11/6/07

RED-EYED and BLUE.



"The alien who resides among you shall be to you as a citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt."

Leviticus 19:33-34




I just wish I hadn't gone into work early on Thursday morning. If I had known how impossibly long that weekend would become, how deeply desperation would sink into my blood, how many caffeine-fueled hours of delirium which would be spent inside that god-forsaken office... believe me, I would've slept in. Instead I went in early, hoping to bang out as much of my case-work as possible and then escape at around 5 o'clock for happy hour with Pat and Frank. That was the plan, at least. But that plan would soon be foiled.

Before I go on, I believe some sort of introductory explanation is in order. I work at an immigration law firm. When people hear that, the typical reaction is to roll their eyes and immediately begin espousing their particular personal opinion on the so-called "immigration debate." But we don't do that kind of immigration-- there's no money in it, quite honestly.

Our firm, with offices in 30 different countries, does global corporate immigration. We are the biggest and best on the planet, according to just about every authority on the matter. Our office, because of it's strategic location here in Silicon Valley, counts among its clients just about every single one of the world's major tech companies. In fact, there is an overwhelming probability that the computer on which you're reading this right now was manufactured by one of our clients. There's a joke in our office that Silicon Valley is built on ICS-- no, not built on Integrated Circuits, built on Indians and Chinese.

I'll try to explain the process as simply as possible. Let's say Microsoft wants to hire a software engineer from Korea. Our job is to take care of all the details and make sure Uncle Sammy is properly appeased. There are 3 major steps: they enter the US, begin working on a temporary visa, and then become permanent residents after we file I-485 (aka green card) applications. Remember that is a gross and almost irresponsible oversimplification-- in reality the naturalization process is so tedious and complex that it makes thermodynamics look like arithmetic.

There are two main objections to what we do, which typically come from right-wing protectionists:
1)
"They taking our jobs!"
2)
"They're driving down wages!"

No. Wrong. Absolutely false, as a simple matter of fact. Before Microsoft can hire someone from overseas, we must first demonstrate to the government that no qualified American workers are available, and that the labor market won't be adversely affected by hiring foreign nationals. Then, once the foreign national is hired, Microsoft must pay him a government-determined prevailing wage.

What we do, in all modesty, is make the world a better fucking place. For one thing, a lot of these people are coming from some pretty nasty situations. A lot of these people are coming from third world countries. Most of them live under oppressive dictatorships, in countries whose GDP is one-eighth the size of America's defense budget. One day they're surrounded by civil war, the next day they're living in sunny California, making six figures and working for Billy Gates.

On the other hand, and this may sound crude, but it ain't a charity. We don't take just anyone. Keep in mind that these people are the some of the brightest, most talented people in the world. Those ill-informed Americans who rail against immigration cannot seem to grasp the simple idea that America cannot continue to compete in the global economy if we keep turning away the world's most brilliant minds for no good reason at all. And let's face it folks, if we don't bring the talent here, Microsoft is gonna leave and go find it elsewhere.

This is not unskilled labor. These people have Ph.D.'s in Physics.
These aren't border-jumpers. They jump through every hoop the government sets in front of them.
They're not breaking any laws. These people have nothing but the utmost respect for this country, and a genuine desire to use their gifts for America's benefit.

Sadly, the American government seems intent on cutting it's own throat. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is nothing more than a bumbling bureaucratic portrait of incompetence, a complete and total mess, with arbitrary and pernicious policies that serve no purpose other than throwing roadblocks in our way.

Which brings us back to roughly 1:30 pm on Thursday, June 28. USCIS had just thrown a roadblock in our way. No one saw it coming. And
oh man! we hit it head-fucking-first. The attorneys called a meeting to announce, in no uncertain terms, that the proverbial shit had just hit the fan. There was bad news. Very, very, very, very bad news.

USCIS imposes immigration quotas-- they will only accept a certain number of foreign nationals every year. The deadline to submit all files was July 31st, just as USCIS had been telling us and everyone else for the past six months. Even with a month to go, things were pretty hectic. But USCIS had just called to say
Just kidding! the deadline was now July 2nd.

Remember, folks, it was 1:30 pm on Thursday, June 28. I hadn't even taken my lunch break yet.

Utter disbelief instantly descended upon the entire room. It hung there for a moment or two, before transforming into total panic. The meeting didn't last more than five minutes before people literally ran off in a mad and desperate dash, rushing to their desks and hurriedly thumbing through one of the thousands of cases which had to be filed by Monday morning.

There would most certainly be no happy hour. Heck, I knew that if I even saw the light of day that weekend, it would be an act of benevolent mercy bestowed upon me by a God who clearly has a taste for bitter irony. On my way back to my desk I turned to my buddy James and asked, with considerable incredulity, "Man, what ever happened to
'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to beathe free'? I thought that was our country's motto for immigration."

"We got a new motto," he said. "Now it's
'What can brown do for you?'"

I didn't leave the office until 1:30 am that night, and never did get to take that lunch break. I couldn't complain-- who had time to complain? I was only home long enough for two glasses of Cab, four restless hours of sleep, a shower and a shave. I was back at work by 7 am.

Truth is, I wouldn't dare complain. My own self-pity vanished immediately the moment I walked into the office to find that many of my co-workers had never left, hadn't slept at all save an hour or two at their desk. Sure, I made sacrifices. But there's only so many sacrifices to be made by a 23-year-old single male who lives alone and has no children (I hope).


* * *

I think it was Saturday night. I'm pretty sure it was Saturday night. Truth is, after a few 18-hour workdays, after so many forms and files and phone calls, you start to lose track. You want to lose track. You want to just close your eyes and let it all deteriorate into a blur, to push yourself into a trance and sleepwalk through the nightmare.

I wandered into the supply room, looking for "Sign Here" stickers. Instead I found something you don't normally see in the supply room of a law office-- kids, two of them, a boy and a girl, wrapped in sleeping bags and sleeping soundly.

"Whose kids are those?" I asked James.
"Laura's," he said. Laura was a paralegal who'd worked at the office ever since Earl Warren presided over the Supreme Court.
"Why are they sleeping in the supply room?" I asked.
"Oh, I guess her husband's away. Rachel normally babysits for her." But, of course, since Rachel also hadn't left work since yesterday morning, Laura's only option was to make this a family affair.
"Damn. That's a shame," I said.
"Dude, that's nothing," James said with a grin. "Morgan canceled her vacation to New York."
"You're kidding," I said. Morgan was one of our youngest attorneys. She'd just gotten engaged, and to celebrate, she and her fiancé were going to spend two weeks in New York City.
"Nope. And you don't understand-- the whole trip was planned and paid for. We're talking reservations at the Waldorf Astoria, Broadway tickets, the whole nine, man."
"They're just eating the expenses?" I asked, already half-knowing the answer. James just nodded. I grunted in disgust and headed back to my desk.

Time wasn't passing in seconds, minutes, and hours. Time only crept forward in increments of files completed, petitions submitted, forms finalized and sent off to some faceless government building in Nebraska. The stack of cases next to my desk never seemed to get any smaller; each time I made any sort of headway, one of the attorney would walk by and drop another box on the pile.

And these boxes don't merely contain case files-- they contain lives. These files contain everything you could possibly know about a person: birth certificates, social security number, credit card numbers, every address they've lived at for the last five years, diplomas and transcripts for high school and college, paystubs from every job they've held in the last decade, marriage licenses, passports. You name it-- it's in there. My job isn't merely to process I-485 petitions, my job is to maintain the livelihoods of people who place their trust in our firm. With each file I process, I learn the intimate details of another person's life story. I learn exactly how the events of their adult lives unfolded.

I picked up a case file and glanced at the name. Dr. Ramakesh Prande, from somewhere in Karnataka, India. His foreign address quite literally included the phrase "near the IIT Bus Stop." Dr. Prande was now making $127,630.00 a year as a Hardware Engineer. While studying for his Ph.D. at Stanford, Dr. Prande had invented a method of combining the three major kinds of medical images-- MRI, CATscan, and PET-- into one 3D image in less than 30 seconds, whereas before it could've taken an hour. His invention could save millions of dollars and thousands of lives. His wife, Deepa, had just given birth to their first child in January. His visa expired in October of this year and...

"Oh fuck," I said, loud enough that half a dozen people looked up from their desks. Ramakesh hadn't signed his ETA 9089. We couldn't submit his application without it. Immediately I picked up the phone. It rang four times before a quietly exhausted voice answered. It was 10:30 pm.

"Hello?"
"Hi, Dr. Prande?" I said, instantly adopting that I'm-a-professional persona.
"Speaking." His accent wasn't thick. Most of our foreign nationals are quite fluent in English.
"This is Joby Martin, we spoke last week regarding your marriage certificate. How are you?"
"Good," he said. I wanted to say
"No, dude you are not fucking good right now. You are anything but good."
Instead, I said, "Sir, I'm going to be very direct with you. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we absolutely must file your I-485 before Monday morning. But we can't do that because you didn't submit your ETA 9089."
"Yes I did, I sent it last week."

I delicately explained to him that I had the fucking form in my hand, and I was looking right at the part on page eight where he was supposed to sign and date it under penalty of perjury. And there was no fucking signature.

"We need you to come in tomorrow, at your earliest convenience, to sign the form." There was silence on the other end of the receiver.
"I'm in Montreal," he said. Now there was silence on both ends. It lingered until I started to stammer.
"Well... uh..." I had no idea what to say or do. "Can you hold, sir?" I didn't wait for him to say yes. I dropped the phone on my desk and ran over to James' cubicle.
"Hey James," I said, "Ramakesh Prande... do you know that name?"
"Yeah," said James. "He's one of your cases, right?"
"Uh-huh. And I've got him on hold right now. He didn't sign his 9089."
"Well, tell him to come into the office by tomorrow afternoon."
"But he's in Montreal."
"When does his visa expire?" he asked.
"October."
James stopped shuffling through papers for a second, his eyebrows ruffled above the rims of his glasses. He thought for a moment, a smirk sweering across his face. He shrugged and said, "Well, if he doesn't come back now, you can tell him he might as well just stay in Canada."
He was right. There was no other way. It was too late to file a visa extension, so he was totally screwed unless we got his I-485 in by Monday. I ran back to my desk and took Dr. Prande off hold. "Hi, Dr. Prande?"
"Yes," he said.
"We need you to come into the office to sign your 9089."
"I can't," he said. "I'm in Montreal."
"I know sir, and I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. You have to be here by tomorrow afternoon." I was starting to think that this guy just didn't get it.
"I can't, I'm with family, and I--"
"Sir!" I said, cutting him off, my voice getting firm. "I need you to understand this. We have to submit your file by tomorrow night. There is no way around it. Your visa will expire by the next time we can file your application. They will send you home. You will have to leave."

I could almost hear his brain starting to wrap himself around the idea.

"Now, what time can you get here?" I asked.
"I'm on my way," he said. He hung up.

I felt sick. I couldn't believe that I had just asked a man to drop everything and get on the next international red-eye and cross two times zones just to sign a goddamn paper. But, as I later learned, Dr. Prande was hardly unique. We had foreign nationals flying in from all over: San Diego, Texas, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts, London, Australia, Japan-- just to sign papers. They began showing up periodically through all hours of the night, wife and kids in tow, spending fifteen minutes reviewing documents in our lobby and then heading straight back to the airport.


* * *

I could feel my eyelids slowly creeping towards each other. "Coffee," I thought, "sweet sweet coffee." I found Rosa in the kitchen. Rosa was another paralegal, I'd place her in her early-to-mid fifties. She was Spanish-- not Mexican, as she would point out to anyone who failed to make the distinction.

Rosa was in tears. She and I got a long pretty well, or at least we had gotten past the stage of merely acknowledging the presence of a co-worker with the customary and obligated "
mornin!" On a few occasions I'd cracked a mildly funny joke while we were waiting in line for the copy machine. Most times she'd laugh, or at least smile. I guess having made this woman smile caused some curiosity as to what was making her cry.

"Are you alright?" I asked, somewhat uncomfortable with the situation. We'd moved past mere manufactured greetings, but we certainly not at the point where I felt like the right person to comfort her. As soon as I had asked I regretted doing so, scared shitless of what her reply might be and my severe lack of a premeditated response.

"Tonight is my son's wedding," she said, crumbling back into hysterics the moment she finished forcing the words out into the air. Just as I feared, I hadn't the slightest clue how to respond. I just looked at her, dumbfounded and disgusted at no one in particular. "Or at least it
was my son's wedding. It's probably over by now."

Christina De Paul, my boss' boss, had called Rosa into her office the night before. She begged Rosa to go to the wedding, assured her that they'd be okay without her if she took the night off, or at least a couple of hours. But Rosa, a Catholic mother of an only child, said no.

"I'm so sorry," I said, feeling helpless and a little angry at myself for not having better words to comfort her. I started to stumble over some stock words of consolation when Andrea, an attorney, poked her head into the kitchen.

"Meeting in the conference room," she said.

The conference room began slowly filling up with employees. Guys who never showed up to work in anything less than a three-piece suit were clad in sweat pants and slippers. Women who I'd watched stick religiously to rigid diets came in reeking of fast food.

"We need someone to fly to Lincoln, Nebraska," said Jen, a senior partner. No greetings or ice breakers, just straight to business. "We're not going to finish all the cases by the last FedEx pickup, and we need someone to hand deliver the files to the Nebraska Service Center by 8 am. We've already booked a flight. We just need a volunteer."

I raised my hand, without much thought. If it wasn't going to be me, it was gonna end being someone else who had greater things to sacrifice. I didn't have much to lose.

"Thank you, Joby," Jen said. "While we've got everyone here, I just want to take a moment to tell all you how are incredibly thankful I am, and how deeply touching it has been to see all of how put your lives on hold to help this firm. I know that I'm speaking for all of the attorneys when I say this... thank you."

And then it was back to work.


* * *


The guy sitting next to me on the airplane was glancing out of the corner of his eye to see what I was working on. I'd seen him do it every couple of minutes for the last hour or so. He was trying to sleep, and I was the only person on the plane with their overhead light shining.

"You doing homework?" he said, finally.
"It's July," I said, hoping my tone would signal to him that I wasn't in the mood for chit-chat. "School's not in session."
"Oh, you're on summer vacation?"
"I guess you could call it that," I said.
"Are you working over the summer?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said, knowing full well what his next question would be.
"What do you do?"
"I work at an immigration law firm."
"Oh," he said, pausing for a moment. "I think that they really need to build a wall. I just can't believe that th--"
"Sir I really need to finish these applications before we land," I said, this time making damn sure that my voice conveyed to him that he needed to shut up and leave me alone. He turned his head and stared at the window. The dark summer night had started to flee from the rising sun, the darkness of last night gradually melting into the deep blue of tomorrow morning.

When I got to the baggage claim, a crowd had already gathered, eager to grab their luggage and head home to their loved ones. It was not quite six a.m. when the gears started cranking and the conveyor belt began creeping forward. The first piece of cargo to drop onto the carousel was one of my boxes, heavily fortified with packaging tape. I started towards it when I noticed that the second and third pieces of cargo had just dropped onto the carousel. They too were boxes from work. Suddenly I realized this could get ugly.

I pulled the first box off the carousel and set it on the ground. Then I grabbed the second and third, stacking them one on top of the other. The fourth and fifth boxes slowly spun around to where I was standing. I looked up and saw that the sixth was not too far behind.

I could feel the ugly looks, the poisonous and penetrating eyes as they slapped against the back of my neck and burned my skin. Those eager to simply grab their bags and get home were now waiting anxiously for what seemed like an endless stream of cardboard boxes to cease flowing towards the 23-year-old with three-days worth of stubble. As I pulled the eighth box off the carousel, a middle-aged woman in a pantsuit who'd been talking on her cell phone just moments before came and asked me how many I had brought with me.

"Nineteen," I said matter-of-factly. She grunted, the kind of grunt that seeks to convey feelings of
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me." No, lady, I'm not kidding. I certainly wish I was kidding, but alas, I am not kidding. You may count every single last one of my nineteen boxes as they come out before your Gucci suitcase. Feel free. Be my guest.

The firm had arranged for me to be picked up by some taxi service, and there was a white Chevy van waiting for me outside of the airport. The cabbie was nice enough to help me load the boxes into the back of the van, which only fit once we collapsed the back seat and even then I had to put one underneath my legs and carry one on my lap. We started through Lincoln to service center.


The Nebraska Service Center is a faceless, nondescript, two-story building in the middle of (for all intents and purposes) a faceless, nondescript city. The landscaping is unremarkable, with well-kept grass and the bare minimum of trees and foliage. I imagine the landscaper as being a well-structured individual with a serious lack of creativity.

I'm not exactly sure how I expected it to look, but the building I saw before me was certainly not what I had expected. Maybe I imagined this huge impressive glass skyscraper, with overzealous security and important-looking people walking around wearing secret-service-type attire. I imagined everyone would have earpieces and sunglasses and pistols and badges. I guess I wanted it to be like some movie scene, maybe I wanted to have to walk through a metal detector and get patted down for weapons and treated like I was a character in some Clint Eastwood movie. But this wasn't anything like that. This looked like a post office.

The van was parked, and I headed towards the front door. But when I got there and started through the double glass doors, a man wearing a blue dress shirt and khakis stopped me.

"Joby Martin?" he asked.
"Yes?" I said, a little shocked that my arrival was anticipated. Maybe they tapped my phone calls. Maybe they had the firm on surveillance. USCIS is, after all, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security.
"Garrett Christensen, I'm an assistant regional director here at the service center." Wasn't he at least going to show me a badge or something? That would be kinda cool. "Christina DePaul called me earlier this morning to let us know you would be coming in," he said. That foiled my vast government surveillance conspiracy theory.
"Our office isn't normally open this early, so I came out here to meet you personally."
"Am I the only one dropping off files by hand?"
"So far as I know, how many have you got?" he asked.
"Nineteen," I replied.
"You flew out here with nineteen files?"
"No, nineteen boxes. I'd say probably fifteen hundred files."

We walked towards the van. One-by-one we carried each box to the glass doors, stacking them in threes on top of a cart. Then he took a massive set of keys from his pocket, opened the front door, and wheeled the boxes inside. He turned around and propped the door open with his foot.

"Is there anything else?" he asked. "Do you have any questions?"

My mouth dropped open and hung there, halfway, as if I started to say something but needed another moment or two to figure out exactly what it would be. I wanted to ask him why the hell all of this had happened. Why in god's name I was in Lincoln fucking Nebraska at 6:30 a.m. on a Monday morning with thirty thousand pieces of paper. I wanted to ask him how the government could so effortlessly throw the lives of thousands of people into complete disarray. But I didn't say anything.
I know that this is very anti-climatic, that I've spent all this time building the rising action just to get to the climax, only to tell you that there isn't one. My English teacher would be ashamed. But I didn't ask him anything at all. I knew what he would say, that he isn't authorized to talk about it or that it's confidential or that it's blah blah blah. At best, I'd get an insincere apology.

"Nope," I said.
"Alright, take care of yourself," he said, letting the door close. I turned around and headed back to the van, back to the airport, back home.

The office is on the way home from the airport. My phone was dead, so I decided to drop by to let them know that the boxes had arrived safely and on time. The parking lot was nearly empty. I couldn't imagine very many people would want to spend their Monday at work after having spent every waking hour of their weekend behind a desk.

But, sure enough, that was exactly where I found Jen, sitting in her office, banging away at the keyboard with some song from the soundtrack of an 80's movie. I couldn't remember the name of the song or who sang it, but I could remember most of the lyrics.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.
"Well, what are
you doing here?" she spit back.
"I guess I just wanted to let someone know that the files got to the service center on time."
"Yeah, I know," she said. "Garrett Christensen called us this morning."
"Oh. Was that all he said?" I asked, just sort of assuming that there wasn't much else besides that for him to say. But I was wrong.
"They filled their quota on Saturday night," she said, not even taking her eyes off the computer screen or stopping the rapid assault of her fingertips on the keyboard.
"What?" I was confused. "What do you mean they filled their quota?"
"They ran out of visa numbers on Saturday night," she said, suddenly ceasing whatever it was she was typing, paused for a moment and then slammed her fist against the table. There was a potent mix of anger and frustration in her eyes. "Christensen, that rotten shit, said that they got more applications than they anticipated and they hit quota on Saturday night."
"So... wait a minute," I said, no longer confused but much moreso disbelieving of what was being told to me. "They ran out of visa numbers?"
"Yes."
"On Saturday night?"
"Yes."
"You're fucking kidding me, right?"
"No."

It was all in vain. None of mattered. It was all a waste. Every application submitted after Saturday night would be categorically rejected without them even looking twice at it. All nineteen boxes that I hand delivered to their goddamn doorstep would be shipped back to us without USCIS having even opened a single one of them. Everything I had done for the last 48 was a complete and total waste of time. Ramakesh Prande was going back to India.

I wanted to scream, sort of. Something inside my exhausted brain told me that people in situations such as these normally scream and yell and throw stuff. But I didn't have the energy. I was too weighed down by defeat that I could barely move, but at the same time so angry I couldn't see straight.

"What do we do now?" I asked.
"We sue," she said.
"We sue the federal government?"
"Yep."

And that's exactly what we did. Our firm was named as part of a class action lawsuit against USCIS, the Department of State, the Department of Labor, and the FBI. Filing amicus curiae briefs were Microsoft, a few of other clients, the American Immigration Legal Foundation, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, is when the fun starts.


* * *


Legal Workers Lose Chance at Green Cards

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 2, 2007

Filed at 8:26 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Legal immigrants hoping to be first in line for employer-sponsored green cards lost time and money when the government suddenly announced Monday that no new applications would be taken until the fall, a lawyers group said.

Tens of thousands of people who work in the United States under employment visas and their families were affected by the change, said Crystal Williams, associate director for programs at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

''There are people who flew to the United States so they could apply and had their families fly back. They paid attorney fees,'' Williams said.

The State Department announced last month that employment visa numbers were available for all people seeking employer-sponsored green cards, except unskilled workers. It sometimes takes years for applicants to get those numbers.

The announcement meant that as early as Monday, Citizenship and Immigration Services would begin accepting applications. The applications are hefty, requiring medical exams, a lot of documentation and the applicant's presence in the United States.

But an update on the State Department Web site posted Monday said 60,000 such numbers were no longer available because of ''the sudden backlog reduction efforts by Citizenship and Immigration Services offices during the past month.''

The department called the backlog reduction an ''unexpected action'' and said employment visa numbers would be available again Oct. 1.

The State Department has been flooded with passport applications since new rules went into effect in January requiring passports for air travelers returning from the same destinations. The resulting backlog has caused delays of up to three months for passports and ruined or delayed the travel plans of thousands of people.

A spokesman at the State Department declined to comment.

Williams said several workers within Citizenship and Immigration Services told her and other lawyers that the agency had staffers working through the weekend to resolve pending cases. She said several lawyers reported getting phone calls from the agency with questions about applications when normally that happens by mail.

Chris Rhatigan, spokeswoman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, denied the weekend work occurred or that there was a push to use up the visa numbers. She said the agency had pending cases from previous months.

The fee to apply for a green card increases July 30 from $395 to $1,010, including a fingerprinting fee.