Dictionary.com defines the interesting German word schadenfreude as "satisfaction or pleasure at someone else's misfortune". Every language should have such a word, although I suspect many don't because few of us admit to such feelings — they're among life's guilty little pleasures.
And, at least in my view, the best schadenfreude is that felt when others' misfortunes are the result of their own foolishness or (the pinnacle of delight!) mirror a foolish mistake of our own, because it's always nice to see someone clump with heavy boots down the path we ourselves have already trod, only to discover with dismay, as we did, that incontinent dogs got there first.
In that vein, consider developments related to illegal immigration in the up-and-coming South American powerhouse Brazil, which has replaced the United Kingdom as the world's fifth largest economy.
The story goes back to January of last year, when Brazil announced that it would grant resident visas to some 4,000 Haitians already illegally in the country, most of them working in unskilled labor jobs. According to the BBC, "[D]emand for manual labourers is strong in Brazil, where there are infrastructure and building projects under way, many linked to the planned 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games being held in the country." In announcing the residency measure, the "Brazilian authorities stressed that this was a one-off move", and emphasized that they would at the same time immediately increase border security measures to halt the rising tide of humans, many of whom are coming from Brazil's immediate west, courtesy of alien smugglers operating in Peru and Bolivia.
Now fast-forward to today, 14 months after enactment of this humanitarian measure combined with serious border security measures: the BBC and a variety of other international media outlets, including the Jamaica Observer newspaper, are now reporting that the governor of the northwestern Brazilian state of Acre, whose land border sits proximate to Bolivia and Peru, on April 9 declared a "social emergency" to try and leverage the federal government into helping it curb the influx of immigrants, who have overwhelmed state and local resources. According to an article in the Global Post, Acre's Secretary for Justice and Human Rights is quoted as saying "More than a thousand illegal immigrants have entered over the past month", and that the Amazon rainforest state "has been turned into an international travel route controlled by coyotes." The article goes on to state that the illegal arrivals are not just Haitians — they are also from Bangladesh, Senegal, the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, and elsewhere, and that authorities have been obliged to detain more than 1,300 immigrants at a facility in Brasileia that was built to hold 200.
Does any of this sound vaguely familiar to you, in the context of our own society's ongoing debate about combining border security measures with amnesty and "a path to citizenship"?
The question here is: Who will end up with the sense of schadenfreude — us, or the Brazilians as they watch us make the same mistake, magnified into the millions?
