The immigrant Visa Two-Step

I would qualify any process that requires paper work and lines to be as close as we humans can get to the various circles of hell described by Dante. So when I realized that my beloved American work visa, the intrinsic document that lets me carry out my professional development in America, had expired, the panic that traversed my spine and mind was not your average kind of panic.

The American Visa is a document that has reached an almost ephemeral status among immigrants. It is highly sought after, and most of the times, highly unattainable. So those of us who are lucky to obtain an American visa, guard it with our lives. The process is simple once you have been approved, but the bias and the profiling that occurs while you are trying to get it is one of the more shameful and hard things to witness as a person.

In Colombia, a nation that suffers with a stained reputation, that conjures images of drug lords and violence, the process to find yourself in possession of an American visa is such the ordeal, that it merited a post on my blog. Mostly because the act of acquiring it is so tedious, so humiliating and so difficult that it seems  crazy that people submit themselves to it.

For those who are unaware as to how people enter the USA as a foreigner from a non first world nation, this is what the typical person must go through. If i have the desire to travel to America for any particular reason, weather it be for business or pleasure, as a citizen of countries like Colombia, or Venezuela, or Bolivia, i must obtain a visa from the designated consulate in my home country. In Colombia the process is extensive and convoluted, in hopes of weeding out those that really don’t want to go thorough as much as is requested by the embassy. Initially like with any sort of errand you need an appointment. In most peoples mind the idea of an appointment to obtain a visa is not absurd, it becomes absurd when you see how the appointments are run.

To obtain said appointment, a Colombian national must first pay a fee to be able to call the embassy scheduling office. This initial fee of $16.00 for 15 minutes of the operators time is already a steep price to pay , but this is hardly the most expensive thing that comes along in the entire process.

Once you have paid at a designated bank, you will be given a pin number which represents your access to the scheduling system. You then call the operator to set up your appointment. Because the demand for visas is so extraneously high in Colombia, days and weeks are booked end to end. On average you will receive a date 4 or 5 days from the day you called. In the average mind of most people, this seems like a good place to be. You have an appointment and you are set to go into the embassy. However in Colombia, the embassy sets hundreds of appointments at one given time. Ive gathered that they have 4 allotted times by which they set appointments too. Starting with 7am and going every half hour till 9am. This gives the embassy roughly 4 blocks by which to separate people into.

So now you have a date and a time. The next step is you have to go to the bank yet again to pay for the process. While naturally you would expect to pay only after you’ve received the document you are trying to process, in Colombia EVERYBODY pays regardless of the outcome. While i could understand that the demand on the resources of the embassy is high enough to merit having to pay a basic transaction fee, the fact that everyone pays the entire processing fee astounds me. Why does it astound me? because the fee they charge is astronomical. For $141.00 dollars or roughly 318.000.00 pesos you can get a visa IF you are approved but that’s a big if, and that’s a big fee if you don’t get it. Even crazier is that if your a family of four traveling to Disney for the first time, it becomes $141.00 x 4 . While you could potentially budget for this fee in your travel plans, you have to imagine that the average Colombian family household has one income maybe two incomes, and of those 2 incomes, the potential for them to be minimum wage is Very Very high. Which means out of these two incomes which potentially can amount to 900.000.00 pesos, just the fee for 2 people to pay for visa would wipe the monthly income of this family down to 100.000.00 pesos. Yes its true not everyone is on a minimum wage in Colombia, but if they were, this poses an almost impossible challenge to pay for the visa to begin with. This of course is also intentional as its another way of weeding out those who can’t simply afford it, or afford to waste that kind of money. Even more earth shattering is the fact that your chances to receive a tourist visa into the US a Colombian citizen earning a minimum wage is almost 0.

The money issue aside, leads us to the actual appointment and appearance before a consulate. While I would love to say it involves a nice office and desk and an interview across said desk, the truth is more like cattle being herded through a small opening in a field, or some sort of detention center, where you sit waiting endlessly for a number to be called and your turn to talk to a human being.

Like i said, I am one of the lucky ones. I have paperwork from the US backing up y claim, I also have a job and a slightly higher income than the average Colombian, simply because i am employed in the USA. So my process is more routine than anything, but this does not mean im not equally scared to get that rejection that everyone fears, seeing as they make it crystal clear to all who walk through the walls of the American embassy that NOTHING guarantees you getting or renewing a visa.

So my adventure continued as after having completed the endless task of errands for the appointment, i show up at the embassy on a Thursday morning at 7:30 AM along another 200 people designated for my time slot. This to any foreigner would sound crazy but the image of these 200 people is as follows. The American embassy in Colombia is a fortress if you will. Guarded by tall concrete walls. The main perimeter of the property is also sealed in by a metal fence. This fence is heavily secured, you know there is someone watching you through one of the many security cameras. You line up along said fence on a sidewalk which runs out fairly quickly and turns into the street. There are some nice young ladies helping people sort their applications, and while they scare most with questions about the details of your application, and promise to help out, they really don’t. You are in a chaotic line with no sense of what to do or why. Then over a loud speaker, that can barely be heard if your at the end of the line, they say that if you are applying for a certain type of visa you should move to a certain type of line labeled by a number. At this point i find that this might be my saving grace, as I know us working folk usually get grouped with students and we should be processed quicker as our requests are ” reasonable” by comparison.

You then get ushered through the fenced portion of the embassy, which includes a metal detector and a place to leave your cell phone. Once through that set of doors, you go through the main walled area of the embassy into a space, not a room, but a space that has a roof, a series of benches and roughly 30 nondescript windows with little telephones. This is where the feeling of cattle first becomes clear.

Those applying for the more specific visas like work or student visas, are told to follow a line into one of the windows and drop of our paperwork, where once we do, we are told to wait for our name to be called. I sit following said instructions with a copy of Little women in my hands but with little patience to read it. I wait for roughly an hour and half before they call my name. When they finally do i line up yet again, only to be fingerprinted and told that i have been assigned to a group with the number 744. I am again told to turn around sit back down and wait for the new group number to be called. I have assessed at this point that this grouping method is a quick way to separate people into manageable chunks the consulate folk can handle. As I turn back to sit back down i realize that by this point 5 hours have passed since i first arrived at the embassy and 4 and a half since i first entered the wall of the establishment, and clearly 3 away from getting anything done. The runaround seems pretty crazy, and why its done this way baffles me, but they have perfected a system by which they squeeze all possible hope from your system while you wait. In the wake of this i sit in the many rows of benches and see dejected families who in some case have traveled from various cities within Colombia ( visas are only issued in the embassy in Bogota) walk to the gates with heads down and stack of passports int he their hand, with a letter that  states why the government of the united states has denied their request for the visa or things they need to do if they wish to be reconsidered. I have not seent the paper first hand, but i have to imagine it must be a hard thing to read considering all the time you have already spent on the effort.

While i understand fully why the USA has to control its borders, some of this feels completely wrong, mostly because you know people have saved and spent time preparing for the possibility of going to America. And while their desire to stay may sit somewhere in the back of their brain…. i fear a lot of people simply want to travel but that could just be my naive nature speaking its mind. The list of relatives and people you know who have been denied is endless, cousins and aunts and friends have all gone through that process and been denied. And whats worse is they go through it multiple times. Its even more shameful that after the third or fourth time, the US embassy deems you worthy and grants you your visa. I like to think at that point they see the person has no intention of staying illegally, simply because they could have done it through other means by then, and the other is that it shows you have enough resources to spend 141 dollars multiple times and be ok with never seeing the results of that money.

I finally get called. To my surprise not with my numbered group but directly by name. I fear at this point that something is critically wrong. Why would i not be with my group, was something wrong with my paperwork? was i about to be denied? The amount of thoughts that raced through my head were incredible, what would i do with my apt in San Jose, my car, my belongings, my job? it just seemed like my world would have an implosion right then and there. Then as i walk to the window and i interview with the consulate. He does not allude to any mistakes but his tone is harsh and his Spanish very accented. i always figure i need to help these guys out and make their day a little better and speak to them in English. My English has always been flawless and i speak with a native American accent, therefore i feel like this would comfort them and ease them up a bit and see that i am not a threat but just another kid that grew up with the states who lives and works there and who one day wishes to become a resident. He asks me about me and my family what they do, how they do it and why out of all my direct family do i choose to live in the states. I have spent many years explaining that answer to people and with time i have come to see that the explanation is crap siply because, the answer to  why we are where we are is less about our calculated decisions and more about how we just chose to do things and how they played out.

He finally asks, “is there anything else you think we would like to know”. I reply “well what would you like to know?” and he then says, “your visa has been approved go pay the courier to get it delivered”. I do as he says and after seven and half hours, I have finally been freed from the clutches of the visa process. I walk away calm after having witnessed people lost and afraid of outcomes out of their control and spent time in a space that makes you wish you knew how to pace your mind so that you don’t go insane looking at the same things over and over again for hours on end.

As a post mortem on the whole experience. One of the more horrifying thing that happened that day was I rehashed a vicious cold i had fought to eliminate 2 weeks prior. The uncovered and unprotected shelter they provide leaves you exposed to wind and vastly common temperature shifts that occur in Bogota on a daily basis. It would seem that after collecting my money, they could at least afford to show us humans some dignity and comfort, considering they are well aware i will be spending 7  hours of my day and probably accumulated a solid day of my life in this place.