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sufaud@hotmail.com (Sufaud) wrote in message news:<766fc3.0407130706.19ffef70@posting.google.com>...
> The New York Times
> July 13, 2004
>
> An Immigrant, a Terrorist List and a Day Trip Gone Wrong
> By SETH KUGEL
>
>
> Photo:
> http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/07/13/nyregion/13STRANDED.jpg
> Caption:
> Officials at the United States Consulate in Montreal advised Irfan
> Ahmed, an Indian immigrant who lives in Queens, not to leave the city.
>
>
> At 12:01 Thursday morning, Irfan Ahmed, a 35-year-old Indian immigrant
> living in Forest Hills, Queens, left on a bus to Montreal for a
> whirlwind visa renewal tour. His plan was to arrive at the United
> States Consulate for his 8:30 a.m. appointment, wait for his
> paperwork, then take the 4:15 home to New York and be back at his city
> job the next day. He had done it twice before, with no glitch.
>
> But yesterday, four days later, Mr. Ahmed was still in Montreal,
> hoping to clear up an apparent case of mistaken identity after his
> name came up as a match on a government watch list. That delayed the
> renewal of his work visa, which can be issued immediately only by an
> American consulate in a foreign country.
>
> At the consulate, a visa officer handed him a letter that stated,
> "Please be aware that this review may take one month or more to
> complete," and he was advised not to leave Montreal.
>
> His story is hardly extreme - he was not thrown in jail, just stranded
> in a French-speaking city that he barely knows but that is home to the
> foreign American consulate that is closest to New York.
>
> He is exasperated and panicked, however, to be away from work as a
> computer consultant for the city's Human Resources Administration and
> to miss classes at Mercy College, where he is studying education.
>
> "What's the big deal having a name Irfan Ahmed?" he said in a phone
> interview. The name is common among South Asian Muslims. "Everyone has
> this name. Irfan Ahmed is like John Smith."
>
> To Monami Maulik, the director of Desis Rising Up and Moving, a South
> Asian immigrant group in Queens where Mr. Ahmed volunteers, it is
> distressingly unsurprising.
>
> "What's happening with Irfan is something that's happening pretty
> frequently since Sept. 11, especially to Muslim men like him," she
> said. His problem seems particularly ironic, she said, because of his
> volunteer work for her organization and for the Internal Revenue
> Service, where he helps low-income residents file tax returns. (To
> make matters worse, he could have simply filed the renewal application
> by mail, but he said he thought that would take too long.)
>
> On Thursday, when the visa officer told him that his name was on a
> terrorist watch list, he smiled knowingly, he said. This had happened
> before, at Kennedy International Airport, in 2002. Officials there
> told him that an Irfan Ahmed who also had a mother named Begum (in
> fact, a respectful form of address for women in Urdu and Hindi) was on
> a watch list.
>
> He said he had joked with the officers that he could prove his
> identity by showing them an unusual scar on his buttocks, burned in a
> lentil-splattering pressure-cooker incident in India when he was 5. He
> was released in a few hours.
>
> Gary Sheaffer, an officer at the United States Consulate in Montreal,
> said over the weekend that in some cases, waits are inevitable.
> "Sometimes the name is incomplete, sometimes it's an exact match, and
> you've got to find out if that person is the same person," he said.
>
> Mr. Ahmed said he told the visa officer about the 2002 airport
> incident, and could not believe that State Department officials would
> not clear him by simply looking up those records. "We're the No. 1
> country in the world, and this is acceptable?" he said. "This is their
> own inefficiency."
>
> His stay in Montreal began with a flurry of phone calls on a dying
> cellphone. Someone in New York found him a temporary home in the
> one-bedroom apartment of a sympathetic Pakistani named Arshad, where
> he has slept since.
>
> The incident has been a lesson for Mr. Ahmed's sister Mahmooda
> Farooqi, who also lives in Forest Hills and who teaches high school
> chemistry in Manhattan. She also must soon renew her visa, and said
> she would take the mail-in option. A bus trip to Montreal is out of
> the question.
>
> "Never ever," she said. "I don't want to crucify myself like this."
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/nyregion/13stranded.html |