Speaking From Personal Experience: The Visa Process is Hell

 

How can the baptized claim to welcome Christ if they close the door to the foreigner who comes knocking? “If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” (1 Jn 3:17).

-Pope St. John Paul II in his Message of the Holy Father for the World Migration Day 2000

I’ve been gone for a while, as a peek at my sorry blog archive will reveal.

Mostly, I’ve been bogged down under the stress of trying to obtain my student visa for my trip to Spain in September. And I came back here to tell you about it.

That’s not really true. I came back here to tell you how livid I am about this horror show that is dancing around our privileged, rich, white American borders. How much rage I feel when I see the news articles and I hear friends I still somehow respect stating that we need more secure borders.

Rage because I’ve worked with the immigrant and refugee population. I worked with them as an intern teacher last summer at an English school for adult refugees and immigrants. I worked with them before that, the year I took off before college, when I waitressed in a tiny Mexican restaurant where 90% of my coworkers were immigrants. I couldn’t communicate with the majority of them, because my privileged white ass had never felt the need to study Spanish. It’s our country, after all. Why aren’t they learning English, we ask flippantly.

Except that they are.

In between working 14 hour days, 7 days a week, for the purpose of feeding their families back home in Guatemala and Mexico, my coworkers at that restaurant were learning English every chance they got, despite living in a tiny Pennsylvanian town with meagre resources for the immigrant population. Despite the way many of their white coworkers ignored them or treated them as nuisances.

Except that my students at the ESL school last summer were learning English. Many of them had never held a pen before arriving in our school. Many couldn’t read or write in their native language. And yet, there they were, religiously, every day, sitting in hard classroom seats in the one hour they had in between shifts at their two or three jobs, trying to learn a new and difficult language so that they could assimilate into this country they’d fought hard to enter.

Oh, and the citizenship test? I helped my students study for it. Did you know it costs $700+ per person? I didn’t. Did you know that it would be nearly impossible for most US citizens to pass? I didn’t. I graduated summa cum laude from an American university, and I didn’t know the answers to 75% of these questions.

Did you know that applicants are required to take the test in English—unless they fit into a handful of acceptable exceptions? At the school last summer I tutored a gentleman named Hector. He was from Honduras. He had lived in the US for 5 years, was legally blind and disabled, and was 62 years old. His disability and age fit the meagre exceptions permitted by the citizenship test officials and should allow him to take the test in his native language, Spanish. And yet, even with the help of our school’s experienced administrators, we were still having trouble getting him permission to take the test in Spanish. Not that he could afford the test in the first place.

But I’m not really here to tell you about languages or citizenship tests right now.

I’m here to tell you about the visa process.

I’ve been yanking my hair out trying to navigate the impossible hoops of the Spanish student visa process for exactly two months now. I feel like I’m no closer than I was when I began. I’ve tried three times already to get my FBI background check. The first time I went through an incorrect source; the second, I received state fingerprints by mistake (that was $36, nonrefundable, down the drain); and the third, my fingerprints were deemed illegible due to a condition I have called excoriation (goodbye $18 application fee + $13 shipping costs).

Now I need to find a location that will take electronic live-scans of my fingerprints and will print them out for me to send in to the bureaucracy gods once again as I pray, frantically offering libations and burnt offerings, that they will process my fingerprints this time so I can move on to the next impossible step of this godforsaken process.

When I finally get my FBI criminal background check back, I must send it back to DC for an official document called an apostille. Then I need to drive seven or eight hours to Chicago as I pray to the visa gods that my application will be accepted.

The visa process is hell. Okay? That’s my point. It is hell.

I’m a privileged white American woman, and it is still hell. I can’t imagine what it is like on the Mexican border, for families fleeing extreme gang violence, who don’t have two months to waste trying to navigate this process. I can’t imagine.

But I don’t have to imagine. Instead, I just did some research on the American visa process. I looked at the student visa process first to compare it with what I’ve been going through trying to get a Spanish student visa. Then I looked into immigrant visas and green cards. As soon as I opened the 18 page document, I wanted to puke. And I thought learning how to do my taxes was bad. Then I saw that they offered instructions, so that was exciting. Until I realized that that document is 42 pages.

Did you know that an American citizen or resident relative or employer of the hopeful immigrant must sponsor an immigrant who wishes to enter our country? I didn’t. The relative or employer must submit an application and fee to our government before a foreigner can even begin the rest of the immigration process. The bureaucratic red tape on this process is astounding. And after what I’ve been going through trying to get my privileged white-person student visa, it’s put me on the verge of a panic attack.

Want to check it out for yourself? Take a look at Travel.State.Gov.

But once you make it through all the red tape, there’s still the visa application appointment, which I’ve heard is super fun. I remember one day at the Mexican restaurant, my dear friend and coworker Veronica told me about trying to get her green card. She said the American officials are horrible. Whether you get your green card doesn’t depend on how good a citizen you are, how clean your record, how accurate your papers. No. It depends on whether the official thinks your daughter is cute or not. Whether they like your nail polish that day. Whether they got their coffee early enough.

But so far I’ve only discussed immigration. I haven’t even begun on the asylum process. We are running out of time, so I’ll keep it brief. Mostly what you need to know is that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website states that:

To obtain asylum through the affirmative asylum process you must be physically present in the United States. You may apply for asylum status regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status. (Emphasis mine)

I suggest you read about the process yourself. It sounds equally exhausting and nearly impossible to navigate. One website I looked at strongly recommended seeking the help of a lawyer specializing in the American asylum process because of how complicated it is. Yeah. Right. Because most families coming here for asylum can afford a lawyer.

Yes, our immigration and asylum processes need to be reformed. But not to be made stricter. No. Because I’m convinced that isn’t even possible.

I oppose, vehemently oppose, the way America treats immigrants and refugees. It is reprehensible. It is unacceptable. And now, just as we who opposed Trump all along warned you, America has created its own concentration camps (again). How can you look at the way we are separating families, desperate parents seeking asylum for their families, and see it any differently? We are separating mothers and fathers from their children. At least one parent has already committed suicide, convinced as he was that he would never be reconciled with his wife or child.

And that’s likely accurate. Does our government even have a plan to track down the nearly 1500 missing or unaccounted-for immigrant children who have been lost by our government, or the 12+ children who were given directly to human traffickers? How? Is this not a crime that will cry out to our God for justice?

There is even a recording of border patrol officials laughing at detained children as the children cry in anguish for their parents. As my friend Theresa Marie Weiler put it:

If you are still comforting yourself with stories about children being smuggled, or the necessity of separating families for their safety or ours, there is audio available of hysterical children crying for their families while Border Patrol cracks jokes. I can’t listen, but maybe you should.

Our government claims this is an effort to protect our country from gangs, and yet the practice of separating children from their parents in this way, it seems to me, is the most likely way for these children to experience lasting trauma and end up, willingly or through trafficking, in the very clutches of these gangs. Renowned trauma specialist Elizabeth Vermilyea commented on this yesterday:

Talk about a chilling juxtaposition. Today I did a workshop for a juvenile rehabilitation agency in Washington State. They work with incarcerated youth. What did we discuss? The fact that these kids have multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences and the added element of the trauma of incarceration. The elephant in the room was the images of human rights abuses perpetrated by our government, taking kids from their parents, caging them, creating ACEs before our eyes, and completely unapologetic about it.

This is not okay. This is vile, evil, a sin of our country that will have consequences lasting for generations.

Faulkner spoke of the blood of slaves that had seeped into the ground of the American South and haunts our country still as it seeks justice for the evils our forefathers committed. And what is happening today at our borders, as we prepare to grill our American hot dogs and celebrate our country’s birth on July fourth, is no different.

The cries of these children are reaching our God. We must be his hands and feet to make these abominations cease.

There are ways you can help:

My friend Noelle Huling told me about this recently.

If you text RESIST to 50409, a bot will walk you through writing to your governor and representatives via text and will format it and send it for you. If it qualifies, it will also offer to submit it to your local newspaper as a letter to the editor. I used it yesterday to write my representatives and I’m thinking of writing my governor now to ask him to follow suit.

The Families Belong Together movement is organizing rallies around the country to show our support for these immigrant families. The rallies will take place on Saturday, June 30. I’m going to the Pittsburgh rally. If you go to their website, you can search your zip code and find an event near you.

Alice Sujata Gambino and Sally White have organized a GoFundMe to raise money for supplies for these families. They plan to drive to the border themselves to purchase supplies and deliver them to these vulnerable people in person. They’ve also organized a Facebook event called Letters of Hope for Asylum Seekers where they’re asking people to write letters of support and kindness to immigrant families, which they will deliver on their trip

For more information about this issue, here are some really fantastic resources:

My friend (and frequent guest writer) Maiasson directed me to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is quite helpful. Check them out.

Rebecca Bratten Weiss at Suspended in Her Jar tackled this issue from the Pro Life activist standpoint, and her piece was very informative.

Mary Pezzulo at Steel Magnificat posted recently about this issue and included multiple resources you can use to be vocal for these vulnerable and marginalized immigrant families.

Write to your legislators. Ask your churches to include these immigrant and refugee families in the petitions at Mass. Submit info about advocating for these vulnerable people to your bulletins, and inform your pastors about the weight of this issue.

This can stop. But we have to make it.

Image Credit:

www.prideimmigration.com/obama-and-border-control-aid/