Day 172 - Patterns

Patterns. There are always patterns. Some took longer to see. Some were easy to spot.

Image of Indian passport by The Cydonian,
via Flickr.com

One group of applicants who demonstrated a consistent pattern were applicants from India who were married to German citizens. Indian men. And they all seemed to want to travel to the United States without their wives.

The explanations varied from "my wife is afraid to fly," to "my wife can't get the time off from work," to "my wife is taking the children on a separate vacation."

None of them were very convincing explanations. My boss reminded me that marriages of convenience for immigration reasons were not exclusively a U.S. phenomenon.

Somewhere along the line, one of these cases must have led to success. I don't recall ever issuing a visa in such cases, but the looks on the faces of those I denied clearly indicated the applicants thought they had followed the right recipe precisely. They had residence permits for Germany, establishing their right to return. They had German families - a wife and usually at least one child. They had jobs in Germany, or at least they presented letters to indicate they had jobs. They spoke German. They just couldn't understand that we expected more.

The bottom line for me was that I just couldn't understand separate vacations, especially when one of them would cost so much.

There was one case of an Indian man and his German wife where I did approve the visa. This was a case where both the husband and wife applied for visas to travel together. The wife wore traditional Indian jewelry, including a nose ring, and clothing with a definite sub-continent appearance. She appeared to be a wife, not just an immigration-wife. Since they did not follow the typical pattern, I granted them visas.

But then, a few weeks later, I got a call from my friend Randy in Istanbul because the same couple had come into the consulate there to apply for another visa. I don't recall all the details, but here is probably what happened.

When I issued visas to non-Germans, I frequently issued single-entry visas valid for three months. In that case, if the applicant did not travel to the U.S. right away, the visa would expire. It is likely that I issued a multiple-entry, unlimited visa to the German wife but a single-entry, three-month visa to her husband. Instead of traveling immediately to the U.S., they traveled first to India to visit his family (or perhaps for less legitimate purposes). On their way back to Germany, they stopped in Istanbul to apply for a replacement visa for him. Since they had succeeded in convincing one consular officer of their purpose, they thought it would be a simple matter to get a replacement. But they didn't know that I knew Randy. Randy thought the visa in the husband's passport might be a forgery. He called, expecting me to confirm his suspicion, to tell him I had not issued the visa. When I told him I had in fact issued it, he was surprised. He thought they were involved in drug trafficking. I told him I had expected the two to travel directly to the U.S., not make a rather wide detour through the south-Asian sub-continent. At that point, the decision was Randy's. I don't believe he issued a visa to the husband.

Image of Turkish Passport by susanvg, via Flickr.com

One group of non-German husbands who were much better risks for visas were Turks. When East Germany erected the wall separating West Berlin from the rest of East Germany, West Germany lost one source of labor - East Germans. To compensate for this, West Germany established a guest worker program that brought thousands of Turkish workers to the country, with their families. Three decades later, those Turkish guest workers' children thought of themselves as Germans, not Turks, although they did not have easy options to become German citizens. Unlike the United States where citizenship is conveyed through either the blood lines of the parents or through birth within the boundaries of the United States land, Germany only accepts conveyance of citizenship through parents. Many of those German born and raised Turkish citizens married German citizens and remained in Germany even if their parents chose to return to Germany. These applicants had stronger ties to Germany than they had to Turkey. They didn't even rise to the level of being interesting, so I have no good stories to tell about them.

Because these patterns were so well recognized by all of the staff of the consular section, any time a consular officer deviated from the expected decision, the local staff took notice. When an Indian man applied for a visa in Stuttgart and I decided to issue him a visa valid for the full validity permitted - five years - and for multiple entries, one of the local staff came to me to ask if I had made a mistake. She had never seen any consular officer issue a multiple-entry visa for full validity to a Indian citizen. And this Indian wasn't even married to a German. He was married to an Indian woman. What the local woman didn't know is that I had met this man and his wife through a friend and former colleague from Minneapolis, Jan, when she and another friend and former colleague, Kathy, traveled to Germany on business and spent a week with me in southern Germany. Jan, Kathy, and I had all worked for CPT Corporation in Eden Prairie. Jan and Kathy still worked for CPT. Jan's responsibilities involved a great deal of international travel, including to India and the Middle East where she met Pradeep* who was working for a distributor of CPT. Jan kept in touch with Pradeep and his wife Parvani* even after Pradeep left the CPT distributor and began to work for Hewlett Packard. It was Hewlett Packard that transferred Pradeep to the Stuttgart area.

Pradeep and Parvani invited me to their home many times before Pradeep needed to renew his visa for the United States. I got to know their entire story. While they were both from India, they were from different castes or sects or regions - the details weren't important to me. But the differences in their backgrounds made their decision to marry very unpopular with their families. They had one another to rely on, no longer their families in India.

Because Pradeep worked for Hewlett Packard, he had to travel to the United States often. He had obtained a five-year, multiple entry visa in India before they moved to Germany, but the passport that visa was in was about to expire. He needed a new passport. He could have continued to carry his old passport with the five-year, multiple-entry visa in it as well as his new passport, presenting both to immigration officials.  U.S. law requires a valid visa and a valid passport, but they don't have to be in the same document. But Pradeep's old passport was very much like my first one - full of extension pages and very thick. His job required a great deal of travel. As an Indian citizen, he knew what it was like to be profiled. His quiet way of responding when he felt the immigration or customs official was being bureaucratic or pompous was to hand over his passport without providing any indication of where his visa for that country was. If the immigration or customs official smiled and otherwise approached him as a businessman, he would open the passport to the page with the relevant visa on it before handing his passport over.

Pradeep didn't ask me for any favors. He didn't even tell me he was coming in to apply for a visa. But when I saw him in the waiting room and matched up his application and passport, I indicated my decision was to issue a visa for maximum validity. After all, if he really wanted to emigrate to the United States, he could probably get Hewlett Packard to sponsor him. In the meantime, his purpose for travel was business, and a B-1 visa was the appropriate type of visa.

*A name, not necessarily the right one.