The U.S. Visa Lottery

This summer Izvestia published an article which detailed the problems that Russians face applying for visas to visit the United States and accused embassy personnel of extreme rudeness. The American ambassador to Russia, Thomas Pickering, then responded with his own letter to the newspaper which appeared several weeks later. I would like to add my voice to this debate, based on my experience at the Movement Without Frontiers group of the Moscow Human Rights Research Center. That experience has convinced me that the current policy regarding non-immigrant visas at the American Embassy is a violation of the spirit of the American constitution and infringes on the rights of American citizens.


In addition to our group's regular clientele -- refugees and people who have been refused permission to emigrate for reasons of state security -- we have been seeing large numbers of people who were refused guest visas to the United States. Many of these people come to us literally in tears -- not, they say, because they were denied but because they were accused of lying or because the demands for documentation changed from one visit to the embassy to the next. They report that after going to considerable trouble to produce the necessary documents, officials refused even to read them, stamping their passports "rejected" and not listening to any arguments. Some report being asked, "Are you a drug addict?" or "Are you a homosexual?" Some have been told to bring in personal letters for inspection.


It is not my intention here to accuse embassy employees of rudeness or incompetence. I fully appreciate the difficult position that they find themselves in and would like to approach this problem constructively.


Ambassador Pickering defended the embassy's practices, explaining that according to U.S. law, embassy officials "must consider everyone who applies for a non-immigrant visa to be a potential immigrant, unless the applicant manages to prove the opposite." The key is that applicants must demonstrate their "close ties" with their native countries so that the consular official can be certain that the applicant will return. On the other hand, Pickering also notes that, "We cannot spend more than four to five minutes on each application," because of the large demand.


The upshot is that every applicant is considered a priori to be dishonest unless he or she can prove otherwise in less than five minutes. In practical terms, these rules turn the application process into a mere lottery dependent on the whim of the embassy official. Let me mention a few cases that we have seen recently.


Galina, 78, applied to visit a relative who is an American citizen by birth and who recently lost his wife. Galina had already visited him in 1993 on a three-month guest visa. She has a husband and children in Russia. She was refused by an official who told her that her "previous stay in the United States was too long." She had not, however, overstayed her visa, but the officer was unwilling to listen to her objections.Veronica, 62, wanted to visit her son, a student of Holy Trinity Seminary in Jordanville, New York. After she was refused a visa, Archibishop Laurus of the monastery repeated the invitation and wrote a letter of guarantee on her behalf. Nonetheless, on July 16, she was again refused and the archbishop's letter was ignored.


An elderly couple applied for a two-month visa to visit their son, his American wife and their two small children. They were refused three times despite considerable documentation establishing their economic links with Russia. One embassy official even told them: "You have only one son. Why do you want to just visit him? You should apply to immigrate. You will be accepted."


"But we don't want to emigrate from Russia," the man told me.


On Oct. 3, Maria was refused a visa to visit her relatives despite letters on her behalf by U.S. Senators Richard Lugar and Dan Coats. "If you want to see your children and grandchildren, let them come to Russia," she was told at the embassy.


The ironic thing about the U.S. policy is that it does not seem to be very effective in combating illegal immigration. Pickering admits in his article that "approximately 15 to 20 percent of Russians granted tourist visas from the embassy in Moscow stay on in America after their visas expire." This alone should be enough to convince the Americans that they need a new approach.


The best solution, it seems to me, is to make the person who invites a guest to America more responsible for that guest's actions. They should be subject to a fine equal to the cost of finding and deporting a violator so that American taxpayers will not have to bear the burden of other people's dishonesty. With such a policy, all American citizens would be free to decide for themselves whom to invite and would not have such decisions dictated to them by bureaucrats in Moscow.


Of course, the policy for people applying without invitations would be more difficult and responsibility would indeed ultimately rest with the embassy. However, all of the people who have applied to our group for assistance have indeed been invited by people living in the United States. The point is that these people should not have to face a five-minute inquisition at the hands of a consular official.


Personally, I believe in the great respect of the American people for human rights and the tradition of the rule of law. I also trust that the dynamic nature of the American legal system will provide a solution to this problem, which reflects so badly on America and ultimately is a violation of the rights of the citizens of the United States.





Boris Altshuler is a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and chairman of the Moscow Human Rights Research Center. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.