Day 182 - A Tisket, A Tasket, Oops, I Lost It

Image of sign on a bus by Lodigs, via Flickr.com

The majority of non-routine passport cases involved reports of lost passports and requests for replacements. Some were true reports. Some were not. Of the latter, some were trivial. Some were not.

I relied on my gut reaction to the initial report of the loss to decide which cases to question further. Like so many of my German visa applicants, many Americans also were not good liars. The first clue was when answers to questions were vague or included too many "I don't remember" responses. When the person on the other side of the counter could give a credible and more or less complete description of the last time he was aware he still had the passport and a logical explanation for when it was lost, I didn't ask a lot of additional questions. If the person reporting the lost passport had already reported the loss to the police, I had even fewer questions. But when the answers were overwhelmingly "I don't remember," and no report of the loss was filed with the police, I kept asking questions, pointing out that my questions were to jog her memory to help find it.

One rash of reports of lost passports arrived from high school students in the early spring. It was like a minor epidemic at a school. Everyone seemed to have lost their passports and needed replacements. The first case probably seemed normal with the likely outcome that we issued a replacement passport. But by the third report, things started sounding fishy. As I asked additional questions, more and more "I don't remember" answers came up. It was clear the persons requesting replacement passports were trying to hide something. In one case, after I asked my questions and sent the young woman away with instructions that she should look a little harder before coming back to request a replacement, she left, but only for a short time. She returned to explain why she had asked for a new passport.

Her class, she explained, was taking a trip to East Germany and they were planning to travel by bus. But she was the daughter of a U.S. service member which meant she had a status of forces agreement, or SOFA, stamp in her passport. The status of forces agreement outlined the rights and responsibilities of U.S. service members and their family members while in Germany. One of the responsibilities was to limit travel between West Germany and West Berlin to three routes - one by air, one by train, and one by one highway. The young woman's class trip would not follow one of those routes. So she thought she would get a second passport without a SOFA stamp. Someone had told her all she needed to do was say she had lost hers and she could get a new one.

I was probably more bureaucratic than sympathetic in my response. I pointed out that those covered by the status of forces agreement had responsibilities as well as rights. The bottom line - I wouldn't issue a second passport to her.

Other reports of lost passports appeared to be less benign. Another group of lost passports was reported by former U.S. service members who were living in the Mannheim area. We suspected that passports were being sold. And there were still active underground terrorist groups in Europe, so the thought of U.S. passports in the hands of the Red Army Faction was unpleasant at best.

One man who reported his passport lost was most memorable for the contrast between all of his "I can't remembers" and the full details he could recall when I asked clarifying questions. For example, he couldn't remember where he last used his passport although it was within the past month. He traveled a lot for his job as a logistics specialist. Maybe it was when he traveled to France, or maybe it as to Switzerland.  I pointed out that the French government had only recently introduced the requirement that American citizens had to have visas to travel to France. My conversation with him went something like this:

"Have you ever applied for a French visa," I asked.

"No," he responded.

"Then I think it is unlikely that you last used your passport on a trip to France. Maybe it was when you traveled to Switzerland." I suggested.

"I didn't need to get a visa for France," he countered with just a bit of a challenge in his voice, "because I traveled by train. They issue visas to passengers on the train at the border."

It was amazing how well he remembered some details, but not others.

The interview window in the American Citizen Services section was within line of sight for the Marine on duty in the consular waiting room. While I was interviewing this man with two contrasting memories, the phone on the desk near me rang. The applicant had raised his voice so loudly that the Marine wanted to know if I needed help. I declined the offer and explained to the applicant, again, that in cases such as his, I advise looking harder for his lost passport before returning to apply for a replacement again.

He didn't return. But he did write a letter to the Consul complaining about my refusal to issue a replacement passport in which he exhibited his superior powers of observation as he described me, the color of my dress, and my matching shoes - shoes that he couldn't see while at the interview window. When my boss read the letter, she agreed that his letter just further undermined his credibility as the contrast between the details he chose to recall and those he couldn't was so dramatic.

Day 181 - The Weiss Brothers

After a year working in the Visa Section, I moved to the American Citizen Services Section where the majority of the work involved issuing passports and reports of birth abroad to family members of service members in Germany. Once again, like visa applications, most of these cases were straight forward. But a few were interesting.

The Weiss brothers were definitely interesting.

Image of cowboys by DangerRanger,
via Flickr.com

The two brothers showed up wearing cowboy hats, cowboy boots, and big smiles, requesting that we arrange to repatriate them back to the U.S. because they had run out of money. But the kicker was that they had previously been repatriated back to the U.S. from Stuttgart and their explanation for why we should do it again was that they hadn't yet repaid the repatriation loan from that first occassion three or five years before. They had copies of the paperwork to prove it.

The brothers were Amcits, State-speak for American citizens, but they spoke English with an accent that suggested an eastern European background. Russian was my guess.

The reason their case was interesting is that the brothers shouldn't have been issued new passports until after they had repaid the previous loan. When U.S. citizens are repatriated, their passports are annotated to expire when they arrive back in the U.S. and a hold is placed on any new applications until the loan to cover the cost of repatriation has been repaid. Repatriation is intended to be a last resort for Americans in trouble overseas. Even people who are evacuated out of dangerous places such as Tehran in February of 1979 end up with a bill for a representative cost of their last-minute flight out if town. Let that be a lesson to you if you were thinking of taking an adventure vacation in one of the world's hot spots, assuming the USG, that is how we refer to the United States Government in State-speak, will bail you out.

So the Weiss brothers showing up, claiming they were broke and needed to be repatriated again in spite of the fact that they still owed the government for the earlier trip home, was interesting. The first question to answer was how they got those passports. And that required sending a message back to Washington to verify that the passports were legitimate.

They were. All we got as an explanation was that someone made a mistake when the new passports were issued. So we decided we needed to dig deeper. Since the original case was several years old, that meant digging into our files in the basement. We explained to the brothers that they would have to come back in a few days.

They were impatient, so they came back earlier than we were ready to give them an answer. And this time, they brought their parents. They were not U.S. citizens, so they had no passports. They also didn't have the same last name. Theirs was definitely Slavic, perhaps Russian. They were permanent residents, green card holders, who had reentry permits. These are travel documents issued to permanent residents who have a legitimate reason to be out of the U.S. for an extended period of time. The boys informed us that they wanted their parents to be repatriated as well. Now that posed a few problems because repatriation isn't extended to non-citizens, even those with green cards. But we collected their reentry permits and photocopied all the pages, at the strong recommendation of my boss. It turned out to be a very good step since there were pages missing from both of those documents. That led us to look more closely at the brothers' passports. They were also missing a few pages. The boys claimed they had been in Germany only a few weeks, but missing pages suggested there may be something bigger they wanted to hide.

After interviewing the brothers again, asking a long series of questions regarding where they had been since they left the U.S., I sent a second report to Washington with their explanation for their predicament, along with a summary of their previous repatriation file and their request that we repatriate their parents as well. I also copied the other consulates in Germany in order to find out if the brothers had previously appeared anywhere else to request assistance.

We received approval to repatriate the brothers, but the addition of the parents complicated things.  The brothers complicated things even more. In spite of the likelihood that we would not receive approval to pay for the parents' return, the boys kept upping the ante. They insisted that we repatriate them via ship instead of by plane because, they said, their parents were afraid to fly.

By this time, it seemed clear that they knew we weren't going to repatriate all four of them, and that we wouldn't agree to send them back by boat. But they had started the process, so they had to follow through. The smiles on their faces gave away that they were just playing a game. Or so I thought.

Image of Mercedes Benz by pilot_micha, via Flickr.com

As suddenly as they appeared, they disappeared. They never returned to find out if we would book their return via ship. But we did hear more about them later. They turned up at another consulate in Germany. I think they had a new story and a new request. The details are not in my memory. What I do remember is that the brothers and their parents had been sleeping in two brand new Mercedes Benz vehicles which they probably purchased in Stuttgart, the heart of Mercedes Benz manufacturing.

They must have run out of money before they could ship them to the U.S.

Day 180 - A Secret in the Heartland

Sharon put down the book, recognizing that emotions were choking her up. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Laughter would be aimed at herself for being so naive. Crying would be for any of her classmates or students of other classes who had gone through the same experiences as the author of the book she had just finished reading. But maybe he was the only one, she thought, almost hopefully, even though her real hope was that no child would ever have to experience predatory actions from adults, especially from a teacher.

The book was a novel, but the author indicated it was based on events from his childhood. In the epilogue, he spelled out what happened, without naming real people, of course. But Sharon knew the teacher was Mr. C, her favorite elementary school teacher.

Sharon had felt she was special to Mr. C, but not in any shameful way. She thought Mr. C considered every student in his class special. She knew that she had considered Mr. C special, because he had taken the time to verify that Sharon's inconsistent grades were not the result of not knowing the material. It was because Sharon needed glasses. Whenever Mr C handed out problems to solve or tests on paper, Sharon got most of the answers right. She tried so hard to make no mistakes and Mr C had already tried to console her when tears filled her eyes whenever her grades weren't what she expected. It had always been that way. Tears came all too easily for Sharon, the source for the nickname she had had throughout elementary school and that followed her, behind her back, of course, into junior high school: Cry Baby. Mr C told her that her ability to bring tears to her eyes so easily might be a talent she could develop later in life if she decided to try acting. Actors need to be able to display all emotions at any time. Mr. C was the first teacher to give her encouragement, not to cry, but to see her ability to bring up emotions so easily, or more precisely her need to develop the ability to control her emotions for the right moment, instead of just telling her to stop it, to grow up and quit behaving like a baby. It was no wonder her classmates picked out the nickname Cry Baby for her. Most of her teachers thought she was acting like a baby, too.

One reason Sharon's grades disappointed her was that when Mr. C wrote the problems or questions on the board, Sharon couldn't always see them clearly enough. If the problem involved words, she could figure out what she couldn't see by what she could see, but when the problems involved numbers, she couldn't always figure out what the shapes were by what was around them. So she made mistakes, lots of mistakes. Fourth grade was when multiplication and division were introduced, so there were lots of number problems to solve.

One day as class was about to be dismissed, Mr. C asked Sharon to stay after class. Once the rest of the students had left, Mr. C told Sharon to stay in the back of the room while he walked to the front and raised one of the maps that covered a section of the blackboard. On the board were several arithmetic problems. These were all completed, so it wasn't like a test. But the problems were a mixture of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Multiplication and division had been difficult for Sharon and the plus sign for addition looked so much like the times and division signs to her from the back of the room. Mr. C asked her to read the problems. She had to guess a lot and she admitted that as she read, telling Mr. C that because she could see one of the top numbers and the bottom number, she could figure out the other number and whether the problem was addition or multiplication because she could figure it out by either subtracting or dividing.

After Sharon completed reading the problems to Mr. C, he gave her a note to take home to her parents. He told her the note said he thought she needed glasses and suggested that her parents have her eyes tested.

Sharon's mother was surprised when she read the note because she knew the school gave eye tests each year and none of those who tested children's eyes had indicated Sharon's vision needed correcting. But no one had ever asked Sharon if she understood what the eye test was for. She knew it was a test, so it was just one more time when she wanted to give all the right answers. Sharon didn't remember if she did anything to make sure she answered correctly, but as an adult, she believes she just might have done so. The eye chart in elementary school wasn't like the one in optometrists' offices. The eye chart in the school only had the letter E on it. Sometimes the E was correct, sometimes it was backward, sometimes it was lying on it's back, and sometimes it was standing on its three arms. Students were supposed to point in the direction the arms were pointing.

When Sharon had her eyes tested in a doctor's office, it was clear that she needed glasses. The day after her exam, she told Mr. C that she was getting glasses and asked him not to tell anyone in the class. She wanted it to be a surprise when she arrived in school the next week wearing her glasses.

In addition to being able to see everything written on the board with her glasses, Sharon noticed that people's faces no longer looked fuzzy. She realized that for at least the past year she had been seeing everyone with two noses until they were close enough for her to recognize. This inability to recognize faces at a distance may have contributed to her feeling that people were ignoring her. Her classmates probably had thought she was ignoring them since she didn't say "Hi" to anyone unless they were right next to her.

Years later, when Sharon was in high school, Mr. C had been her Sunday School teacher. Some of the shine of her admiration of him was tarnished that year as she discovered Mr. C opposed the integration of schools all at once. He proposed that the schools should be integrated one grade at a time, beginning with first grade and then adding a grade each year, giving everyone time to adjust gradually. The need for integration and bussing children across town was not an issue in Sharon's home town so there didn't appear to be any immediate impact of the desegregation of schools and no children in her town were going to have to be bussed to a school any further from their homes than was necessary already. But Sharon and her classmates all felt that it was important for all children to get a good education and if that meant children needed to ride a bus to school so that all the schools would provide equal education to all children, they agreed it was the right thing to do. But Mr. C objected.

Sharon began at that point to see Mr. C as more like all other adults than as the special teacher he had been to her in the fourth grade. But he remained one of her favorite teachers because of what he had done for her so many years before.

But now, five years after Mr. C's death at 82 years old, she learned that at least one of Mr. C's students saw a side of Mr. C that Sharon couldn't have imagined all those years ago, even when Sharon's mother told her after Mr. C had left the school district and moved out of town with his new wife that there were some ugly rumors about the reason for his departure. In fact, Sharon thought the reason for his departure was that the marriage was troubled and any talk of divorce among the teaching staff at that time was scandalous. It was only now, after reading the work of fiction that developed characters along paths that the author might have taken himself as a result of Mr. C's inappropriate attention, that Sharon learned the real reason for his departure from her home town. Mr. C remained married for the 44 years until his death.

Sharon knew that her friends and family considered her to be a bleeding heart liberal - too ready to give someone the benefit of the doubt. Those whose political alignment differed significantly from hers saw the world in more sharply delineated black and white tones. Sharon saw shades of gray. But she couldn't stop remembering the good he did just because he also stepped astray. She thought about all the crime shows on TV about child predators and recalled the message of them that was repeated again and again that such people could never be cured. Once a predator, always a predator. Sharon wanted desperately to believe that was wrong, that at least one man who acted inappropriately with at least one 9-year-old child did find redemption though counseling and a 44-year-long marriage.

Sharon worried about what Mr. C's widow would feel when someone told her about the novel. Someone would eventually mention it to her. She must also be in her 80's by now. What would it feel like to have to confront an event from nearly half a decade ago at such an age?

Yet the author had lived the consequences of keeping a horrible secret for that same length of time. Would it have been better had he written the novel six years earlier, while Mr. C was still alive to respond? Or would that have just raised dust unnecessarily in a new town?

Did Sharon's mother act correctly in telling Sharon that her beloved teacher had left town under a cloud without telling her the details? Was it kinder to Sharon, to Mr. C, to Mr. C's wife, to leave the details out? Surely it seemed so at the time, but perhaps an open airing of the details would have encouraged the author and possibly other children who experienced the same inappropriate attention to confront the facts instead of surpressing them and turning them into ghosts to haunt them in the future.

What do you think?

Day 179 - More Prison Blues

Another American I visited in a German prison, Mark,* was charged with a much more serious offense - murder. He explained to me that went out one night to a bar, drank so much that his memory was blank for a portion of the evening. He didn't remember meeting a woman in the bar. He didn't remember taking her home. And he didn't remember murdering her. He had no memory of the woman. He really, really didn't think he should be charged with murder when he couldn't remember what happened to him. I don't know how he would have felt about a guilty by reason of loss of memory option. What he really wanted was not to be charged because he couldn't remember. But he had been found guilty. I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for him, but it was important for me not to let him know how I felt.

I visited Mark more than once. My responsibility was entirely to make sure he wasn't being mistreated and that he had access to legal representation. I wasn't his advocate in the legal system, just as a American citizen in prison. But he didn't fit the image of a hardened criminal. He was a former GI who was stationed in Germany where he met his wife so that he stayed in Germany with her after he got out of the Army. He didn't claim to have any problems with his wife. He claimed he wasn't having an affair. He claims that he only remembers going out for a few beers.

Later, he was arrested, tried, and convicted for murder.

Now this is a time when the curious person in me would have asked him a lot of questions about what happened, to be able to at least describe, if not solve, the mystery. But taking the conversation in that direction might look to Mark as though I was there to help his defense. So instead our conversations were short, focused on how he was doing. He didn't spend most of his time in a cell, unlike what TV programs show. Instead, he, like all other prisoners, had time to watch TV, read books, as well as working in the prison.

There were going to be a lot of consular officers in the future who would end up visiting Mark in prison. Maybe they still are.

The third American I recall visiting in prison was also a former GI, Jerome*, who remained behind in Germany, although I don't recall whether he also married a German. I learned more from him about the circumstances of life in prison from him since he had many complaints about his treatment. Jerome described the work he did at the prison for which he earned a small amount of money. His complaint was that he couldn't buy what he needed in the shop where his earnings could be used because they did not stock products for African hair. My boss usually picked up the products she knew he wanted and gave them to him, through me.

I don't know, or don't remember, anything more about Jerome's circumstances. I think that means I was doing my job, assessing whether he was being treated well without getting involved in any way.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 178 - Jailhouse Blues

An occasional responsibility for consular officers involved visits to American citizens in prison. Fortunately, these were rare in Germany. Even more fortunately, German prisons are much nicer than prisons in many other parts of the world.

Image of prison by kIM DARam, via Flickr.com

During my training for consular work, we did a lot of role playing. The location was Congen Rosslyn, the name given to the suite of offices that were set up to look a lot like what we would find when we arrived on the job. Rosslyn was a section of Arlington County in Virginia where most of the Foreign Service Institute's courses were held at the time I arrived in Washington. Congen Rosslyn took its name from the location, but it was transformed into the capital of the mythical country of Z. During our role playing, one of us would act as the prisoner, one as the consular officer, and the course instructor and the other ConGen students would observe. At the conclusion of the role playing exercise, we would discuss the scenario. The consular officer and prisoner role players would describe how they felt during the exercise and the observers commented on whether they thought the scenario would have a positive outcome if the situation had been real.

I was surprised that my fellow classmates all commented on how cool and detached I appeared during the role playing. I thought I was being very sympathetic.

When I made my first prison visit, I didn't have the benefit of an observer to let me know afterwards how I did, except that I had to write up a report to send to Washington to ensure headquarters knew we were fulfilling our obligation towards imprisoned Americans.

The first American I visited, Bruno,* was born in Germany of a German mother and an American citizen father. At the time he was born, Germany did not consider the children of German mothers to be German citizens; Germany considered that a child's citizenship was derived through the father. In Bruno's case, his father was American of Yugoslav origin. The importance of this detail comes later.

Bruno was in prison because he had overstayed his visa in Germany. He had grown up in Germany, so he considered himself German, not American. He barely spoke English and that fact meant that he often was thought to be carrying a false passport when the police stopped him for one thing or another and he handed over his American passport as his proof of identification. His mother had died, so he was living on his own in Germany, unable to get German citizenship through a change in the law that might have made it possible for him to take advantage of a provision for certain German women to petition on behalf of their children to obtain German citizenship in spite of their fathers not being German. His mother would have had to petition on his behalf, and she wasn't there. His father also wasn't in Germany. He had returned to the United States where he was prepared to welcome Bruno in spite of the fact that he had done so once before when Bruno had been deported from Germany, but Bruno hadn't adjusted well to life in the United States so he returned to Germany. And that led to his overstaying his visa, being found in the country without permission and then put into prison. Bruno was facing deportation to the United States for a second time.

Bruno thought the solution to his problem would be to renounce his American citizenship. According to his thinking, if he wasn't an American citizen, he couldn't be deported, so he would be able to stay in Germany. He would have to apply for a Stateless person's travel document, but that was preferable to being deported. But Bruno wasn't considering his father's situation clearly enough. His father, though an American citizen, was also very likely also a Yugoslav citizen. There are many countries in the world which do not consider it possible for its citizens to stop being a citizen. Since his father was born in Yugoslavia to parents who were both Yugoslav citizens, the Yugoslav government might consider both his father, and through his blood line also Bruno, to be Yugoslav citizens. If Bruno renounced his American citizenship, he couldn't be deported to the United States. But the German government might instead decide to deport him to Yugoslavia, a country where he knew no one, where the language was completely unfamiliar to him, and where his life would likely be much more difficult than it was in Germany or had been for the year he spent in the United States.

My mission was to meet with Bruno and talk with him about the consequences of renouncing his citizenship. While my boss didn't tell me outright that my job was to talk him out of renouncing his citizenship, it seemed clear that she thought Bruno would be better off being deported to the United States than giving up his citizenship and not having any control at all over what happened next.

Since Bruno's English was very weak, he and I talked about his situation in German. I asked him questions and listened to his answers. I didn't tell him what I thought he should do. I just asked him questions, hoping he would come to his own decision not to renounce his citizenship. I was very pleased at the end of the visit when Bruno agreed that he would not insist on renouncing his citizenship.

When I returned to the Consulate, I happily reported the results of my meeting with Bruno to my boss. She just smiled. At the end of my story, she admitted that Bruno always changed his mind by the end of a consular prison visit. She said I had done a good job. But I walked away knowing that the next consular officer would probably have to go through the same conversation with Bruno, unless the German government finally deported him in the meantime.

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.