Pakistani journalist penalized by dumb immigration system

Zahid Khan, 29, is a graduate student in the Global Business Journalism program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

I recommended him for the program after reviewing his application and interviewing him by telephone. He had solid journalism experience, an excellent academic record and an impressive personal essay.

Zahid had worked for the U.S. government in his native Pakistan for two years. He was a reporter for its news and information agency, Voice of America.  He traveled to Afghanistan on assignment more than once.

Wins fellowship to Penn

He won a fellowship to study in the master's program at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, but there was a problem.  His former employer, the U.S. government, whose image he had helped promote in Pakistan, one of our key allies in the war on terrorism, denied him a visa.

No reason was given. So one is left to speculate.

One possibility is that he has been caught like a dolphin in a tuna net, that our skittish anti-terrorism authorities netted him by mistake. It could be that he is of the gender, age, marital status (single) and nationality that fits a particular profile considered risky. Young males trying to immigrate from Muslim countries attract special scrutiny. But we will never know.

In the meantime, he is working for me as a teaching assistant in the Multimedia Business Journalism course. Cindy and I took him to dinner the other night. He is a smart, talented young man, and he will get his graduate degree in journalism from a Chinese university, not a U.S. one.

Renewing a Mexican visa, or Catch-22

"Catch-22" is one of my favorite books because it makes hilarious comedy out of bureaucratic lunacy.

None of the bomber crew members in the story want to fly the suicidal missions over Italy. The only way they can get out of them is if they´re judged insane by the Air Corps psychiatrist.

But if they tell the psychiatrist they have horrific nightmares and they´re too terrified to fly the missions, that´s a healthy response, therefore they´re sane and have to fly the missions.

If a crewman really is crazy, then he enjoys flying the missions. So everyone has to fly the missions. That´s Catch-22. The world´s bureaucracies are full of Catches.

Mexico´s version of Catch-22

Getting a work visa renewed in Mexico is something like that. You´re wrong even when you´re right, and you will be punished. This year the government developed a new computerized streamlined system for the process. Here´s how it works:

1. It says on the helpful website that you just fill out the renewal form online. I ransack the website without finding the renewal form. There is no place on any page that has a link to it. I do a Google search for FM3 visas and find a blog dispensing immigration advice for Cubans living in Mexico. It has the link.

2. I fill out the form online. There is no English version, which is not a problem for me but must be for some of the other 1 million Americans who live in this country. At the end, the form gives me two choices: "save" (guardar) or "save and copy" (guardar y duplicar). Being a careful sort, I hit "save and copy".

Hitting "save and copy" was, I later learned, a big mistake.

3. Being a careful sort, before I fill out Cindy´s application, I take the printout of my application down to the immigration office to submit it to Answer Lady, whose job it is to help ignorant foreigners decipher the niceties of the system. She reviews my form. In the box for writing where the original visa was issued, I wrote, "Washington, D.C.", just as it said on my visa.

-- This is a mistake, said Answer Lady. Even though your visa says it was issued in Washington, it was really issued on Mexican soil because it was in the embassy there.

-- Oh, I said. So when I fill out my wife´s form online, I should write that her visa was issued in Mexico, right?
-- Right, said Answer Lady.

Believing Answer Lady was a big mistake.

4. At the immigration office the next Monday, the line is amazingly short at 9 a.m. We bring with us a fat file folder filled with documents that we had to present the previous year to renew the visas:
-- letter from me in Spanish attesting to the fact that I will support my wife during the time of my visa and not abandon her,
-- passport and two copies of each page of the passport,
-- visa and two copies of each page of the visa,
-- letters from the University and from Washington saying that I am in Mexico to do good things,
-- copies of passports of the letter writers with their signatures to prove that the letters aren´t forgeries,
-- copies of utility bills as proof of residence,
-- copies of three months of bank statements to prove income,
-- copy of my work contract with the International Center for Journalists,

-- three black-and-white photos face front, two photos in profile.....
-- and although we supposedly don´t need them this year in the streamlined system, I bring along the certified copy of our marriage license and certified copies of our birth certificates.

I also had obtained from Answer Lady the form you use to go to the bank and pay the visa fee for each of us.

To speed up the process, I paid the fees before submitting the application. Big mistake.

5. We submit our papers. Two women scrutinize various documents.

-- We have to reject your application, sir, because you made a mistake by hitting 'save and copy´. You only use that if you´re going to submit a duplicate for a child, and you don´t have a child seeking a visa. So you´ll have to go online and fill out the form again.

-- And we have to reject your wife´s application because it says she got her visa in Mexico but it was really in Washington, D.C.
-- But Answer Lady told me to put down Mexico, I protest.
-- Sorry.

6. We go to an Internet café near the immigration office and fill out the forms again, print them out, get back in line, which is longer now, and wait our turn. We submit our stuff again.
Do you have your payment forms? You bet we do.
-- I´m sorry sir, but we can´t accept your payment. It´s for the wrong amount.

Cindy´s is correct, but it turns out I had made a mistake and paid the same amount for both Cindy and me, about $100 each. I was supposed to pay $160 because I´m earning a salary down here.

7. They accept Cindy´s application but won´t accept mine until I go to a bank and execute a new payment for the correct amount. It´s not possible to just add on to the amount I´ve already paid. Cindy takes a taxi home. I take a taxi to the bank where I originally paid, pay again, this time $160, take a taxi back to the immigration office, take a ticket and get back in line. The line is longer now. I wait. I submit my application again, payment is correct, they accept the application and give me a number to check online. It will tell us when the visas are ready.

8. So what do I do about getting a refund for the erroneous $100 payment I already made?
-- You´ll have to talk to that lady over there.
She has me fill out some forms. Now what?
-- Well, the paperwork has to go through some channels and you´ll have to come back in three days.

9. I come back three days later, expecting to get a check or a voucher I can take to a bank and use to make a deposit.
-- Oh, no, you have to take this form to the office of a different agency, the SAT (tax collector) where they issue refunds.
-- Where is the SAT office?
-- There are several. You can look them up online, but you have to make an appointment.

10. I go online to try to make an appointment. The system is down and not working and continues not working the next day as well. I call the number listed on the website. A person answers and says that I made a mistake, this is the wrong agency. I check the number on the website. I had called the number listed, so evidently everyone who has this problem and calls this number will always get the wrong agency. She gives me the correct phone number.

11. I call the agency to make an appointment for getting my $100 refund. The woman asks me what SAT district I live in. I say I don´t know but I give her my address. She says she can´t tell from that what district I live in. I´ll have to go to one of the offices and ask which office is the correct one to go to for the refund.
Then I can make an appointment.

12. Meanwhile we find out that are visas are ready. On this day, the office is packed. We wait about two hours to get to the front of the line. I´m nervous as hell that I might have made some other mistake, that there is some hoop we forgot to jump through. The clerk asks us where our XXX forms are. What forms?
-- These forms. You mean no one told you to fill these out?
--No.
-- OK, we´ll just fill them out now."

Fortunately do not have to get back in line.
But this new form asks for information that we have already given them two or three times in different documents, but we have to fill it out.
We get our visas. Yay!

13. Now about my $100 refund for the erroneous payment.
There are two possible SAT offices that could be the one I´m required to go to. I pick the one by the Christopher Columbus Circle. I get in the line that says "without appointment". I give them my address. Yes, you´re at the right office. You´ll have to wait to see a counselor. I take a ticket. I wait. The counselor says that to get the refund I will need:
-- Proof of residence from a utility bill
-- a copy of my passport
-- the voucher that I already have and a copy of it
-- copy of my visa, both sides
-- the bank account details where they are to deposit the money (they don´t issue checks)
-- and I will need to make an appointment

Here comes Catch-22

-- So when would you like to make your appointment?
-- How about this week?

She looks at my newly issued visa. It´s a plastic card like a driver´s license instead of the old passport-style booklet. She checks the date. Technically, my new visa doesn´t take effect for two weeks because I renewed it two weeks before the old one expired.

-- I´m sorry sir, but we can´t make an appointment with you until this visa takes effect.
-- But I just renewed it. Look. Here´s a copy of my old visa.
-- Sorry, we´ll have to make an appointment no sooner than the effective date of this new visa.

14. Now uncertain whether my new visa is valid, I prepare to leave on a two-week trip to the U.S. I carry a 24-page full-color photocopy of my old visa, just in case. At the airport in Guadalajara, the immigration officer looks at my card-style visa as if he has never seen one before.
The new rules and new forms have been in effect for two months.
-- What´s this?
-- It´s my FM3 visa. It´s the new style. They just started issuing them.

He looks at me, looks at the picture, studies both sides of the card, trying to figure out what to do. Eventually he sees something he recognizes, writes something down and stamps some forms, giving me two copies.

15. I´m back now from the U.S. and have my appointment at the SAT office. I bring my fat file with me that has 10 times more information than is required because bureaucrats always want you to present something you don´t have.
She asks for a copy of the picture page of my passport, which by dumb luck I have. She looks at the bank account information.

-- This bank account isn´t in your name.
-- No that´s my wife. I don´t have a bank account. Here´s our marriage certificate.

After a half hour of looking at her computer screen and printing out a half-dozen documents, stamping each four or five times, she hands me a form that is a record of my application.

-- It will have to go through channels and be approved she says. You should hear within the next 40 working days.

40 working days. That´s more than eight weeks after you take holidays into account.

At this point, the authentic human response should be a shriek of frustration. But I know that within the bureaucratic system, you have to pretend to be civilized, or the system will punish you even more.

So now I´m waiting to see if the deposit will show up in Cindy´s bank account or for some notification that my application for refund was rejected.

On the other hand

The Mexican bureaucracy functions differently for special people, though. Yesterday I read in the paper that six state government officials, in illegal fashion and with approval from no one, awarded themselves bonuses last year totaling $2 million.

That averages to $333,000 apiece. I´m betting that they didn´t have to make an appointment at the local SAT office to get it.

A culture of bribes

Yesterday El Deber ran this picture of the head of the local Immigration office being hauled off to jail in a big bribery scandal. He is charged with running the highly lucrative business of providing quick turnaround on passports for $300 to $700 at a time when a lot of desperate Bolivians are trying to leave the country to look for work. If you don´t pay the bribes, you have to wait for months to get a passport. He´s smiling probably because he knows he won´t be in jail long. When things cool down he´ll be out.

The pace of bribery picked up recently as April 1 was an important deadline. On that day, Spain would no longer admit Bolivians on tourist visas, the usual way for them to enter the European Community to look for work illegally.
Ironically, the guy going to jail was brought in a few months ago to clean up all of the crooked dealing going on under his predecessor. But there is evidently too much money floating around for anyone to stay clean. One newspaper article mentioned that there was a network of more than 50 travel agencies and an unspecified number of paperwork fixers (tramitadores) involved in this illegal traffic.

Meanwhile, the ruling party of President Evo Morales has shown new levels of audacity in the business of giving jobs to political friends. The old corrupt system was bad, and the new one has taken it to new heights. Under the old system, you had to prove party loyalty to get a government job. Under the new corrupt system of Morales´s party, you also have to pay $500 to $1,000 to the party official who gets you the job. The cash payments are an innovation of the socialist government. When Morales learned of the problem he turned it over to his own party to supposedly clean it up. They charged a couple of low-level sacrificial lambs but all of the ringleaders have escaped any judicial action.

My own experience
I´ve had some visa difficulties of my own with Bolivia´s immigration officials. Let's just say that it helps to know the right people. Meanwhile, the visa that I actually need to be here as a guest university lecturer requires 15 steps, of which I have completed five.

1. It started with an Interpol background check at National Police Headquarters, where I was fingerprinted and photographed. In addition to the legally required fees of 50 bolivianos, I had to pay another 50 bolivianos, a day´s pay, in illegal, undocumented fees for which I was not given receipt. I have a document now that says I´m not an international terrorist or drug smuggler.

2. Center for Tropical Disease Research, 180 bolivianos for blood tests for AIDs and yellow fever; told to return the following day for results. No bribe required.

3. Back to police headquarters to get a certificate of antecedents (show passport to prove I´m an American), required thumbprint, 25 Bs official payment (plus 5 Bs payment, not legal, demanded by clerk), told to come back for document next day.

4. Police headquarters again, proof of residence, also required thumbprint, official payment of 13 Bs (plus 20 Bs illegal payment, demanded by clerk), told to come back for completed document next day.

5. Had photo taken for NIT, national tax ID, downtown atprivate studio, had to come back next day, 15 Bs.

Meanwhile, it´s possible to get your visa extended by anywhere from 30 to 90 days, depending on the whim of the immigration official, by leaving and re-entering the country. I did this once to Peru and once to Chile. It appears that the 15-step visa process will be moot. I´m good through June 18.