Sunday, March 4, 2007

The Immigrants, pt. 2

If you want to see the American dream, go to the consular section of an embassy and wait outside. The asphalt is paved with it, and it can be seen in every one of the faces of the people standing on it.

In one such embassy, there was an old Russian woman who was moving to America to be with her daughter and grandson. She had won the visa lottery - literally. Every year there was a lottery in this country, and the lucky winners got, instead of money, pre-approval on an immigrant visa to America. Were they able to provide all the necessary documentation, and to pass all the necessary tests, physical checkups, and background checks, they would get a free ride to America.

We called the woman a week before her last appointment at the embassy and congratulated her. She had passed all the preliminary requirements for acquiring her visa to the United States. She was to come to the embassy on Friday and take her picture, sign the visa, after which we would print it up and put in her passport, stamp it with our approval, and she would move to America.

The woman was ecstatic. She left her apartment, sold her furniture, bought her plane ticket, and began packing her things. On the day she came to the embassy, the raw delicacy of hope that has tentatively come true was written all over her face, and it made her look adorable, and it made what we had to tell her about a hundred times harder.

We had made a mistake, you see. In the interval between our phone call to the woman and her appointment the next week, we discovered that we were not in possession of one of the aforementioned necessary documents - a Russian police certificate. It was our fault. Had we notified her of its missing status earlier, she would have had time to acquire it from the Russian embassy. As it was, however, the certificate to took a minimum of three months and a maximum of six to process, after which time the lottery would have expired. We called the Russian embassy, and confirmed that she had no criminal record. The document at this point was a formality, but one that we were not permitted to forego, for reasons I have never been clear on. On the day the woman came to collect her visa and her dream in her hands, it was snatched from her.

As if that weren't enough, she was also denied a non-immigrant visa on every count. If you are ever denied an immigrant visa to the US, it stays on your file, and in most cases will prevent you from obtaining any other kind of visa, because of the logical assumption that you will use it to remain in the country illegally instead of waiting another ten years to reapply for an immigrant visa.

Because yes, one must wait ten years after applying for their denied immigrant visa to apply for another one. And in the meantime, it's not at all likely you will be able to visit the States under any other pretense. That was five years ago. The woman has another five years to go before she can even start the process of being able to be with her only remaining family members. She was seventy-two when I met her.

My friend Katia (also Russian) and I took it harder than anyone else because of our youth and because we were the two most closely involved with the project. For the next two weeks, we asked every higher-up for their intervention in this matter. I used every connection available to me, even the borderline unethical ones. No one did anything. This woman fell through the cracks. I didn't speak much for those two weeks, losing myself in the music of the revolution, enjoying the irony of listening to Dylan and Zeppelin on the way to my government job ("the Immigrant Song" struck me as particularly apt). I lived five minutes from the beach and found myself there often after work for those two weeks, standing in the water and thinking about the debilitating hopelessness that hit me like a mack truck sometimes, living where I did. I was ashamed of my luck, that I could leave it whenever I wanted for the greener and highly secured pastures of America. Mostly, I hated that I was the one behind the glass. There was just a thin sheet of glass separating me from that woman, that and fifty years, and I was the one who had to tell her that her dream was dead in the water.

I left my job at the embassy shortly thereafter, and I have had a hard time believing in the American dream ever since. Sometimes the people who are most skeptical of their product are the ones peddling it.

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