OR/MS Today - October 2000 - Was it Something I Said?

October 2000

Was it Something I Said?

Green Card Process Has Him
Seeing Red

By Vijay Mehrotra

A couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with our company's immigration lawyer. She was educating me on The Green Card Process. We were an unlikely pair to be discussing immigration policy — a Hawaiian of Japanese descent and an Indian-born, Minnesota-raised Californian. Yet there we were, having a conversation that was extremely important to my company's future.

We have by necessity a number of professionals on our staff who we have sponsored for H1-B Visas. Our desire and intent is to keep them eligible to work by sponsoring them for Permanent Residence Status. Frankly, our business depends on top quality professionals, regardless of where they were born.

Our attorney asked me to describe the people that we hired. I explained — quite eloquently, if you ask me — the mystical blend of technical skills, communications ability, penchant for teamwork, desire to make a difference, personal goals, work ethic and intangibles that makes a candidate worthy of an Onward T-shirt. These people are really hard to find.

She shook her head. The INS, she explained patiently, has nothing in their files about the je ne sais crois that I was talking about. They had neat, bullet-pointed criteria lined up with the classification buckets set down somewhere in the past. They had a hard time when job descriptions didn't match their pre-defined criteria.

I protested. The world no longer works that way. Our business doesn't work that way. We focus on the whole, can't break people down to the sum of their characteristic parts, can't state "it" exactly, but (like the U.S. Senator describing pornography) "I know it when I see it!"

She smiled and rolled her eyes. Clearly she'd heard this kind of thing before. "We'll work it out," she promised.

One week later, I got a call from a newly hired consultant. "Vic" had moved to California and gotten settled. He needed some routine documentation to take to Canada — he was a Canadian citizen — to get a TN Visa which would enable him to work in the United States. I put together some quick paragraphs, mostly stuff straight from our standard job postings. Along with his offer letter, he felt that this was all he needed. He would head to "Northpoint" for the weekend, visit some friends and report for work Monday.

The phone rang early on Monday morning. Vic was at the border. A U.S. Customs official was refusing to grant him the visa that he needed.

"They don't know what ŒOperations Management Consultant' is," he told me. "I need a letter that states that my title is ŒManagement Consultant.'"

"No problem," I told him. The new letter went out that day via FedEx. I was mildly annoyed at the bureaucracy.

The phone rang again the next morning. "Now he is saying that he doesn't see how this job is management consulting," said Vic. I could hear some real frustration in his voice, and I was starting to feel some of my own. I wrote another document describing how operations research tools were used to drive management decisions about capacity planning, routing, scheduling and pricing.

The phone rang again that afternoon. "He now says that he doesn't understand why my scientific training is relevant for this job. He says that this is just computer programming, and that anyone can do this," despaired Vic.

By now, I was now furious! Who was this ignoramus, standing guard at some provincial border post, casually dismissing the complexity of our work and making unilateral judgments about the training required for my employees? I wanted to wring his neck.

This option was not available, so instead I did something foolish: I took it out on Vic. All of my anger poured over the telephone line. He had told me what to write and when to write it, he was wasting my time and energy on this thing, and if he couldn't get through the INS then we as a company would have no way to employ him.

Looking back, I am totally ashamed of having "vented" so fiercely on a guy who had invested even more time and energy, someone who had far more on the line than I did.

My anger was no doubt rooted in an assumption of prejudice. At that instant, I was sure that the border guard did not see a Canadian citizen applying for a visa to enter the United States for professional purposes. Rather, I assumed that he saw one foreigner (Vic is also Indian) with an offer letter signed by another foreigner masquerading as an American businessman, and that his position gave him the right to enforce his bigotry by blocking Vic's entry into The Promised Land. Most days, I forget that I am a foreigner. Incidents like this one, while not terribly common, still serve as an unnerving reminder of an outsider status that you can't ever quite shake.

Looking back, I can see that this was not just a simple case of racial prejudice. Like many other organizations that deal with lots of data, the government has hopelessly antiquated running "in production." They are looking for specific boxes to fit people into, and any deviation from what is expected brings great potential for confusion or worse. Even though our immigration attorney had warned me, it still came as a shock.

Epilogue: Vic eventually gave up on the officials in Northpoint, and after traveling to a more cosmopolitan city in Canada, he was issued his visa without incident. He has worked for Onward for the past month, and every indication so far is that he will be successful here.

It was just a very, very rough start.

Vijay Mehrota (vijay@onward-net.com) is the CEO of Onward Inc., in Mountain View, Calif.

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