International Relations

Not far from my office, there’s an Immi­gra­tion and Nat­u­ral­iza­tion Ser­vice Appli­ca­tion Sup­port Cen­ter.  The street it’s on is a lit­tle hard to find, in a war­ren of con­fus­ingly laid out one way streets– if you take the wrong turn, you have to cir­cle all the way back around and start all over again.  An apro­pos metaphor for the immi­gra­tion process, as I under­stand it– espe­cially since it can take for­ever to find park­ing on my block, and if you take the pub­lic trans­porta­tion sys­tem, well, the one we’re on has been expe­ri­enc­ing dis­abled trains and sig­nal delays.  Wel­come to America.

I’ve never gone in to the office, but the front win­dows are pretty wide, and afford a rep­re­sen­ta­tive view.  From what I can see, it looks like any other busy, entry level gov­ern­ment office.  A bunch of low-end office chairs in some­what lin­ear rows.  Older wooden benches.  Walls and walls of pam­phlets and signs in nearly every lan­guage known to man.  Coun­ters behind which tired-looking clerks of all nations speak with tired-looking appli­cants.  Basi­cally clean scuffed linoleum floors with util­ity rugs full of sand and slush laid over them dur­ing winter.

I think that they have dif­fer­ent lan­guage groups come in dif­fer­ent days of the week so they can arrange the inter­preters reg­u­larly– Wednes­day is for peo­ple who speak Span­ish, and I think Thurs­day morn­ing is for Por­tuguese and all vari­ants thereon, plus Hait­ian Cre­ole.  Thurs­day after­noon, any­one from Africa, though Boston seems to be hav­ing a lot of peo­ple from Uganda and Soma­lia these days.  There are peo­ple from Bangladesh, India and Pak­istan (Mon­day?) and Chi­nese Tues­day morn­ing.  Fri­day morn­ing seems to be pretty much all other groups from South­east Asia, and Arabic-speakers.  Fri­day after­noon, so far as I can tell, is for Cana­di­ans, Israelis and Euro­peans who speak Eng­lish fairly well– the clerks giv­ing them­selves a bit of a break at the end of the day.

Some of the appli­cants are in tra­di­tional cos­tume.  Some of them seem fully Amer­i­can­ized.  Some are poor.  Some seem to be doing very well, with Mer­cedes and warm coats and nice jew­elry.  A lot of them smoke out­side the front doors, and not just the poor ones.  Many, espe­cially those from more trop­i­cal climes, seem to be ill-equipped for New Eng­land win­ters, and I’ve more than once seen some­one who looks like they were over at the INS office ear­lier at the out­er­wear and equip­ment store buy­ing at least bet­ter hats and gloves, if not coats and more expen­sive things.  Some­one in the INS office has got to be send­ing them there, because it’s again on a warren-ous side street a few blocks over–  it’s not some­thing you’d find unless you were look­ing for it.

That some­thing they’re all look­ing for isn’t in that shabby appli­ca­tion sup­port sys­tem, but it’s an entry­way to some­thing they think they’ll find when it’s all done.  After nav­i­gat­ing the crazy streets it’s on, they nav­i­gate the crazy appli­ca­tion process.  Hope­fully, the sec­ond time they come back, it’s eas­ier to find.  And that their return trips finally get them to the end of the block and across the main cause­way, the easy to travel-road to the larger fed­eral build­ing.  That’s where they pho­to­graph the peo­ple who’ve fin­ished their cit­i­zen­ship class, a het­ero­ge­neous group of all nations, and not just your sup­port cen­ter lan­guage sub­group, and take pic­tures of the class on the front steps.  It hap­pens on Fri­day after­noons at 3.  I get up from my desk to watch that photo ses­sion every week– all those Mon­day through Fri­day appli­cants at the back of my build­ing now find­ing what they’re look­ing for, only one block, one main thor­ough­fare away.  A chance to stand with peo­ple they didn’t meet on their assigned morn­ing.  On a main street that you can look up and down– tell what’s com­ing at you from back­wards and for­wards.  A place wide enough to look up, down, for­ward and back.

I hope.