Protecting the Homeland
One of my tasks at my secretarial position is dealing with the Department of Homeland Security for the various faculty and graduate assistants who come here to the Fruited Plain to further their research. All of the processes by which people are granted permission to live and work in the US can only be described as “byzantine” (or perhaps simply “effing ridiculous” if you weren’t the sort of child that played with a thesaurus). Here at UF, we have an entire office devoted to sorting out residency status, visas, and other such forms involving numbers, letters, and judicious use of the word “homeland”.
I have been trying since March to renew a professor’s visa status and also try to earn permanent residency for the same professor. Keep in mind here that the fellow in question is a teacher and a researcher at arguably the most important research institution in our state. He has a PhD. He presents important papers in a scientific discipline at conferences. In short, he’s the sort of guy that any country would love to have around. Nonetheless, I didn’t get his visa renewal back until a week ago. Then today, we finally got back his I-797 approval notice for his permanent residency application. The letter accompanying this notice had a tangled mess of forms the professor could choose to fill out with absolutely no recommendation about which forms he should fill out. This isn’t unusual. Every step of the permanent residency process has been like this. The whole process resembles nothing so much as a giant real-life Choose Your Own Adventure novel.
Turn to page 43 if you want to fill out form I-485.
Turn to page 57 if you want to fill out form I-765.
Turn to page 13 if you want to fill out both forms.
[Sound of furious page turning.]
You have been eaten by a wolf.
This whole thing is some bureaucratic version of Hell. I’m convinced of it.
Technorati Tags: residency, green card, Department of Homeland Security, visa, bureaucracy, humor
September 13th, 2007 at 17:19:27
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I wanted you to know that this *killed* me. And I know exactly how you feel. Earning Yusuf the great honor of being considered a Permanent Resident of the United States of America was a delve into a paperwork underworld the likes of which I had never before seen. The process is a test of the true mettle of marriage… every time a manila envelope came in the mail, we would end up in tears or screaming at each other or both.