Re: “The American Embassy strikes again!”, Have Your Say, March 28.
I have been through the exact same visa nightmare that bedevils many persons with Thai family members.
At one point on the third try, I had to invoke my military comradeship with then Secretary of State Colin Powell to finally get my sister-in-law a tourist visa. Very annoying and hard to understand until I found that there are about 10,000 Thais living in the US illegally on expired tourist visas and that the Thais have a nickname for them, “Robin Hoods”. You figure that out. The one point that I agree with and one that really needs to be changed is that if one is denied a visa, the embassy keeps the already exorbitant visa application fee. Hey, give me the visa, I pay, otherwise give the money back. It cost me $900 to finally get my sister-in-law her visa.
This is where my agreement with “Disgruntled” stops and The Nation posting that picture of the US Embassy stinks to high heaven. To cite what immigration policies were when Chinese coolies were working on the US railroad in the 1860s, and President Roosevelt’s ill-advised and illegal incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, is both inflammatory and unnecessary. History is replete with these sort of racial disparities and injustices that have nothing to do with present day US immigration policies. That President Trump is trying mightily to keep Islamist terrorists out of his country has nothing to do with bias against Asians and visa policy.
Get over it Mr or Ms Disgruntled – stand up and be counted.
Richard Re
