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A leg and an arm in the US Embassy
Aug 28, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
A common procedure in the US State Department is that when they post consular officers around the world, they supply each of them with a dossier on the citizens’ attitude to immigration to the US. In the case of Guyana, consular officers are told that this country is a high risk one in terms of non-return on visitor visas.
No doubt the manual on Guyana would instruct the officers that the Canadians moved their consular services to Trinidad since the early eighties.
A new document that has been placed in the dossier that visa officers coming to Guyana have to read is the Thomas Carroll cooperation statement with the district attorneys.
Thomas Carroll sold hundreds of visas while stationed here. The officers would have been given his story to read so they can gauge the extent to which Guyanese are in desperate need of an American visa whether green card or visitor stamp.
Now there is an additional document that will be given to new employees at the US Embassy.
Before we discuss this new information that will be in the instruction manual of the consular personnel in the US Embassy, let us offer a hypothetical example.
Suppose you run a school for medical students in Guyana. Then one day, you read that the Minister of Health of Wattalia, one of the countries that send students here, wrote in one of his country’s newspapers that Wattalia students are making a lot of money illegally selling cadavers to foreign countries from the medical schools that they attend around the world. Isn’t it natural for you to do two things?
One is to feel inclined not to accept students from Watallia because they steal corpses and ship them out for big bucks. Secondly to inform the staff of the school to keep a watchful eye on students from Wattalia.
Now the Minister of Legal Affairs and the Attorney-General of Guyana, Charles Ramson, is quoted in the newspapers as saying the following; “Guyanese would give a leg and an arm to become a resident of the US that is a known fact.” Well if the consular officers didn’t know that, they know it now.
Most definitely, they are going to study that statement. Most definitely, this opinion of one of the senior Ministers in the Guyana Government will be made available to new American personnel posted to Guyana.
Put yourself in the place of the visa officer. He/she reads that in Guyana, people are willing to make all sorts of sacrifices and do all sorts of extreme things to stay in the US and this was announced by a Minister of the Government. They are not going to be disposed to dishing out visitor visas easily anymore.
It will be myopic to think that Ramson’s statement has gone unnoticed in the US Embassy. It has not. Ramson’s definitive outlook on how Guyanese feel about wanting to go to the US will definitely be taken into account as the visa officers process their Guyanese applicants. It was an unwise, intemperate and wrong statement to make.
That is not the end of the story. There are so many tragic parts to this uncontrollable blurting out by Mr. Ramson. A lot of PPP supporters flock to the US and Canadian Embassies for visas.
They get sent home but yet they vote on polling day for the PPP. One has to remember that Guyana has the highest rejection rate per capita of visitor visas from the US Embassy among countries of the world.
For a good analysis of visa difficulties at the US Embassy, one only has to Google the Kaieteur News archive for Randy Depoo. He has done a lot of writing on this subject.
Life will be made harder for the PPP supporters as they leave Berbice and Essequibo and flock to the US Embassy, thanks to Charles Ramson who was once a Court of Appeal judge. Ramson has compounded their headaches.
The US Embassy in Guyana is so deluged with Ramson’s grabbers that it has done the unthinkable – rejected the submission of accompanying documents. This is truly an amazing and esoteric attitude to adopt in administrative affairs. It is incomprehensible, but understandable.
The Embassy was inundated with bogus documents that took its toll on the psychology of the officers. One can understand the exasperation that the visa officers endured.
One of the things the US Embassy perhaps never mentioned is that maybe it had to employ a large number of investigators to check out the information listed in those applications.
So will Guyanese be angry in the future when they are turned down? Their own Minister told the Embassy that Guyanese are desperate to get out.
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