Day 176 - Name Checks

A final hurdle that visa applicants had to get over was the requirement of a clean result from a name check. Clean in this case means no derogatory information. No information was as good as nothing derogatory, but it was essential that the name checks be completed accurately. In later years, a consular officer in Sudan came in for some severe criticism when it was discovered that she had issued a visa to Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, better known in the U.S. as the Blind Sheikh from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His name was on the terrorist watch list which should have prevented his being issued a visa of any kind. So no information was only good if the name being checked had been entered properly. In countries where names are spelled in a non-Latin alphabet, the transliteration of the names into English is tricky which results in more hits suggesting possible derogatory information than is accurate. In those cases, consular officers must satisfy themselves that the hit doesn't apply to the specific individual applying for a visa - a challenge in countries where names like Mohammed, Abdullah, Nasser, Ahmed, and the like are common and where second names are the fathers' names, making Mohammed Nasser and Abdullah Ahmed nearly as common.

I can understand why the consular officer in Sudan could have made a mistake even when the Blind Sheikh's name was on the terrorist watch list. The second piece of information used to determine if the name check result applies to the applicant is birthdate and in the Arab world, the calendar used is lunar, based on the moon, which means each year is 11 days shorter than solar calendars. It is tricky to equate a lunar year date in one year with the solar year date. And with incomplete birth records on top of that, it turns out that many people's birth dates are listed as January 1 because there is no way to be more precise than the year of birth.

Image of sign at Auschwitz by agati, via Flickr.com

In Germany we didn't face quite such a daunting task when we received a response from the name check that the applicant might be ineligible for a visa. There are about 35 grounds for ineligibility. The laws have changed since I served as a consular officer so I'm not sure of the precise number then. If an applicant was found to be ineligible on the basis of one of these grounds, that didn't necessarily mean they could not enter the United States for a temporary purpose. If an applicant was ineligible, there were provisions for a waiver of the ineligibility to be issued in most of the cases. But not all. At the time I was in Germany, there were a few permanent ineligibilities, one of which was having been involved in the persecution of persons in the concentration camps during World War II. This came up often when the name check results were derogatory.

While having served in the German military was not sufficient grounds for an applicant to be ineligible, all names of German soldiers during World War II were in the name check database. Until a few years prior to my arrival in Germany, nearly every former German soldier during World War II was found ineligible under a provision that allowed a waiver to be issued. So occasionally we would receive applications from German men of the right age who knew their applications would require some time to process. One was Manfred,* whose daughter was an American citizen. He had traveled to see her every few years since she emigrated to the United States and each time he had to obtain a waiver. So he wasn't surprised this time when we invited him in for an interview. But what he didn't know was that the law had changed so that the result of the interview would either be that he no longer ever had to obtain a waiver again because his service in the German military would not rise to the level of the permanent ineligibility or that he would be permanently ineligible. Even active members of the Communist party weren't permanently ineligible, so this was a big deal. We interviewed him and sent in the report and then we waited. And we waited. And waited. By the time we got the response from the Washington, Manfred had died.

Manfred's case was very frustrating for me because we had othere applicants who were neither as understanding nor as pleasant as Manfred. Klaus,* for example, when interviewed by Elizabeth, the senior local employee, leaned across the desk and nearly yelled at her, asking, "Don't you know who I am? How important I am? One phone call is all I would need to make you disappear." And yet he was deemed to not be ineligible.

We never did understand just who he was.

Another case, Dieter,* applied for his visa with a Danish passport. He knew about the ineligibility and he thought he would be able to disguise his past with the German military by taking Danish citizenship through his wife and applying with a fresh passport. But name checks aren't keyed off citizenship; names, date and place of birth were all we needed. Dieter wasn't unpleasant like Klaus, but neither was he as understanding as Manfred. He was willing to wait, but not too long. I. The end, he, too, was found not to be subject to the ineligibility and was issued a visa.

*a name, not necessarily the right one.

Day 177 - Suspicious Minds

One consequence of Germans not being very good liars is that Germans were also very trusting of one another. And that meant it was difficult for the local German staff to trust their instincts about when others were not being entirely truthful.

One exception was Ruth. She had a knack for identifying applicants who weren't telling us the whole truth. If we issued a visa to someone Ruth thought was a poor risk, the proof would take months, if not years, to prove her correct. The proof was something we called a blue sheet. Blue sheets were the copy of the request for adjustment of status that the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent to consular sections when someone who had entered the U.S. on a non-immigrant visa subsequently applied to adjust their status to permanent residence. When I issued a visa that Ruth thought was a bad risk, she would write "SOML" at the bottom of the application. That stood for "Sandra owes me lunch." If a blue sheet arrived corresponding to an applicant with that note on the bottom, I agreed I would take Ruth to lunch. I never had to, but that doesn't mean Ruth was wrong. It just meant that none of the blue sheets turned up before I left Germany.

Image of engagement ring by LJ Mears, via Flickr.com

There was one case of blue sheets that was normal: fiance visas. A fiance visa involved nearly everything that an immigrant visa required, medical tests and police clearances, for example, but it was issued to a non-American before a marriage. The visa allowed the non-American to travel to the U.S. in order to get married, provided the marriage took place within 90 days (or maybe it was as few as 45 days). Once the marriage took place, it was expected that the non-American spouse would apply to change status from non-immigrant to permanent resident. So a blue sheet from INS didn't automatically mean something irregular had happened.

But it usually did. When we issued a tourist visa to someone who then married a U.S. citizen and applied to change their status shortly thereafter, it was usually evidence that the applicant had planned to stay in the U.S. all along. So we would pull the applicant's file to see if there was evidence that we were deliberately misled. We would provide a response to indicate what information the applicant provided and then INS would make a decision whether to approve the application for adjustment of status. We didn't learn what they decided, so we only saw the middle, or sometimes the beginning and the middle, of the story.

But more often, the blue sheets didn't arrive until at least a year after the applicant arrived in the U.S. The longer the passage of time, the more difficult it was to prove one way or the other what the applicant's intention was when the visa was issued.

We Americans also had some trouble trusting ourselves to be the right level of suspicious vs. trusting. One morning, for example, my colleague John received a phone call that stunned him. The caller said he was an American citizen who overheard a conversation in the lobby of his hotel the day before. The conversation involved an American and an Iranian who frequently translated for Iranian applicants who explained to the American that he had a special arrangement with one of the consular officers in Stuttgart that would ensure the American's friend would get a visa. The caller wanted to complain about the consular officer and probably thought he was getting through to the head of the consular section, not one of the consular officers. John asked the caller a couple of additional questions to identify the Iranian translator. From the description, John realized first, the translator was in the visa waiting area at that moment, and second, the Iranian meant he, John, was the consular officer the Iranian referred to. John realized he had often relied on the translator and had often issued visas to the applicants he had translated for. And that meant John was upset with himself for not listening more critically. He was much more willing to accept the explanations from Iranian applicants than I was, but each consular officer is responsible for making his or her own decisions.

When the translator came up to the interview window with his applicant, John explained that he would no longer welcome the translator to represent applicants and that meant that the applicant would have to find someone else to translate for him, or he would have to answer questions himself in either English or German.

That applicant went away and had to come back another day.

Day 175 - The Truth Shall Set You Free

Image of Rajneesh Shree Bhagwan materials,
by timogan via Flickr.com

I represented the Consulate General at a demonstration in Stuttgart one day. The event - a protest march by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh who had established an intentional community (aka commune) outside the town of Antelope, Oregon. The community was known as Rajneeshpuram. By 1984, the year before I arrived in Stuttgart, Rajneeshpuram was a city of up to 7,000 people, complete with typical urban infrastructure such as a fire department, police, restaurants, malls, townhouses, a 4,200-foot (1,300 m) airstrip, a public transport system using buses, a sewage reclamation plant and a reservoir. The Rajneeshpuram post office had ZIP code 97741 and it quickly outgrew the size of Antelope itself.

Followers were known as Rajneeshees and for some reason a lot of Germans were drawn to the movement. Rajneeshees were identifiable by the yellow, orange, or red clothing they wore. When they applied for a permit to demonstrate their disappointment with the Consulate's reputation for looking on applicants from Germany who wished to travel to Rajneeshpuram to take part in the Bhagwan's training programs unfavorably, the police informed the Consul General, and he designated me to meet them. It wouldn't have been appropriate for him to meet with them as his stature might encourage someone to believe the protest was being taken seriously. With me, the most junior level American staff member of the Consulate General, to greet them, there would be no such misunderstanding. I was advised to say nothing, just take what they had to give me and then come back into the building.

The Rajneeshees assessment of the Consular Section was accurate. We didn't issue visas to Rajneeshees who applied for tourist visas to travel to take part in a training program that didn't have specific start or end dates. Rajneeshpuram wasn't a recognized educational institution, so they couldn't issue the I-20 form required for us to issue student visas. It wasn't a recognized exchange program organization, so they couldn't issue the IAP-66 form required for us to issue an exchange program visa. About the only category of visa that would work for Rajneeshees who wanted to travel to Antelope, Oregon, was an immigrant visa. But we didn't issue immigrant visas. In addition, immigrant visas are issued on the basis of categories, most of which are for family reunification. Even if a German Rajneeshee had a sponsor for an immigrant visa, they would fall into a category that would mean a many year wait for his or her name to come to the top of the list.

When the demonstrators arrived at the Consulate General, I went out to meet them to accept their letter of complaint and a large bunch of flowers. I was a little disappointed that they didn't bring an elephant to their protest march that year. I had been told in the past they had always arrived with an elephant.

Image of Church of Scientology
by spaceninja, via Flickr.com

Another near-cult-like group that sponsored applicants to travel to the United States for training was the Church of Scientology. I didn't know much about Scientologists before I arrived in Germany, but I got to know a lot about them very quickly. Adjudicating their visa cases was much more challenging because they had managed to get blanket approval for clergymen from the church to travel to the United States for extended stays. That meant that each of them applied for a different class of visa, a work visa, not a tourist visa. And since the Immigration and Naturalization Service had issued blanket approval for clergymen, we were left with determining whether the applicants qualified as clergymen.

One memorable applicant was not yet 18 years old. Dietrich* applied under the blanket petition as a clergyman. He had already traveled to Clearwater, Florida, one of the centers for Scientology, and completed some of the church's training. He wanted to return to Florida in order to complete more training and take up duties as a clergyman.

About the time Dietrich arrived for his interview, his grandmother was on the phone to beg us not to issue him a visa. She said Dietrich's parents were supportive of his desire to travel to the United States, but he had already dropped out of high school in Germany to make the trip and she worried that he would never succeed without completing his education.

His grandmother was probably worrying for no reason. One of the qualities I recognized in all applicants who wanted to travel for further Scientology training was their self-confidence. I had little doubt that Dietrich was going to succeed at whatever he put his mind to. But since he was still a minor, traveling to Clearwater as a minister of the Church of Scientology was not in his cards yet. I advised him to complete his education in Germany and then consider at a later age whether his future was still with Scientology.

Another applicant whose arrival coincided with a phone call from a worried relative, Manuela,* wanted to travel to New York so that she could be a volunteer with Covenant House, a program devoted to providing support for homeless children, many of whom had been abused or were abusing illegal substances. Covenant House operated with the assistance of hundreds of volunteers who paid their way to the cities where their houses were located and who lived with the children resident there. Volunteers received no payment.

This was not my first introduction to Covenant House as I learned about it during my summer in New Jersey when five of my fellow volunteers with the Christian Neighborhood Summer Program met a young woman from Georgia who had run away from her parents and made her way to New York. We six bleeding heart liberals from across the midwest tried to find a safe place for her to stay that night. A surreptitious telephone call to the New York Police by one of our group led to the tip that she might be able to stay at Covenant House, but when they learned she said she was 19, they told us she was too old.

Then just before I ended up joining the State Department, a friend in Minneapolis told me he had decided to sell lhis house and use the proceeds of the sale to fund a year of volunteering with Covenant House. So while Manuela wanted to volunteer, I had a pretty good idea of just what it was going to cost her to volunteer. I had already spoken to her mother who told us she opposed Manuela's plans. Because I hadn't yet met Manuela, I explained to the mother that I could only make a decision based on what Manuela presented, especially since it was clear that Manuela was no longer a minor. I asked Manuela how she expected to pay her expenses in New York since her parents wouldn't be helping her. She downplayed the amount of money she thought she would need and that was the basis for my refusing her application - she didn't have adequate funds for the purpose of the trip.

Whitney Museum of Modern Art by beautifulcataya,
via Flickr.com

The most memorable of applicants who applied to spend a year in the United States was Elke.* Elke applied to spend a year in New York on an internship with the Whitney Museum for the year after the conclusion of her university studies in the U.S. A fifth year in the U.S. was common for foreign students, but it required an exchange visitor visa or an extension of the student visa. In Elke's case, the internship was organized through Max Factor, not a university, so an exchange visitor visa is what she needed. Elke initially submitted her application through the mail, but since she didn't have an IAP-66 form, needed for us to issue an Exchange Visitor visa, we sent her application and passport back to her with a form telling her she should reapply when she received an IAP-66. Instead, Elke returned and presented the letter she received from the Whitney Museum that explained they weren't approved for issuing IAP-66 forms. The woman who wrote the letter explained that other foreign students who spent an internship year with the museum were willing to hide their intended purpose at the time they applied for visas as they felt the opportunity was too good to pass up. She further suggested that Elke might try getting a new passport and then reapplying in person, wearing a scarf and coat so that no one at the consulate would recognize her from her previous application.

Elke refused to lie. She presented all her documents with her application and asked us what she was supposed to do. The employee who took her application at the window handed the package over to Elizabeth, the senior local employee in the Visa Section. Elizabeth read through everything and brought the package to me to ask if I thought the Whitney Museum was connected in any way to our boss whose last name was Whitney. We brought the package to Ms. Whitney who read through everything and then began laughing a bit and said, "Dear Aunt Gertrude" while shaking her head. She volunteered to talk with the applicant and then she got on the phone with her extended family to explain what they needed to do to get on the list of organizations approved to issue IAP-66 forms so that Elke could join their internship group in September.

Elke returned a week later with an IAP-66. We were happy to issue her visa.

*A name, not necessarily the right one.

Day 174 - Lies Have Short Legs

Germans aren't very good at lying. That made our jobs easier in many ways. But as I mentioned before, lying isn't grounds for refusing a visa application. It just makes it harder to figure out what the real story is.

Before I arrived in Stuttgart, it was well known that a previous consular officer there never issued visas to German women who had GI boyfriends. Never. So German women with GI boyfriends learned that telling the truth wouldn't work. But unlike the situation with applicants wanting to spend a year in the U.S. as an au pair, there was nothing illegal about a German woman traveling to the U.S. with her American boyfriend. The key was the purpose of the trip. If it was to remain in the U.S., a tourist visa wasn't the appropriate category. But if it was for a vacation, there was no problem.

Except that German women thought they couldn't tell us the truth.

Image by arteunpooro, via Flickr.com

My favorite example was Ursula.* She arrived at the interview window with her hair a mess, too much make-up, and wearing clothes that left so much of her exposed she should have been embarrassed. But she wasn't. She explained that she wanted to travel to the United States for the Christmas holidays. She had an invitation from an American woman, Mrs. Brown,* Ursula said she had met the previous summer when Mrs. Brown was in Germany on vacation. She said she and Mrs. Brown hit it off right away and she had spent a lot of time showing Mrs. Brown around Germany. She also said that Mrs. Brown had sent her a present recently, so she was very much looking forward to seeing her again. Ursula was about 20. She said Mrs. Brown was about 50.

I was having a hard time understanding how this ditzy blonde had managed to charm a middle-aged woman to the point that she would invite her to spend two weeks over the Christmas holidays. Christmas is for spending time with families, not strangers.

So I suggested to Ursula that I could better understand her reasons for traveling to the U.S. for the Christmas holidays if Mrs. Brown were the mother of her American boyfriend. At that Ursula said she didn't have a boyfriend in the United States. In fact, she said, her boyfriend was the Marine on duty at the Consulate right now. I had seen her talking with Cliff, the Marine on duty, so I thought it might be possible. I went into the office and called Cliff to ask how long he had known Ursula. His response - he had known her for just as long as I had.

At this point, it seemed hopeless to think I would get Ursula to change her story. So I refused her visa application. When we didn't issue a visa, we stamped the back of the passport with a notation that we had received an application and we wrote in the date. It wasn't always an indication that the application had been refused. Sometimes it just meant that we needed more information or documentation before we could issue a visa. But most people understand it means the visa was refused. I am sure that Ursula understood that. But she had a lot of nerve.

A few days after I refused her application, my boss got a phone call from an American GI in Illinois. He wanted to know why the airline in Frankfurt wouldn't allow his fiancee to get on the plane. They told her they wouldn't accept her visa. Ursula was trying to convince the airline that the stamp in the back of her passport was her visa. I don't know if Ursula ever got to the U.S. or if her boyfriend/fiance returned to Germany for her. Consular officers only get to know the beginning of most stories.

Image by summerbl4ck, via Flickr.com

Another favorite was Brigitta*. I had seen her sitting in the back row of the waiting room with two children and a tall man when I began interviewing applicants that day. Brigitta was older than Ursula and therefore at least a bit more believable. But still her story didn't quite make sense. She also said she planned to travel to the United States for the Christmas holidays. She also planned to visit someone she had met in Germany who had invited her to spend the holidays. I asked if she was traveling with anyone else. She said she wasn't. I asked why she would leave her children behind in Germany over the holidays. She said her children would be staying with her ex-husband.

She had answers to all my questions, but it still didn't quite make sense. So, just as I had done with Ursula, I told Brigitta that I could understand her reason for wanting to travel to the U.S. with just a few changes to her explanation. I could see that her children adored the man she was with. They were sitting next to him, taking turns giving him a hug. And he seemed to be very comfortable with them. So I could understand her story if she told me he was her American boyfriend and that the two of them were planning to travel to the U.S. for the Christmas holidays to spend them with his family.

At that point, Brigitta told me a German saying, "Lügen haben kurze Beine." Lies have short legs. She said she thought she wouldn't get a visa if she admitted that she would be traveling with her American boyfriend. I asked if he was in the Army. He was. I asked if he was being transferred back to the U.S. He wasn't. He just had two weeks of leave for the holidays.

I issued Brigitta a visa for her Christmas holiday. Lies may have short legs, but they don't prevent visa from being issued unless the lies are intentional and material to the question of eligibility.

*A name, not necessarily the right one.

Day 173 - I Need a Break!

While it might seem that we only interviewed visa applicants who were not German, there were a couple of categories of Germans who fell into the interesting range. Germans who just completed high school, Gymnasium in German, and who wanted to take a year off, a gap year, before beginning their university studies were interesting. Back when I finished high school all the advisers, counselors, teachers, ministers, and parents preached against doing anything after high school that would delay beginning college studies. I always thought it was that they were concerned that if we started working right after high school, we'd get used to having our own money and would never want to be without the income. The result was that it was nearly unheard of for my classmates to do anything except head off to college in the fall after graduation.

But the Germans all wanted to take a break. They explained that completing their Gymnasium education was so stressful that they needed some time off to unwind before beginning further studies. There was one compelling argument for this approach that can be explained by comparing the university program of a typical American student with a typical European student.

The typical American student spends the first two years completing basic requirements, getting a feel for all the options available for majors, minors and so on. Many college freshmen don't declare what they expect their major to be until after the first year. And some change their declared major when half-way through, like I did when I changed my major from German to English (although the "as a Foreign Language" detail had to wait until I got to San Francisco State). With so many general education courses to get out of the way, there is plenty of time to get exposed to different subjects, to experiment, before buckling down in the final two years of college to complete the courses required for both a major and graduation.

The typical European student, however, must declare what their course of study will be immediately on entry into the university. Some universities accept students based on what they plan to study. Changing your major in many European universities means starting over. So it wasn't all that difficult to understand that recent German high school graduates would like to take a year off - to explore and experiment outside the university environment so they wouldn't waste time inside the university environment exploring and experimenting.

Used Car image by Thomas Hawk, via Flickr.com

While I could understand why German graduates would want to take the time off, I couldn't understand what they would do during an entire of traveling around the United States during their gap year and how they could afford the year off.  Many a German recent graduate explained they would include a driving course with their year of traveling, with the goal of getting a driving license in the U.S. at which point they planned to buy a used car which they would use during their 6 to 12 months of driving around the U.S., after which they were convinced they would be able to sell the car for about what they paid for it so they would have money to return to Germany when they were ready to begin their university studies. I had to have this desire to get a driving license in the U.S. explained. In Germany, getting a driving license for the first time wasn't just a matter of taking a written test and then driving around a few blocks. In order to get a driving license in Germany, you had to know how a car works. Driving instruction in Germany included lessons on the internal combustion engine and required being able to do the work to maintain the engine yourself. It took a long time to complete all the courses, and the test included questions about the workings of the engine. But if a German got a driving license somewhere else, they could skip all the hard stuff. With a valid license in their hands, Germans could apply for a replacement German license based on reciprocity. Once again, what had at first seemed strange was something I could understand.

But. . .

I also had to understand just what these young Germans were going to do in the United States for the many months they planned to spend there.

Image of an au pair with an American family,
by ArcYang via Flickr.com

One common plan involved staying with an American family for a year, watching over the children now and then in exchange for a place to stay and meals and often also some spending money. This is the life of an au pair in Europe and it was a common way for young adults to travel to another country to live and learn the language of that country to get that experimentation and exploration out of the way. The term au pair comes from French and means "equal to." The concept is that the person staying with the family is considered to be part of the family, not a domestic employee, and the work the au pair is expected to do is comparable to what a child in the family will be expected to do when they reach the age of the au pair. It is a nice system, but it isn't something well understood in the United States. At the time I was in Germany, there were no official programs that would permit a young person to travel to the U.S. as an au pair. We considered anyone traveling to be an au pair to require a work visa, not a tourist visa. So if we knew that was what the recent graduate was planning to do, we had no choice but to refuse the application for a tourist visa.

So they tried to hide the fact from us. They knew that if they told us the truth, we would turn down the visa. So they told us stories. Sometimes the story was that the applicant planned to stay with a distant relative who had agreed to give her a place to stay while she spent their time studying English. That was a believable scenario until the applicant couldn't explain which side of the family the relative was from. Sometimes the story was that the applicant planned to stay with someone who was a business partner of her father who had agreed. . . Again, the applicants rarely had worked out enough of a story to answer even the most cursory of questions. Sometimes the applicant would insist the family she was going to stay with didn't have any children. But while the words were saying one thing, the muscles of the face and body were saying something else. Sometimes the applicants would come for the interview chewing gum because they understood chewing gum would hide the slight tremors at the edge of the mouth when telling a lie. So we always asked applicants who were chewing gum to take it out and throw it away before continuing with the interview.

Image of an au pair's baggage by swperman, via Flickr.com

Sometimes the lie was bigger - the applicant requested a visa for a short vacation with her parents so that there were no clues, they thought, that their plans were to stay beyond the length of time their parents would stay. But what the applicants didn't understand was that having a visa stamped in the passport wasn't a guarantee they would be admitted into the U.S. Now and then, when we did fall for the story and issue a visa, the applicant headed off for the U.S. with several suitcases to get them through the many months they hoped to stay with their host family while they studied English only to encounter an Immigration and Naturalization Services officer who had the authority to search their luggage to determine whether the story the applicant told us at the visa window matched what the applicant carried on the plane. If the INS official believed the purpose of the applicant's intended stay was inconsistent with the visa issued, they would refuse entry to the applicant and would send them right back to Germany. Fortunately we didn't have to meet with too many such applicants and their families, but we did meet a few who were thunderstuck that their plan for their daughter's gap year wasn't consistent with U.S. immigration law.

Not all au pairs are women, but we never saw any patterns among young men who applied for visas during their gap year. Or maybe the guys were more clever than the girls.

Toward the end of my time in Stuttgart, a trial program for au pairs began which gave us a better option than just turning down the applications. The trial program was an Exchange Visitor program which required that the applicant obtain a specific visa support document for the program through one of the organizations in the United States approved to issue those documents. The organizations were required to orient the au pair participants as well as the host families to ensure the families didn't use the program as a way to get cheap domestic or child care help and that the au pairs understood what household chores they would be expected to do and what was beyond that. The au pairs also received a modest allowance through this program.

The existence of the au pair Exchange Visitor program didn't solve all the problems because many times the family in the United States and the family in Germany did have a relationship so that the family in Germany only wanted their daughter to stay with that family and the family in the United States only wanted that specific au pair.  We did what we could.

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.

Day 171 - Cotton Candy Syndrome

Not all non-Germans who applied for visas in Stuttgart were just passing through. Many lived in Germany, had German spouses and children, and worked in Germany. They often still fell into the interesting category which led us to invite them for an interview nonetheless. And those interviews were often truly the most interesting of all.

Image of Irish Passport by Sean MacEntee, via Flickr.com

One non-German, for instance, was James who submitted his application with his Irish passport. The application indicated James had been born in the United States so the question of just why was he applying for a visa to travel there had to be asked and answered. U.S. citizens must depart from and arrive into the United States on a U.S. passport. If a U.S. citizen has another citizenship, the U.S. doesn't care which passport is used to travel elsewhere, but no U.S. citizen can arrive in the United States on a foreign passport with a visa.

James came to his interview with a copy of his affidavit renouncing his U.S. citizenship to explain why he was traveling on an Irish passport, but every time he answered one question, two or three more popped up. It seems that James' purpose for traveling to the U.S. was to visit his ex-wife. She was an American citizen who had lived with James in Germany until recently, but once they divorced, she returned to the U.S. That piece of news raised questions about whether he intended to return to Germany or stay in the U.S. But James insisted he had no plans to remain in the United States. He just wanted to visit his ex-wife because in spite of the divorce, they were still friends. His ex-wife didn't like living in Germany while James didn't want to live in the United States because of his renunciation of his citizenship.

Oh and why did he renounce his citizenship? To get a job. His father had been in the military, stationed in Germany, when James finished high school. James went to university to study to become a veterinarian. Once he finished his studies, he returned to Germany. He was able to line up a job as a vet with the U.S. Army in Germany, but the only available positions were for non-Americans.  At that time, there was a complicated system of identifying jobs that could be filled by Americans, but only by Americans who were dependents of military members or foreign service staff, and the rest of the jobs with the military and the diplomatic establishments could only be filled by non-Americans. James was too old to be considered a dependent of his father. Besides, his father wanted him to enter the Army, not remain in Germany. I was aware of this system even before I came in contact with it in Germany. A high school friend had married a man who joined the Air Force and the two of them stayed married far longer than their marriage actually lasted because if they divorced, my friend would have lost her job. James' situation was just the reverse. He happened to have an Irish grandparent which gave him enough of a blood connection to Ireland to be issued a passport. If he had simply renounced his U.S. citizenship without any other citizenship to replace it, he would have had to battle the German government for one of those Stateless Person's Travel Documents.

In the end, James convinced me that he was sincere in his wish to travel to the U.S. and then return to Germany. But he was high on the scale of being an interesting case.

Image of German passport
by sebastiankippe, via Flickr.com

Another somewhat related case was Werner who was much older than James but had also been born in the United States and now lived in Germany where he had been living for thirty years. Werner had traveled to the U.S. on his German passport several times, so he was very confused when we invited him in for an interview. The difference between Werner's previous applications and his application in the late 1980s was that what were considered expatriating acts in the past had been reviewed by the courts. A recent ruling found that no one could be found as having lost their citizenship unless the individual had committed an expatriating act with the intention of giving up U.S. citizenship. About the only expatriating act that was on its face deemed to prove intention was renouncing citizenship, as James had done. In Werner's case, however, he lost his citizenship when he voted in a German election in the 1950s. I think Werner had even fought with the U.S. Army against Germany during World War II, but casting a vote ten years later lost him his U.S. citizenship. In the meantime, he had undertaken a number of other actions that also would have been expatriating at the time. But since he thought he didn't have U.S. citizenship then, no court could ever have made the case that he continued to vote or serve in an official capacity with the German government in order to give up his U.S. citizenship. The result of Werner's application for a visa was that we sent him over to the American Citizen Services side of the Consulate in order to get a new U.S. passport.

More troubling instances of potential U.S. citizens applying for visas were infants and children where one parent was a U.S. citizen and the other not. When a child is born overseas of two American parents, that child is an American citizen by birth.  But when a child was born to a U.S. citizen mother or father but the other parent was not American, there are some hoops the parents and child must jump through. A U.S. citizen who was born overseas would always be a U.S. citizen, but that doesn't mean that his or her children would always be U.S. citizens. When a U.S. citizen is born overseas, he or she must live in the United States for a fixed length of time, at least some of which was before either the 14th or 16th birthday (the law changed often so everything depended on the date and place of the parent's birth) in order to be able to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child.  In most of the cases we saw, the result was that the child was determined to be a U.S. citizen, but there were no shortcuts to that determination. When the parents were at the interview window hoping to get visas to travel the next day, the extra steps were viewed as unnecessary bureaucracy.  My boss called it the cotton candy syndrome.

When she was in high school, my boss had a summer job selling cotton candy at a kiddy's park. She was so excited about having the job and about providing something she knew kids loved. But she was surprised that everyone who came to buy cotton candy didn't seem as pleased as she was. They seemed annoyed. Through that experience she recognized that most people didn't see her as the person who would give them cotton candy, they saw her as the person in between them and the cotton candy they wanted.

Day 170 - It Isn't Personal, It's Just Business

Image of office by Ben Ramsey, via Flickr.com

Iranian businessmen who applied for visas to travel to the U.S. to develop their businesses had a very difficult job convincing consular officers in Germany that they were being truthful. It isn't that lying is grounds for refusal of a visa application, but certain lies make it impossible to assess a case.

Like for those applying to study in the United States, I had trouble understanding why Iranian businessmen or businesswomen would choose to establish a trading relationship with a business in the United States. Until October 1987, the trade embargo prohibiting trade between the U.S. and Iran was limited to weapons and aircraft, but given the troubled relationship between our two countries, the long-term prospects for vibrant trade relationships were very dim.

Most of these applicants brought invitations from their U.S. contacts inviting them to come to the U.S. for further discussions. Some of these letters looked like they could be legitimate. They were on letterhead paper, were prepared on word processors or at least on electric typewriters. And the invitations appeared genuine. It was the intent behind the letters that was still suspicious.

The invitations were never from big, well-known companies. They were always from small companies and we suspected they were all businesses set up by Iranian friends or family members of the applicants. Most of them were signed by Iranian sounding names. I don't think I ever found one of these cases convincing, so I am sure that I denied them all. And yet more like them kept on coming in.

One of the things about issuing or refusing visas is that it is impossible to know if the decision was the right one. Someone who is issued a visa walks away happy - whether that person should have been issued one or not. And someone who is refused a visa walks away unhappy - again whether the refusal was right or wrong. But someone who is refused a visa often refuses to accept the decision and continues to stand at the interview window, trying to reopen the case instead of walking away. Iranian applicants, especially those who claimed they were traveling for business, were the most difficult to convince there was no point in continuing the discussion. Sometimes the only way we could get them to walk away from the window was to do that on our side first - walk away to make it clear there would be no further discussion.

I learned a better way to refuse a visa to an Iranian businessperson when Shireen (not her real name - I wouldn't be able to remember the real name of a visa applicant if my life depended on it) presented her application and the usual affidavits about her ties to Iran and her wealth, as well as her invitation from a New York company for her to come to discuss a business venture.

This letter was the worst example of an invitation I had ever seen. It may have been on letterhead, but that was about the only business-like aspect of it. The letter was typed on a manual typewriter, with all the misalignments of capital letters that are typical of manual typewriters. The letter had lots of typos, misspellings, wrong word choices, and incorrect grammar. But the error that caught my eye that made keeping my composure at the window a challenge was in the signature block. The name was a Hispanic-sounding name, a curiosity since most such letters didn't try to hide the Iranian behind the invitation. But the title of the Hispanic-sounding name, typed under the name was "Wise President." I looked at it and looked at it, trying to figure out just what a Wise President is until I said it aloud. And then I understood. Farsi has a "V" sound, but no "W". The two English letters were often confused since anytime an English word started with a "W", it was usually replaced with a "V". Whoever had typed the letter had just reversed the subsitution and then corrected the spelling of Wice to Wise.

I asked the applicant to take a seat while I did some research. I had to walk away from the window in order to keep myself from laughing. When I got myself together, I called her back and told her that I was very sorry, but I could not issue a visa to her because I couldn't take the invitation she had presented seriously. I pointed out to her that the letter had so many errors in it, I couldn't believe that it was from an actual business. And the response from the applicant stunned me.

She looked at me straight in the eye and thanked me for letting her know that the business didn't appear to be reputable. She thanked me for saving her the time and money she would have spent pursuing the trip. And at that point, she turned around and walked away.

The light bulb went on. Iran is a shame-based society, not a guilt-based society. All I had to do to get Iranian applicants to accept my refusal was to give them an explanation that allowed them to save face. Life at the interview window got a little easier after that day.

Day 169 - School Days

Image of student by Hossam el-Hamalawy,
via Flickr.com 

One group of Iranians who were very difficult to make decisions about were those who wanted to go to the U.S. to study. The first criteria any applicant had to meet was to overcome the presumption that they were intending immigrants. This was always difficult for students who were applying outside of their home country because of the length of time they would have to remain in the U.S. to complete their studies and because of the age of most prospective students. But for Iranians, it was always a mystery that they would choose to study in the U.S. if they didn't intend to stay. Why would a young adult select a school in the place that was the equivalent of the lion's den to spend 4 to 6 years if they intended to return to Iran at the end?

One applicant that was particularly troubling for me was a man I'll call Farhad. He planned to study nuclear physics. At the time, there were no stories in the media about Iran having a nuclear program, so that wasn't my concern. But the thought of what it might mean if he did study in the U.S. and then return to Iran was my concern. But instead of just denying his application on the basis that Farhad had not convinced me he intended to return to Iran at the conclusion of his studies, I kept asking him for more information. His case was the one that my boss used to help me understand I would never have all the relevant information and that was OK. It was the applicant's responsibility to make his case. If he didn't, then I should deny the visa.

Because we were interested in identifying any of the Iranians involved in the taking of the staff of the embassy in Tehran as hostages in 1979, we ran additional checks on Iranian applicants who were within the age range that the hostage takers would be. We also had to run the same additional name check on any Iranian who planned to attend university in the U.S. Instead of recognizing these checks as only applying in the case of an Iranian who appeared to be a good bet for a visa, I initially saw these checks as part of the process of gathering all available information. In Farhad's case, I ran the additional name check to see if that would give me the clear-cut reason to deny the visa. These name checks took several weeks to complete. In the end, I still had no more information about him than I had at the end of the first interview. My boss pointed out that my desire to gather every speck of information was unfair to the applicant because each additional question gave the applicant hope that he or she would get a visa. By spending so much time with this applicant, I was holding out hope to him which would make it harder for him to accept my refusal.

And that is just what happened. After Farhad had waited in Stuttgart for several weeks, I refused his application because I just wasn't comfortable with his plans. He was very unhappy. Several weeks later I saw him still in Stuttgart, probably looking for alternative student options.

Another case that eventually was revealed as a student case was a young man I will call Said who didn't bring a translator because his English was excellent, Said didn't plan to travel to the U.S. to study. He had already finished his university studies and was working. He wanted to travel to the U.S. to visit a family member. He was an exception to the rule in that he didn't pile on lots of other reasons. He just wanted to travel to see the family member.

I asked Said where he learned English because most Iranian prospective students had to attend an intensive English program before they could begin university studies. The fact that his English was excellent was very difficult to understand, especially since I had met a lot of Iranians by then, something Said couldn't possibly have known. Yet Said claimed he had never visited the United States. He claimed he learned English by listening to the BBC.

Said was quite convincing, but the normal name check revealed that there was additional information about him at the consular section in Vienna. I called Vienna and spoke with a consular officer there who said they had added the code for Said's name to indicate that they had requested the additional name check because of his prior years in the U.S. as a student.

So Said was lying to me.

Image by Dyanna Hyde, via Flickr.com

I called him back to the window to ask a few more questions, including whether he had ever applied for a U.S. visa anywhere else. Said said he hadn't. Again, I asked if he had ever traveled to the U.S. and again he insisted he hadn't. But when I told him I had information that he had not only applied for a visa in Vienna two days before, but also that he had been a student in the U.S. for six years, I saw something I don't think I had ever seen before: Said's face fell. He knew he had been caught in a lie. At that point, Said explained that he only had a month off work to travel and when the consular officer told him he would have to wait at least three weeks before he could get his visa because he had been a student in the U.S., he decided he would go to a different consulate and apply again, not admitting to his previous studies in the U.S. He assumed since he had been told he would get a visa in Vienna, but that he had to wait there, he would get a visa right away if he just hid his studies.

But since the consular officer in Vienna now knew Said was prepared to lie to get a visa, he said he would reconsider his decision if Said ever did come back for his visa.

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.

Day 167 - A Convention of Kwieks

Image of Weissenhofsiedlung, across the street from my
apartment in Stuttgart, by jaime silva, via Flickr.com

My assignment to Stuttgart was for 18 months. The first 12 months were in the Non-Immigrant Visa Section and the last six months were in the American Citizen Services Section. The stories from the Visa Section were much more interesting.

We consular officers didn't interview every visa applicant; we only interviewed the interesting ones. Most German citizens were able to apply by mail, sending their passports, applications, and photos to us. So long as they were well established in Germany, with good jobs and family, they were good bets for being legitimate non-immigrant visitors to the United States - tourists. The interesting ones were those who didn't have good jobs or family or who weren't well established or who wanted to travel for something other than a holiday. Those were the applicants we invited for personal interviews.

When people wanted to travel soon, they couldn't necessarily get their passports and applications to us and then get the visas stamped in the passport back to them in time. Those applicants would come to apply in person. Again, we only interviewed the interesting ones. Many of the walk-in applicants dropped off their applications in the morning and we just issued the visas to them so they could pick up their passports in the afternoon.

The interesting applicants fell into six groups:

• Non-Germans who were passing through Germany on their way to somewhere else,
• Non-Germans who lived in Germany,
• Recent German high school graduates who wanted to take a year off to travel before they started their university studies,
• Young German women with American GI boyfriends,
• Germans who planned to travel to the United States for a purpose other than tourism, and 
• Anyone whose name was a hit on the name-check application that we were required to run for every applicant to whom we planned to issue a visa.

In my first month in Stuttgart, I had my fair share of interesting applicants. One of those were members of the Kwiek family. One morning a number of members of this family came in to submit their visa applications. They lived in Germany, had done all of their lives, but they were not German citizens. They had Stateless Person Travel Documents, not Passports. Stateless Person Travel Documents were what those who had no other citizenship who lived in Germany were issued for the purpose of travel outside of Germany. Those who held Stateless Person Travel Documents did not necessarily have the right to live in Germany. It was a document issued so the person could leave Germany.

Image of gypsy caravan by Feggy Art, via Flickr.com

The Kwieks were gypsies. They came to apply for visas because, they explained, they needed to travel to the United States for a Convention of Kwieks. The king of the Kwieks had apparently recently died, so the family needed a new king. The Convention would be held when a majority of Kwieks adult men, a quorum, was able to convene in the same place in order to elect a new Kwiek king. The plan was for that Convention to be held in New York.

The Kwiek who represented the group most assertively kept telling us to contact the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt if we had questions about the convention. But we had some more basic reservations about the Kwiek's ties to Germany that needed to be resolved before we needed any convincing about the legitimacy of the reason for the visit.

I was not very experienced at this point. I knew all the different types of non-immigrant visas and what the requirements were for each. But I didn't have the experience or judgment to know that I could turn down the applicant on the basis of what was presented without asking for more. I had this notion that I had to know everything about the situation before I could decide whether to issue a visa or not. So instead of just denying the application on the basis of the Kwiek's lack of strong ties to Germany, I explained that I wasn't convinced. Later I learned that the specific phrase I used in German conveyed the meaning that I didn't understand rather than that I understood precisely and on the basis of what I understood I had to deny the application. So the Kwiek's thought they could come back the next week with more information.

The next time, they presented a statement from their bank which showed they had a very large amount of money in an account and they had plane tickets for their trip. I still wasn't convinced, so I think - if I recall correctly - I did deny the application a little more forcefully that time.

The next day another group of Kwieks arrived to apply. They also did not have German passports, but they had a slightly more acceptable set of travel documents. Their documents were Resident Travel Documents indicating that although they were not German citizens, they had the right to continue living in Germany. They arrived with letters from their bank showing large amounts of money in their accounts, their plane tickets, along with their Travel Documents, applications, and photos. And they gave the same explanation for their planned trip - to attend the Kwiek Convention in New York. By this time, we had received a message from the Immigration and Naturalization Service reminding us that gypsies as a group were not usually good prospects as non-immigrants. The message invited consular officers who believed an applicant who was identified as a gypsy was a good risk to contact INS before issuing visas. In addition, my boss had advised me not to put much confidence in a letter from a bank listing a large balance in an account as there was no guarantee that money had been there the day before the letter was prepared or would still be there the following day. She encouraged me to use my judgment, not papers presented with applications, to base my decisions on.

I denied the applications of the second group of Kwieks.

A day or two later, another group of applications were received, also indicating travel to New York as the plan. But this group didn't have Kwiek as the surname. This group were Romanoffs. And this group had regular German passports. This group didn't say they planned to travel to the Kwiek Convention, but there was still something about them that felt like Kwieks. Along with the passports, they presented a letter from the bank showing a large bank balance and their plane tickets. And this group was accompanied by the personal secretary to the head of the family. It felt as though the Kwieks were turning up the fire under the visa stew just a tiny bit at a time, trying to find the point at which a visa would be issued. The information that prevented me from considering the application all that seriously was that the head of the family described himself as a businessman, but he didn't have an address for his business. He did have a diamond-studded gold watch on his wrist to go along with his large bank balance, but I considered what my boss had told me and realized just because he was wearing the watch didn't mean it was his.

I denied the applications of the Romanoffs as well.

I don't know if the Kwieks ever got a quorum of Kwiek men together in New York or if they had to change the venue to a country with a larger number of male members. I did some research recently and learned that in the 2000 census, there were 161 people with Kwiek as their surname. In that same census, there were 3,292 people with Wenner as their surname. But I suspect the Kwieks who were attempting to gather a quorum to elect a new king in 1985 weren't well represented on any census records.

I don't know if there was any truth at all in the story the first group of Kwieks told. What was true is that some Kwieks succeeded at getting visas in Frankfurt with the story of the Kwiek Convention as the explanation. So the Kwieks elsewhere in Germany followed the same path.