And we understood it very well when we met you. Human Imagination is limited. When one is refused an exit visa one does not return to ones former life but to an existence so strange that it is very difficult to visualize from outside. The circumstances which condition the way of life the peculiar ghetto of "refusants" are created not so much by the official authorities as by ordinary people and begin long before the application for visa. It begins with ones family (sic) and continues with ones colleagues. ones neighbours. the housemanager. the yardkeeper. shop assistants and passersby. All the petty spites and envies which had long slumbered in the souls of these ordinary representatives of mankind dont have to be concealed any more. They get to be things to be proud of. being direbted against one who has sold himself to foreign imperialists. Such eminently desirable things as ones neighbours job. his apartment. his scientific ideas are suddenly felt to be within ones grasp when the neighbour applies for a visa. And the desire for them which had always been felt as somehow unheroic acquires now a special political coloring and is not sanctified as part of the fight against the awful meance of Zionism. A clerk ousting his colleague by intrigue. or a hoodlum assaulting a Jew in the streetbecome brave fighters in the ideological war against a person who. after all. has not done any wrong by official standards. (sic) He is just reuniting with his relativesofficially. there is no other kind of emigration. For all that the applicant can be sure that not one of his persecutors really believes what they tell him about the terrors at the capitalist hell. Being people with a welldeveloped appetite for material goods. they really envy him as one who may get a chance to enjoy the legendary opulence of foreign parts.
Identified stereotypes
Generalization about the motivations and behaviors of ordinary people towards those seeking exit visas, portraying them as envious and spiteful.