"You can pray for me," he says.  "And maybe you can bring me some Christian books."  Other than that, though, it seems there's not a whole lot that he needs.

Frankly, I'm impressed by his humble attitude and positive outlook on his life and particularly on his present circumstances.  For three months now, he's been stuck on this boat, and I can't imagine that it would be all that pleasant of an experience.  There are occasional breaks in the monotony.  For instance, in the mornings, he can go outside for an hour.  At other times, he can go to the game room and play some chess.  On Tuesday afternoons and Thursday mornings, for a brief period of 50 minutes, he can receive visitors (mostly customers from back at the Natuurwinkel where he worked).  And even though he doesn't have so many people to call, he will sometimes join the few dozen others standing in line for a ten-minute turn in one of the two telephone booths -- just so he can be around other people doing something other than the ordinary.  Because at all other times, he is relegated to his five-square-meter room which he shares with three other men sharing his same plight.  They're fortunate enough to have a television -- so he sometimes enjoys that diversion.  But most of the time, he just likes to read.  And think.  And pray.

And wait.

For him, this whole waiting process began with a lack of proper lighting while riding his bicycle at night through the streets of Amsterdam.  He paid the fine for his infraction, like we all do -- yet his carelessness that night had a greater price as he ultimately found himself here, in prison.  And not just any prison, but the "Dententieboot" -- a barb-wired floating fortress on a forgotten wharf in western Rotterdam.  And in this Detentieboot, he must wait -- along with 419 others like him -- until who-knows-when.  As an illegal immigrant, he finds himself wanted by no one, welcomed in no land, simply waiting for the bureaucratic battle of "not me!" to run its course.  Some of the inmates -- like this friend that I'm visiting -- are hoping that the end of the process will put them back on Dutch soil.  Other inmates are ready (maybe even eager) to be deported and repatriated -- like his roommate from Burundi -- but even these men must wait.  Because they are strangers in a strange land, and they have to play by unspoken rules and unmitigated timelines.

The entire situation -- and its effect on my own heart and mind -- illuminate how much my views on immigration and border security have changed over the last few years.  Back when I lived in the United States of America, I was tucked up in the middle of a vast continent with relatively little exposure to "foreigners."  This, coupled at the time with a general sense of alignment with the more conservative end of the political spectrum left me mindful of all the ways that immigrants / migrants / illegal aliens took away jobs from other Americans, drove down wages and benefits, and increased the burden on the social system funded by average law-abiding taxpayers... To state it quite simply, I was opposed to immigration.

But then I became an immigrant.

Granted, an American living in the Netherlands with all the appropriate paperwork is in a considerably different situation than a Mexican in the United States or a Morroccan in Europe... Nevertheless, I've personally felt the sting of populist political policy in the growing waves of anti-immigration attitudes across Europe.  I have to pay exhorbitant fees to simply reside on Dutch soil.  I have to jump through hoops for knowledge of the language and general citizenship.  I have to live in fear of the "Rita Verdonk"s and "Geert Wilders"es of the world, while they enjoy the adoration and accumulation of votes from their Dutch constituencies.  I have to look past the haughty eyebrows of shopkeepers who hear my foreign accent.  And, yes, I have to feel the stares and hear the whispers of other parents at my children's school.  People around the world talk about the tolerance and open-minded attitudes of people in the Netherlands... but while their politics and ideology may be very liberal in comparison to most of the world, my experience is that people here are not always so tolerant of me as a person.  And that's probably what hurts the most.

To say the least, I've become a good deal more sympathetic to Mexicans and Middle-Easterners living in the United States.  I've become a good deal more understanding of people like my friend on the Detentieboot.  And even though I can still recognize the complexities of today's global economy and global society -- and I don't pretend to have any easy answers for the migration issues in the world today -- I can confidently say that we'd all do a lot better to put ourselves in the other person's shoes from time to time.