The Red, Red Tape of Home
Sandip Roy
Pacific News Service
The post office clerk stamped my letter without a second look, but I felt it reverberate in my very soul. I was mailing the Alien’s Change of Address Card — otherwise known as Form AR-11 — to the INS, and I wondered if I had just signed my own deportation order.
It was the first time I felt really vulnerable in America, at the mercy of some beady-eyed government official who could change my life for not crossing my t’s and dotting my i’s. I’d been a model immigrant, paying my taxes and following all the rules. At least the ones I knew about.
As forms go, AR-11 is fairly simple — fewer than 10 lines. All non-citizens are supposed to fill one out within 10 days of changing addresses in the United States.
I was 10 years and about seven addresses behind.
Like thousands of other immigrants — indeed, like millions of American citizens — I had moved countless times, from my little “efficiency” during my student days in Illinois to apartments in cities like San Francisco and Portland as I followed the job market. I had never known that every time I moved, I was supposed to notify the INS. And as far as I knew, the INS had never cared.
Until now. In the new era of homeland security, the INS has been dragging old, half-forgotten laws out of the attic. Last July, a Palestinian man in Raleigh, N.C., was pulled over for driving four miles over the speed limit. Proceedings around a routine traffic ticket spiraled out of control when it was discovered he had never turned in his AR-11. He ended up in deportation hearings.
Once that story got out, an immigration lawyer I know said that the INS started receiving 30,000 AR-11s a day.
I remembered the INS when I landed in Mumbai, India, a few weeks ago on a visit home. It was the dead of night and a taciturn immigration official gazed at me from underneath a harsh fluorescent light. He flipped my passport open and sized me up. Finally, he gestured wordlessly at the disembarkation form. I quickly filled it out — my name, why I was in India, where I was going to stay and sundry other details, most of which were already there in my passport. As I handed it to him, I wondered how many hundreds of thousands of these forms came through Indian airports every day; and I wondered in what dusty government office they piled up, in bulging, yellowing, tea-stained folders held together by twine. Was that going to be the fate of those AR-11s now flooding into the INS headquarters?
I never thought the United States could become a paper bureaucracy like India. Over the years, whenever we Indians talked about the brain drain from our home country, we heard the same story. The best and brightest were leaving to flee the “license raj.” Their entrepreneurship was continually being tripped up because they had forgotten to fill out some form or another. They were departing for the can-do West, where they believed a good idea could go all the way from a garage in Palo Alto to the top of the NASDAQ. Forms and petty bureaucrats be damned.
Now, like the dour immigration officer in Mumbai, traffic cops or airline officials in America have suddenly become petty despots who wield enormous power. Now, that minimum-wage job a foreign student holds in a deli could be grounds for deportation.
When people in India heard these new stories from America, they laughed and shook their heads. A friend wondered if officials from the ballooning department of Homeland Security would be coming on a field trip to India to study red tape. People felt the United States must really be floundering if it were trying to impose order through a flurry of forms and regulations.
On all my previous trips home, my neighbor’s son would ask me what I thought he should study to help him get to the United States — information technology, say, or artificial intelligence. This time he just asked soberly, “Do your friends have jobs still? Are Indian software engineers working as waiters?” The image of the land of opportunity was waning rapidly in popular imagination. Slowly, it was being replaced by the image of a traffic cop with the power to deport you because you had forgotten to fill in some obscure form.
“At least in India, we could try and bribe the cop,” laughed a young director at a multinational company in Mumbai. “Over there, you must really be stuck.”
PNS Associate Editor Sandip Roy (sandiproy@hotmail.com) is host of Upfront — the Pacific News Service’s weekly radio program on KALW-FM, San Francisco.
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