-salted hotels with spiky palms,
in spite of which summer is serious,
since there is inevitably a farewell to arms,
to the storm-haired beauty who will disappear.
The shifted absence of your axis, love
wobbles on your body’s pivot, to the carriage’s
shudder as it glides past the roofs and beaches
of the Ligurian coast. Things lose their balance
and totter from the small blows of memory.
You wait for revelations, for leaping dolphins,
for nightingales to loosen their knotted throats,
for the bell in the tower to absolve your sins
like the furled sails of the homecoming boats.

In the New York Public Library

He has pissed himself. Is he high or ill?
He swings towards me on a single crutch
And smells of the sympathetic hyacinths
Sent from Rotterdam which Hitler flattened.
Kerouac’s crutches are kept in the Berg.
Is not this the greatest of institutions,
With levels we both know nothing about?
We take the elevator past the top floor
To the imaginary roof garden.

Paradise Lost

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seatThat we must change for Heav'n, this mournful gloomFor that celestial light? Be it so, since he [ 245 ]Who now is Sovran can dispose and bidWhat shall be right: fardest from him is bestWhom reason hath equald, force hath made supreamAbove his equals. Farewel happy FieldsWhere Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail [ 250 ]Infernal world, and thou profoundest HellReceive thy new Possessor: One who bringsA mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.The mind is its own place, and in it selfCan make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. [ 255 ]What matter where, if I be still the same,And what I should be, all but less then heWhom Thunder hath made greater? Here at leastWe shall be free; th' Almighty hath not builtHere for his envy, will not drive us hence: [ 260 ]Here we may reign secure, and in my choyceTo reign is worth ambition though in Hell:Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.But wherefore let we then our faithful friends,Th' associates and copartners of our loss [ 265 ]Lye thus astonisht on th' oblivious Pool,And call them not to share with us their partIn this unhappy Mansion, or once moreWith rallied Arms to try what may be yetRegaind in Heav'n, or what more lost in Hell? [ 270 ]
So Satan spake, and him BeelzebubThus answer'd. Leader of those Armies bright,Which but th' Onmipotent none could have foyld,If once they hear that voyce, thir liveliest pledgeOf hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft [ 275 ]

Devil's Dictionary

Pray
To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Rational
Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.
Religion
A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Road
A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.
Sabbath
A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.
Vote
The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
Witch
1, an ugly and repulsive old woman in a wicked league with the Devil; 2, a beautiful and attractive young woman in wickedness a league beyond the Devil.
Youth
The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer.
Youth is the true Saturnian Reign, the Golden Age on earth again, when figs are grown on thistles, and pigs betailed with whistles and, wearing silken bristles, live ever in clover, and cows fly over, delivering milk at every door, and Justice is never heard to snore, and every assassin is made a ghost and, howling, is cast into Baltimost--Polydore Smith.