17/09/2023
Q: As a visa officer, what do you wish applicants knew?
Answer:
A few of my favorite universals:
If you’re a genuine tourist or a business traveler, you probably know where you’re going, why you’re going, how you’re going to get there, what you’re going to do there, and why you need to go now instead of last month or next year. If you’re an intending immigrant, you only have a ton of supposedly supporting docs that you believe will somehow guarantee that you’ll return, but you have no idea what those even say.
If you’re a serious student, you probably know where you’re going to study, where that school is located, why you need to study that subject there, on the other side of the world, and what you’re going to do with the degree when you get it.
If you give me a letter that purports to be from a US business contact with a name something like John Jones, it doesn’t matter how beautiful the letterhead is if the first sentence begins, “XYZ is kindly invited to visit USA in order to…” Behind the hard line, we refer to such letters as toilet paper.
Each country has only a dozen or so standard lies. They’re different in every country, but it doesn’t take us long to learn them all. So you might think that yours is totally original and will fool me; I already heard it three times today.
The best visa interview, for both applicant and officer, is one that goes, “Good morning.” “Good morning.” “Your visa will be ready tomorrow at three.” “Thank you.” “You’re welcome. Have a great trip.”
We are not grim, mindless clerks who hate you, and came to live in your country for the sole purpose of frustrating you and breaking your heart. We are highly educated diplomats who won our jobs through an intensely competitive and difficult process, are on a first or second limited assignment in a career that will last for decades if one progresses enough to continue through the fairly brutal up-or-out promotion system (some of us will become ambassadors), will work in dozens of countries over our careers, love yours, and are secretly quite fond of you, too, even if we have to refuse your application.
It won’t do you any good to threaten and curse us if we refuse you. All our language instructors, no matter the language and no matter how much we plead, steadfastly refuse to teach us bad words, so we don’t know what you’re saying.
The majority of US immigration attorneys are ragingly incompetent.
Yes, we know that you applied and were refused at our embassy in another country yesterday… or five years ago.
The more documents you’re carrying, the less likely that you’re legit.
That computer monitor you see inside the window, that the officer is glancing at and typing things into, is secure but is also connected to the internet. If the purported upcoming big-deal conference that you must go to doesn’t turn up on a five-second Google search, there’s probably a very good reason for that that does not bode well for your ambitions.
We love complicated stories; particularly those that keep hanging together however far we follow the branches and then the twigs. Nobody lies that well, so your story, however delightfully unlikely, is probably true. This is The Second Complicated Story Rule: no matter how unlikely seeming, if it’s diabolically complicated but it hangs together, it’s true.
I taught a generation of junior officers The Two-Part Question Rule: 1. Always ask the next question. 2. Don’t ask a question if you aren’t sure that you want to hear the answer.
And a few more.
