9/11 and the visa window

OK, so perhaps blogging is not my strongest point. For about two weeks I had no creative thoughts and pretty much forgot that I am even keeping a blog, and meanwhile so many clever people are writing clever things about life! But today is a new day.

As it happens, the last two weeks have also been spent learning how to be a consular officer - the person you see behind the window when you apply for a visa. Most consular officers do a lot more than visas (for example, help Americans in trouble and give out beautiful Certificates of Birth Abroad to newborn babies), but Shanghai mainly processes Non-Immigrant Visa applications. So I really will be standing at the visa window for 2 years. And it will be good.

On the first day of ConGen class, we were given two books: "The 9/11 Commission Report" (can now finish the assigned reading from a college class long ago...) and "9/11 and Terrorist Travel" (reviewed by TIME as "tantalizing and important," containing "full-color travel documents used by the 9/11 hijackers").

It turns out that the hijackers had gone in and out of the U.S. quite freely on perfectly valid visas. The immigration inspectors were mainly looking for intending immigrants, criminals, and drug couriers - not terrorists. In fact, the only potential hijacker to be denied a U.S. visa was turned away because he seemed like an intending economic immigrant. Looking at the hijackers' photos on their visa applications, I wonder: Would I have stopped any of them? Would I have recognized something suspicious in their stories or seen malice in their eyes? Standing at the visa window is serious business.

But despite the weightiness and frequent sense of drowning in legal citations, we've learned some interesting things:

• Being born to American citizen parents doesn't necessarily make you a citizen if you are born abroad - at least one parent must have resided in the U.S. at some point in life.
• Every year about 1 million immigrants come to the U.S. (legally/documented). 
• In 2011, 20 million people took a chance on the Diversity Visa Lottery for underrepresented countries. Hooray, 20 million people still believe we are the land of opportunity!

ConGen can be fun, especially when examining fake passports or role-playing visa interviews. But I always get a little envious when I walk by the Hindi and Azerbaijani classrooms each morning and think about all the new languages out there to learn!