Dr. Frank's What's-it

More on the INS Check

More on the INS

Check out the comment section on this post from Matt Welch for some horror stories that are far, far worse than mine-- so far, anyway. (I've really gotta get me one of those comment-routine doohickies like everybody else has...)

We're lucky we live near the BART-accessible San Francisco INS. If we had had to travel a hundred miles each time we had to visit (like one forlorn commenter and many, many others) we never would have stuck it out and I'd be trying to "become English" now. In the six months since my wife arrived, I estimate that we've had to go there around eight times. The phone number for the office is a closely guarded secret; the national 800 number is useless if you need to discuss a specific case; if you have any problem at all, you just have to go there. Each one of these visits takes the entire day. If you're not in line by 6 AM, you might as well forget it-- you'll never even get to the window that dispenses the "tickets" before they stop giving them out at noon.

In his response to the comments, Matt writes:

In L.A., where we have an immigrant or two, you have to line up three hours before the place even opens, if you want to have a spot. Often, the people inside do not speak Spanish, which is funny, because 98% of those standing in line *do*.

Ironically, I've experienced the language difficulty as well. INS personnel don't necessarily speak English all that well. When you have a complicated problem to explain, it can be difficult. Once, when I was trying to sort out an extremely screwed-up situation, I half-considered bringing along some kind of Filipino or Tagalog phrase-book, just in case. Well, we are citizens of the Pacific Rim out here...

Despite the screw-ups, our case was relatively straightforward. But you never know. Here's the scary part:

What's worse, and what few people realize outside of civil rights fanatics and people like us, is that the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act gave border guards and INS drones the unappealable power to ruin your freakin' life with one lousy stamp. We lived in terror of "the dark room" -- that room off to the side at LAX, where jabbering Russians and freaked-out Arabs and bewildered Asians would sit with Emmanuelle, while the immigration dupes made tasteless jokes about people's names, and ruined the lives of maybe 1 in 10 of the people there, all of whom had just been on an airplane for 5-20 hours.

This is true, and terrifying. And even though my wife was granted a green card and has a stamp in her passport to that effect (specifically stating that she's authorized to travel) there's no guarantee that the INS rent-a-dudes at the airport will recognize their agency's own bloody document. Not without a struggle anyway.

(Like most English people, my wife has around thirty-eight names. The INS can't handle it, especially now that she has an additional one, i.e., mine. They truncate, abbreviate, and mangle it to make it fit, and they do it differently every time, with varying degrees of accuracy. James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree's passport probably has all of his names; but I bet his green card just says something like James Dup ree, George. Somewhere, buried in an inaccessible CIS file in a broken database, there's an addendum saying "also known as Weather Pree OK" Try explaining that to the guy at the airport.)

I'm really looking forward to Matt's promised post on post-9/11 immigration reform.

Posted by Dr. Frank at November 15, 2002 09:25 AM | TrackBack