Merf. Thinking is Hard.

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Merf. Thinking is Hard.: In which a supe who knows her shit got my shit straightened out ›

jhameia:

UPDATE, ALL!

I am back in Hamilton!

This is what happened:

Got into Detroit, and got to the Canadian Consulate there, which, FYI, NO LONGER ACCEPTS VISA APPLICATIONS. Any visa application there has to be done online, and will take MINIMUM 30 DAYS.

The Buffalo, NY visa processing center is…

WOW! I am really glad you got that all smoothed out.

This was 1) gobsmackingly eye opening, and 2) something that makes me want to hug you were you the hugging type. Seriously. That is a LOT of bull.

We used to have Korean Immigration come to us on base to help us with our Visas, Passports, and SOFA documentation, but this past year Korean Immigration consolidated down to ONE office in Seoul because the satellite offices were all doing things in their own way. Now, instead of sending a rep to us, we have to go into downtown Seoul and wait in line (they don’t take appointments). Seoul’s population density is more than twice that of NYC, so this is one of those things where you can stand in the office all day and still have to come back the next and do it over (they have since opened up a more streamlined military personnel only counter, which as you pointed out is privilege in action).

Also, it is a good thing my husband is fluent, because the translators provided to me when I tried to go alone couldn’t understand me and I couldn’t understand them, which aggravated the situation the first time. Language barriers are something I have infinite patience with, but it makes legal situations like this very complicated, and I almost got the wrong Visa. Plus, I went to Okinawa two summers ago, and they stamped me in, but not out when I went on to Yokota, so that was a hoot and a half. Luckily I had my old itineraries to show that yes, we took military transports out of Okinawa and I flew commercially back to Osan after that.

The process for me is FAR easier than it is for you, and I am realize this is not about me, but what I am trying to stress here is that immigration processes are REALLY complex. I think this highlights well just how easy it is for people to get lost in the system, and to possibly even toss their hands up and just try to get by without documentation because of the cost, the complication, and the sheer inconvenience of having to travel everywhere. Having buckets of privilege really helps here, and I can easily see how theses processes inhibit people who don’g have that.

THAT WAS A WORD VOMIT TO SAY I AM GLAD IT WORKED OUT.

I think this is really important, the stuff in bold.

When I first came to Canada, before I had all this knowledge, I worked exclusively with the Canadian Education Center in downtown KL, which not only advised students on universities, but also handled visa processes for students. They told us what documents to get, what application forms to fill out, collected all of them and sent them off for us. They were basically our proxy in dealing with the Canadian High Commission.

HOWEVER, they closed down a few years after I left for Canada, which made me sad because I really enjoyed visiting them and generally hanging out in their office. It worried me also, because see, THERE was a competent group of women who knew their shit, knew how things work, and knew how to make things happen for students who wouldn’t know any better. Not only that, but they were also very good at explaining legalese things to us. We NEED people like them. When they shut down, not only did whoever shut them down deprive them of jobs they did well at, they also shut down an incredibly valuable service that should have been expanded, not shut down.

Now, I’ve just heard that the Canadian High Commission in KL was shut down. This is a terrible thing. In order of importance:

1) it deprives me of a place to yell at people for giving me bad advice so they can learn to do better next time;

2) it adds the risks of traveling for people who now have to mail passports in for applications;

3) it adds the costs of immigration processes for people who can’t handle mailing in passports and would rather travel to Singapore for this;

4) it adds to the overwhelming complexity of applications,

5) it adds more work onto an already small workforce (now made even smaller) which means processing times are just lengthier.

The idea behind shutting down these offices (Malaysia’s isn’t the only one) is to “streamline” and “modernize” and “cut costs” AND WE KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS:

“Streamline” = “we need to control even more the number of people coming in and out of the country”. Previously, different branches would do things differently. (People like me already see this happening where different border officers do things differently. Shit can depend on their mood, their level of knowledge, their desire to work the system in the applicants’ favour.)

“Modernize” = Someone needs to tell me how this “less is more” principle works, like I’m two. Like I said in point #5 above, this process of modernizing means MORE work for fewer people. The idea is that processing is more efficient and whatnot, but guess what? Processing at the Canadian High Commission in KL was ALREADY very efficient. Yes I got bad advice, but whenever I’ve needed a new visa, or my dad needed travel visas to visit me, these were taken care of very quickly and simply, in a single day. You can’t tell me that cutting down the number of offices will improve on this length of time. Unless these assholes can tell me someone can walk in with a passport and be out in half an hour with a shiny new visa, this isn’t exactly a model of efficiency, unless they mean a model of efficiency which also ensures they are letting in the right kind of people.

And the right kind of people have the wherewithal to take the risks of sending in passports, have the means to travel to offices, have secure Internet connections to apply for visas.

And well, “cutting costs”, WE ALL KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS. “We would like to do as much work as possible with as few people as possible in ways that cut close to taking full advantage of their labour without necessarily paying them more.”

The “modern” world gives no fucks for people outside the system or people navigating the system, and is only concerned about people running it who make all the executive decisions and it punishes people within the system who are trying their best to help others work the system.

May 30

In which a supe who knows her shit got my shit straightened out

UPDATE, ALL!

I am back in Hamilton!

This is what happened:

Got into Detroit, and got to the Canadian Consulate there, which, FYI, NO LONGER ACCEPTS VISA APPLICATIONS. Any visa application there has to be done online, and will take MINIMUM 30 DAYS.

The Buffalo, NY visa processing center is also closing. The closest visa office is NY, NY.

The Detroit office USED to be able to process on-the-spot visas for emergencies, but no longer. This is because the visa processing centers are trying to “centralize” which is just a terrible idea because in due process, a lot of miscommunication happens. Also, a lot of true fuckery occurs, because guess what, this assumes that people who have the means to afford a passport and visa can also afford the extra fucking inconvenience of traveling even further to get a passport.

When did this change come about? Oh, the 29th of May. I missed the opportunity to get a quick visa by like ONE DAY.

So, I end up yelling a bit about how the Canadian High Commission in Malaysia told me that my visa should be able to get me a temporary resident permit or something. I honestly do not understand this whole rigmarole of having a TRV (temporary resident visa) AND a TRP (temporary resident permit) (the TRV gets you entry so you can get a TRP at the border, which allows you to stay in the country). (This is a simplification that consulate people apparently do not like, because when I said, “I was told that this visa would get me a permit” the guy got really angry and visibly strained to not shout at me, “this is a TRV. It does not get you a permit. That is issued to you by an officer.”

Essentially it boils down to this: I have a student visa, and I can’t use this visa to get into the country because I’m not a student anymore, and I’m not prepping to get back into a Canadian university. Also, my work permit application was rejected.

When I last returned to Malaysia, I checked in with the Canadian High Commission on whether my student visa would work, and I was told, again and again, it’s still valid until the end of 2012, therefore I would be allowed in. I had NO idea that I needed to change my visa category in order to qualify for a work permit, and I had NO idea that my permit application had been rejected, since I left the fucking country. (Yes, bureaucracy expects you to put your life on hold while they decide whether you can stay in any given national entity. In case this was not yet clear.)

NOBODY at the Detroit Consulate could tell me why my work permit application was rejected, and the only thing they could tell me was, I could either take my chances at the Windsor border (and this is where the guy got really mean, being all “seeing they rejected you once, they’ll probably do it again”), or I could just GO TO NEW YORK AND GET A NEW VISA THERE.

So this is the thing: I applied for a work permit because I didn’t know whether I was going to get into any PhD program I applied for, and on the off-chance I got into one, I’d at least have the work permit to let me in and out of the country.

I ALSO know that border control? They can issue Temporary Resident Permits, with which you can then use to get Study Permits and Work Permits. Earlier this year, a border control officer did this for me so I had time to wait for the Post-Grad Work Permit that I had in the works (the one that got rejected, natch).

I also had the following: emails from UC Riverside with my letters of acceptance and admission, and an email from my travel agent detailing my flight leaving Canada for Malaysia (after which I fly straight to California). So I headed to a FedEx to get these printed. (If I had known ahead of time this would be an ish, I would have printed my lease for my apartment, brought my McMaster transcripts, and other documentation proving that yes, I actually fucking live in Canada.)

Windsor border control has more staff, and the guy who took my passport was like BWUH? Because, the last border control officer? She literally cancelled my visa, like, WITH A PEN AND ALL, WROTE, “CANCELLED WITHOUT PREJUDICE”. NOBODY fucking does this; this was STILL a valid visa, just puts me in the wrong goddamn category. Nonetheless, I was only going to be in the country temporarily, and I explained this.

It was actually kind of interesting to watch, because here, the border control officer checked in with like a bunch of other officers, all his rank, who all went BWUH? and got all “I have never seen anything like this before” and “why would anybody cancel that?” and shared their knowledge amongst each other. They went up two levels of command that I can tell from watching them.

Now, it helps that I had all the aforementioned documents printed and presented before these guys, because eventually, I got a superintendent, who clearly just knew her fucking shit, and she went through the system, looking at the notes. (There were like three other guys besides the guy processing me, watching and listening and clearly taking notes.) (This is important, because these guys clearly are taking an interest in weird cases like this and want to learn as much as possible in case they get weird shit in the future.) (Also important: all of these folks were on my side and wanted to help. Not just do their job and be done with me having laid down some lawfulness.)

This is what the supe told me:

If I had had a permit, I could come in and out of the country as I pleased, but since I don’t have a valid permit of any kind, they had to have a closer look at my visa.

In the past, I could apply for a work permit on the student visa, because the post-grad work permit application assumes that you’re a goddamn poor student who can’t afford to travel out of the country and apply to change the category of your visa.

Now, my work permit application was rejected, because the passport pages I had sent them? Showed that I had been gallivanting in and out of the country at will. Which means that I could have gone back to Malaysia and applied for a new visa in the category that I wanted to be in (work permit). (Yes! Essentially I proved that I have enough money to do shit I wasn’t told I had to do!)

(Except, of course, nobody fucking told me I needed a new visa, or that I needed to be in a different category to qualify for a work permit… my understanding was that the post-grad work permit was issued to people holding valid student visas. And I repeat: the Canadian High Commission in Malaysia said nothing to the contrary, simply insisted that since I had a valid visa, I should have no problem and these border people would let me in.)

HOWEVER, now that I had made it clear that I was only going to be in the country for the next two months. And the superintendent asked me, (her exact words) “You just need a permit to come in, put your affairs in order, get your crap and go, right?”

Yes, yes that is it. I had the itinerary, and I had the university letters, and they were good and satisfied the supe.

So in the end, it boiled down to, either I could stay in the States and get a new visa, OR I could pay $200 there and then for them to issue a new temporary resident permit, valid until my flight out, at which point I had to surrender it.

(Did any of ya’ll know this? That the permits ARE NOT YOURS, they BELONG TO THE GOVERNMENT? And you actually have to surrender these things when they are done? Because I did not know this. I retain them to generally keep a record of old documents.)

So since I have monies and shit, I said yes to the second option, and now I am home in Hamilton. Which I will have to leave in two months =(

Anyways. JUST SO’S YA’LL KNOW.

On reflection, I could have just explained all this re: my moving to California at the end of July to the Sarnia officer and maybe she would have just let me in but I was just honestly so taken aback at her canceling my visa without a good god damn reason why. Who does this? Honestly? Who fucking does this? And her only advice was to “go get a new visa”? Really bitch? Really? I guess I could have told her then and there I was moving so didn’t have time to dick around with waiting 30 days for a visa to process but I was just so gobsmacked.

This is not the worst kind of wankery that can happen at border control, and to be honest, clearly Windsor’s border control had more sophisticated staff than Sarnia’s, but it’s still pretty fucking harrowing. I don’t ordinarily get scared enough to cry because I am really damn fucking arrogant about these things, but I came close at Sarnia and totally had a boo-hoo after I was done with Detroit’s Consulate office.

The worst thing that could have happened would be that Wilma would have to drive me to the closest airport, where I would fly to New York, New York, to get a visa processed as soon as possible, just so I could return to Canada, for a fucking two months. The Windsor officers could have been worse, rude, incompetent and uninterested in genuinely helping me get back into the country. Lots of stuff.

But I am ALSO a middle-class witch who’s been through this ring-around-a-rosey often enough to have figured out how it works, so after the Consulate nonsense I decided I just needed a cafe so I could find the closest place to print stuff (asked a security guard wandering around instead). (Props to my ride for dealing with my making on-the-go decisions for shit that was definitely out of her realm of experience.)

I figured out that I was doing the wrong thing in pressing for a work permit, when all I really need is just a temporary resident permit. Once I changed my tack, I knew what kind of documents I needed and what to say. So, this is privilege in action on a personal level, helping me with a system, because I had that knowledge of what to do next (and the relative brainspace to think of it).

I’m documenting all this not just to mentally vomit out at ya’ll the wankery I had to go through, but just in case any of you could use some knowledge of shit that could happen to you and yours. There is some nonsense that is routine and honestly doesn’t really affect us that much (those of us with foreign passports will always have to go through immigration, forex, and consistently prove that we are there only temporarily until such a time as we apply for permanent residency legally) but there is some out-of-the-way stuff that isn’t talked about very much.

Anyway.

Hope ya’ll enjoyed that :P