Day 168 - Just Passing Through

Image of Iranian passport by talsafran,
via Flickr.com

The first group of applicants we always interviewed were non-Germans who were passing through Germany on their way, they hoped, to the United States. Most of the Iranian applicants we saw fell into this group. We didn't see as many Iranian applicants as the consular staff in Frankfurt saw. Frankfurt was the furthest west point that Iran Air flew, so only the most wealthy Iranians who desired to get to the west were able to afford to fly there. Most Iranians who wanted to travel to the U.S. only flew as far as Istanbul. The Iranians we saw were further exceptions because they had the means and connections to travel from Frankfurt to Stuttgart. It isn't that the distance between those cities is so great. It is just that most of the Iranian applicants we saw had friends or relatives in the Stuttgart area they could stay with while they waited for their chance to apply for a visa. So they often appeared to have close ties within Germany as well as back in Iran.

In many cities of the world at that time, such as Mexico City, Manila, and Seoul, the number of applicants was so great that consular officers were expected to make a decision to issue a visa or not within 2 minutes. In some of those places people began lining up at the consular section gate the night before, sleeping on the sidewalks to keep their place in line. To avoid both the physical threats and risks to the applicants and the poor publicity such scenes brought to the U.S. presence in those countries, consular sections began issuing interview appointments. Applicants would get their appointments and then wouldn't have to stay in line to wait; they could leave and come back at their appointment time without having to wait in line again. In those cities, applicants who were refused could not get another appointment until a waiting period had passed. Typically that waiting period was 3 to 6 months. That also kept the lines shorter as those who had been refused one day could not come back the next day.

Image of a line by swanskalot, via Flickr.com

But in Stuttgart we didn't have that many applicants. We didn't make interview appointments. And we didn't impose a waiting time before applicants could reapply. Those were all reasons that Iranian applicants who could made their way to Stuttgart to apply.

We had lines outside the gate each morning, but the line didn't begin to form until about the time the consular section opened. And normally anyone who was in line by the time the visa application acceptance hours ended was allowed to remain in line until they reached the window to turn in their applications and learn whether they should wait or could leave and return after 3 p.m. to pick up their passports with their visas. We consular officers remained at the window until we had interviewed everyone who had arrived in response to our invitation for an interview (sent to the interesting applicants who applied by mail) or were deemed to be interesting by the clerk who accepted the applications who were then told to wait until they were interviewed. I didn't get lunch most days and I lost about 30 pounds in the first six months. I called it the consular diet. My body got so used to eating nothing during the day that I rarely was hungry on the weekends.

The Iranian applicants all knew they would be interviewed. Most of them brought their own translators with them. And most of those translators were the friends or family members the applicants were staying with while in Germany.

Because we issued visas to nearly every German applicant who applied for a visa, we ran the required name checks on our applicants before we interviewed them. This wasn't the case in all the consular posts, but it was what I got used to. Often it meant that we were able to pull out previous applications submitted by the same person in the past so we had much more information available than the applicants provided on their current application forms. The name check system also provided us with information in code when the names matched - or closely matched - those for which a file with derogatory information existed. It also probably contributed to my feeling that I needed ALL the information about the applicant's situation before I could make a decision.

Because we knew that Iranian couples often applied separately for U.S. visas, we also ran name checks on the spouses of any Iranian adult applicant. This made it easier to detect when an applicant was lying to us about whether he or she was planning to travel alone or with a family member.

When I interviewed Iranian applicants, I asked the questions in English, if either the applicant or the translator indicated English was the preferred language, or in German which was most of the time. I never interviewed applicants in Farsi. It had been seven years at that point since I had been in Iran and my Farsi was not strong enough to conduct interviews in it. Most days I wasn't sure my German was strong enough. But I did usually understand the answers. I had to restrain myself from beginning to write down the answer in my notes before the translator told me in English or German what the applicant had just said in Farsi. I didn't want to give away the fact that I understood at least some Farsi.

What I did learn from the experience of understanding what the applicants said is that any stories the applicant had fabricated to make his or her case more convincing had clearly been worked out before the interview began. I never noticed a discrepancy between what the applicant answered in Farsi and what the translator reported. I had to rely on my gut reaction to the whole story, not catching someone in a lie at the window.

Most of the Iranian applicants provided at least half a dozen reasons for their travel to the U.S. Most of them did not realize that the more reasons they gave, the more problem they had overcoming the presumption that they were intending immigrants. Instead of providing a single reasonable, justified reason for traveling and then concentrating on why that reason would only require a temporary stay, they piled on the reasons thinking that was the key to being given a visa.

Often, each of the reasons involved providing a piece of paper to document it. If that piece of paper was in Farsi, the applicant also then had to provide a translation. Sometimes those translations caused problems the applicants couldn't understand. One female applicant, for example, provided an affidavit to support her statement that she was the sole support for her children. The document used the Farsi word for "parent" but since Farsi is one of those languages that requires the use of the masculine version of a plural noun or pronoun if it represents a group of a hundred women and just one man, the translator mistranslated the word "parent" as "father." To someone who had only the English translation of the document, the applicant's story sounded like a lie. She said she was the sole support for her children, but the document referred to the children's father. While my Farsi was very limited, I was able to identify that the Farsi word was not "father." And since the rest of the applicant's explanation made sense, I issued her a visa.

Not many Iranian applicants were so lucky.