All In a Day's Work

All In a Day’s Work

957 words


         Sam Adams was an immigrant visa chief for the United States of America serving in Mumbai, India just after the horror of 9-11 occurred. Every day he had to oversee the processing of over 100 immigrant visas, supervising a junior officer adjudicator and five local staff members. He also oversaw the fraud unit and their endless investigation into visa fraud oversaw the American Citizen Services unit providing essential services to American citizens It was a busy place and time.

         He had many obstacles to overcome every single day. First of course was the daily prep work so that the interviews would go smoothly and most of the visas would be approved except for those deemed worthy of “administrative processing” i.e. Fraud investigations which would have to wait until they got their travel money in the early Spring, then he would have to schedule fraud trips pairing one officer and two local staff to the far-flung corners of his vast consular district of over 200 million people.
         Managing the fraud load was his biggest challenge as he was committed to clearing all cases within six months of application, a self-imposed deadline that sometimes slipped.

         Another big challenge was managing his jaded junior officers who were constantly denying legitimate visa requests for the most trivial reasons. A new mood has swept through the department, the new motto was “When in doubt, say no.” Which led to endless debate and controversy.

         All consular officers have stories, and cases that will always be remembered. On that November day, an Indian American citizen came to the embassy to see him. She did not have an appointment. She had a request; would he be willing to consider a case? Her father had immigrated to the United States and become a citizen. And she had become a citizen as well. She had four siblings who were in their 30s all of whom were living in India and all of whose visas were held up for “administrative processing” on suspicion of marriage fraud, or rather fake single status, which was the biggest category of visa fraud.

         Her father had petitioned for them and as unmarried children of U.S. citizens, the wait was about three years, whereas for married children of U.S. citizens, the wait would be about seven years. In this case, we suspected that they were committing marriage fraud by pretending to be unmarried and the case had been held up until we could send someone out to the field to check on whether they were married or not. We knew culturally speaking that rural Gujarati women and men in their 30s would all be married and that they were faking being single on paper to speed up visa processing. He understood and even felt sympathetic but the law was the law and he had to enforce the rules.

         He asked her,

         “So, what can we do for you?”

         Yes, my father is dying in the hospital and it is his dying wish to reunite the family in the United States, could you please reconsider issuing the visas to them?

         He said to her,

         “Do you have any proof that your father is in the hospital?”

         And she said yes, and she pulled out a letter written by an Indian doctor in New Jersey saying that Mister Patel was seriously ill and then he was his dying wish to have his children reunited in the United States, and that the Embassy should reconsider issuing visas for the children. There was something about that letter that struck him as phony and so he called the hospital and he confirmed with the duty doctor that Mr. Patel had died about two weeks before.

         He called Miss Patel and gave her the bad news. He started by saying.

         “So, Miss Patel when was the last time you spoke to your father?”

          “Oh, I spoke to him yesterday just before I got on the plane and is he still alive.”

         “He is alive right now?”

         “Oh yeah, he's still alive and he's waiting for the immigrant visas to be processed.”

         “OK well, there's just one problem. Do you believe in ghosts?

         ” What?”

         “Well, you see here's the problem. There's only one way you could have spoken to your father yesterday and that is if you spoke to a ghost because according to the hospital, he died two weeks ago”. And he showed her the fax from the hospital confirming Mr. Patel’s demise.

         She started crying. Then he said.

         “Well, you know the problem is that you and your siblings just committed visa fraud. They are going to be stuck in India and not allowed to travel to the United States for the next 99 years. But planes fly both ways and you can go visit them every year if you want but they're not coming into the United States.

         She cried and he entered them in the system for visa mail misrepresentation. This one was but one of the many heart-breaking stories illustrating how broken the US immigration system was. In this particular case, if the father was still alive, he might have reconsidered the case and issued the visas for humanitarian reasons ignoring the marriage fraud, which was always difficult to prove, but when the father died the petition died with him.

         He said to himself well that's just another day in the life of a visa officer doing my part to enforce a broken immigration system.

         But, thinking back on it all, he felt blessed to be working serving the country he loved and helping immigrants immigrant, deterring fraudsters, and helping American citizens who found themselves in trouble in a foreign land. Not bad for a government gig he always said.






Write a story or poem inspired by this prompt:

It's the first Monday of the eleventh month. You have a job to do!
Obstacles keep getting in the way though. How will you manage?

What is the task that needs to be done?
Give two obstacles that interfere.