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.