Author: Den Hoopingarner

My primary duties while on my first tour will be to “adjudicate” visas, which means that I will interview people who apply for a visa to the U.S., and determine whether they qualify for a visa.

Many people want a U.S. visa, but not everyone qualifies to enter the U.S., even as a tourist or a student. U.S. law is very strict about the requirements for entry to the U.S. Some people who don’t qualify resort to fraud in their attempt to get in. The most commonly-used fraud technique is not faking documents. U.S. travel documents are very sophisticated, and it’s really hard to forge them. Most people don’t try to use fake documents. The most commonly-used approach is lying. Lying about their finances, their work experience, their family situation, and their intentions regarding travel to the U.S.

Most international visitors are legitimate: they have the right qualifications, and their purpose of travel matches their visa type. But on every airplane that lands in the U.S., there are people who shouldn’t enter the country.

I am in Los Angeles, consulting with various government agencies that enforce the laws that control entry to the U.S. I spent several hours in the airport with the Customs and Border Protection, and was able to sit in on the passport control process, the secondary interview process, and the process by which people who attempt to enter the U.S. illegally are sent back to their country of origin.

Every day since I started this new career, I have learned a lot of interesting things.

Regarding immigration law, I have learned two general categories of knowledge. First, there are many, many different legitimate reasons for foreign nationals to enter the U.S. Tourism and study are the most common, but those are not the only reasons. For example, foreign journalists need a special visa that allows them to report on U.S. news to their home media markets. Wealthy investors who want to invest in the U.S. and create jobs here get a special investment visa. And so on. It was enjoyable to see some of these visas in real life, after learning about them in the abstract during consular training.

The second category is about detecting lies and fining the truth. We need human judgement in order to determine the truth. Documents can be forged too easily, so it isn’t a good idea to rely on documents. The task of filtering out the truth from the lies can only be done by a human being. In order to process the large number of travelers, the border protection people have to listen to a lot of stories, and a lot of them are lies. It would be easy to get cynical after getting lied to all day. But I drew some good lessons from the people in the airport.

One officer noted that some of the lies come from misconceptions on the part of the traveler. They may have been told not to say something, or to say something that isn’t true, because there is a mistaken belief that a certain answer will cause them to be denied entry. Some part of that is true. If your intention is to enter the U.S. and then become a public charge, and when you enter the U.S., you tell the border protection officer that you intend to become a welfare charge, then you will not be admitted to the U.S. But if you are coming to the U.S. to visit your brother, then lie to the border protection officer and say that you have no family in the U.S., because someone told you they won’t let you in to see your family, that’s a stupid lie. It isn’t hard to verify that you do have a brother in the U.S., because you put that information on your visa application, and they can see your visa application at the border.

We rely on human judgement to determine who is lying, but it isn’t possible to produce human lie detectors. We learn how to determine if the story that we’re hearing makes sense. But some people are really good liars, so those of us who are charged with finding the truth have to know about how people lie, and why people lie.

This is getting more and more interesting.

This is my last week in Washington D.C. for a while. The weather has just started to turn nice. That doesn’t seem fair. I had to endure the harshest winter that the city has seen in years, and just when the flowers start to bloom and the birds start to sing, I have to leave. However, I the reason that I joined the Foreign Service wasn’t so that I could stay in Washington. I’m glad to be going to my first post.

The last several days have been occupied by re-organizing my luggage, cleaning out my refrigerator (by strategically eating the food and not replacing it), and doing the administrative paperwork to change my work location from D.C. to China.

I also have to do some “documentable” training this week. There are regulations that we have to be “working” while at the Foreign Service Institute. If we are not in regularly-scheduled training classes, then we have to show that we have been actively learning. So I have been taking online training classes. There are a lot of short online courses available through the Department’s intranet system. I chose several that are relevant to my future work. Today I took a course on how to adjudicate a visa petition, and how to request revocation of the petition when fraud is suspected. It sounds boring, and in fact I had to force myself to pay attention while taking the course, but it’s an important topic, and it would be irresponsible for me not to know the content.

On Monday morning I will go to the FSI in the morning and deactivate my Department email address. After I arrive at post, my account will be reactivated. It makes sense for every post to maintain its own IT system. Because we have posts in 190 countries, literally all over the world, it wouldn’t be practical to run all the Department’s email and data networks from one centralized location. So every post manages its own email system, and the systems are then linked together. The side effect of that arrangement is that individuals’ email accounts are tied to the location where they are posted. So my email account will have to be transferred from the FSI in Washingon to my new post’s servers in China. The State Department’s IT infrastructure is a complex system.

Tomorrow, Friday, will be my last Happy Hour gathering with my classmates. We have already said good-bye to several people, but many will stay while they are in long-term language training. Some of my classmates will leave later this summer, but some won’t leave until this autumn, and some people who are studying “super-hard language” will not leave until the end of the year. Saying good-bye to my new friends will be hard. I have developed warm friendships with many of my classmates, and it’s sad to think that after this training period, we will spend the rest of our careers at various posts around the world, so we will rarely see each other again.

But life will go on.

This morning I made another trip to the Chinese embassy’s visa office. The office was going to call me when the visa was ready, but I thought that making the trip up there was the responsible thing to do.

It was raining this morning (it rained pretty much all day today), which made walking in the city a drag. I like to dress formally when I go to the visa office, because I think it makes a better impression. I know that when I deal with a person who is dressed professionally, I tend to treat them with a little more respect.

My visa was ready. The same clerk handled my case again today. The last time I was there, she looked at me with world-weary eyes. This time, when she looked up my information in her computer system, she gave me a bit of a sneer. She dug out my passport from her plastic washbasin of American passports, and instead of handing it to me, she tossed it over to me unceremoniously. She was finally done with me.

I imagined her mentally washing her hands of me. With soap.

Anti-bacterial soap.

So now I am back on track to begin my first tour. I re-arranged my flight (again), re-set the consultation schedule, and started checking out of the Foreign Service Institute. There is a lot of administrative stuff to do, and this will keep me busy for the next few days.

I leave Washington, DC on Monday. After a few days of consultations with the Department of Homeland Security in Los Angeles, I will arrive in China on Friday.

It’s starting to get real.

My flight leaves D.C. at 4:00 this afternoon. I will not be on that plane. Why? Because my Chinese visa is not yet ready.

The clerk in the visa office of the Chinese embassy recognizes me by now. I have been visiting regularly this week, hoping that the visa is ready and I can leave for China. The first few times that I asked her if my visa was ready, she frowned and said: “Not ready yet.” Last time, she said: “Still not ready yet,” with a clear (and slightly petulant) emphasis on the word “still.” Today, she seemed world-weary as she scanned my paper into her computer, shook her head, and silently passed the paper back to me.

I have bored the visa clerk. This is a new low point in my nascent diplomatic career.

Now that I can’t depart for post on schedule, my status has to change. There is a large administrative structure at the State Department to take care of this stuff. It isn’t hard to imagine that this problem happens frequently, so there is a lot of precedent. In fact, one of my classmates is working on a temporary assignment in D.C. while she waits for her visa to a different country.

If my visa had been ready, I would have left today, so I had packed my suitcases last night. Instead, I had to return to my apartment and unpack. Then I had to make a lot of phone calls to postpone my flight, cancel my consultations in California, etc. I also had to notify post that I was not coming to China on schedule. My Career Development Officer is scrambling to change my administrative status so I can still get paid.

Not knowing what my next step is can be stressful, especially when I am not in control. Stress is not healthy or productive. Stress also prevents me from seeing the positive aspects of my situation. So I have decided not to be stressed.

The weather is beautiful today: sunny and in the low 60s. Walking back to my apartment from the Metro station, I saw this beautiful cloud formation. This picture doesn’t do it justice, but you can see what I mean:

Stressing doesn’t help, and a little drama makes for a good story to tell afterwords.

Besides, one of the reasons that I wanted this job was because I wanted to do something different. This week has definitely been different.

Life is good. Stay tuned.

Still no visa. I went to the Chinese embassy’s visa office yesterday to check. After waiting in the wrong line for 15 minutes, I realized my mistake, then got in the right line. When it was my turn, the clerk thumbed through the plastic tub that contained stacks of American passports. A couple of times, I thought that she was picking up mine. No luck, though. She looked at me like I had a disease, and told me “not ready yet.” She seemed to believe that I was at fault for my visa not being ready yet.

So, no visa, and three days before leaving town. That was stressful. I was on pins and needles. There was no time for panic, though, because I had an appointment on the other side of town.

I had to rush back to FSI to get three more shots at the health unit.

From figurative pins and needles to facing a real needle.

Even though I didn’t have a large lunch, was stressed about the visa, and was tired from traveling from Michigan that morning, I handled the shots with no dizziness or fainting.

I am a masculine man.

One who doesn’t yet have a visa.

Today was my last day of classroom training at the Foreign Service Institute. Next week I have two consultations in Washington, then I will go to LA for additional consultations on my way to China.

All of these plans are contingent on my China visa coming through. Still no word on that. I don’t want to think about making changes to my plans if the visa doesn’t come through in time.

In any event, it’s nice to think that I am progressing through the training process, and moving forward on the road of this new career. It would be easy to get stressed out over the details, and forget that I am beginning a new adventure, one that I prepared for and looked forward to for such a long time. This is the life that I wanted, and now that I have it, I should embrace the positive aspects of it. And there are many positive things about this experience.