Today we say goodbye to India after 5 weeks here visiting a great deal of the country. We have to fly to Bangkok and stay one night as we journey toward our next country-Vietnam where we will stay for a week.
On the flight I sit next to a very pleasant 54 yr old Indian Lady who I "interviewed". Mrs Ranjeet Arora. She is a Sikh and so I tell her how impressed I am with her religion and share with her my visit to the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar. We talk about Sikhism for a while. Ranjeet expains to me that under Shikhism the men are given the name Singh and the women Kaur ("Kor"). She is a Government employee and so (like men) will receive a pension equal to her final salary at age 60.
In September of this yr she applied to the US consulate for a visitor's visa to visit her brother in New Jersey. The application cost her 7,000 rupees (about US$160 - a lot to her I'm sure) to get all the forms completed, (salary, address, bank balance, health statement etc) and then she took those forms to the American Consular office in New Delhi and was interviwed by an African American woman (I asked) who asked her 4 questions. (Her folder of all the requested information was never opened). Q1: "Why did you visit Dubai?" (her son lives there, I think that this was a terrorism question); Q2: "Are you married?" (her husband passed away 20 yrs ago and she remains a widow and lives by herself); Q3 "what is your job?" (she is in the finance section of a government housing department and has been successfully employed there for many years. She is independent and working.); Q4: "with whom do you live?" (A4 " Alone" Ranjeet and I both agree that this is the killer answer since the US will assume that she secretly wishes to move to the US and that she has no emotional attachments in India). "Sorry, you don't qualify for a visitor's visa". She asked why and was told "we don't explain why, you can re-apply again if you wish". She told me that she wouldn't do that, she was affronted and wouldn't want to spend another 7,000 rps again to have a tourist visit to the US. The consular offical then closed the shutter to her window. Ranjeet has no intention to move to the US, she simply wants to visit her brother for a few weeks.
Just as Ranjeet's interview is ending a lady at the next window starts to cry, she wishes to make a visit to see her son and has been rejected for the 2nd time, she is here to ask why. The white caucasian (Again I ask- I want to see how this works and don't know if the US employs US citizens of Indian background to do this work- they apparently do not) consular official simply states that they don't explain and calls for a security guard and then promptly shutters his window.
I have seen the movie "The Visitor" which portrays the awful treatment that the US apparently gives visitor applicants and discounted that view (as some of the movie reviewers also did) but now I am ashamed and intend to write my congressman with this story. Maybe if we made it easier to visit the US legally we wouldn't have so many illegals. Other people had told me on earlier occasions during our trip that a tourist visit to the US is very difficult but I had ignored that, now it seems to me to be true.
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