Hassall-Free Fridays | Fear, self-loathing and government

It’s the week after spring break, and some of you still have hangovers.

Hopefully not alcohol-induced (if so, please seek medical attention), but another kind of spring break hangover. I am referring, of course, to that terrible, excruciating feeling when you realize that there was a whole bunch of things you were supposed to have done by now but didn’t.

For most students, this is a matter of schoolwork. Professors — Machiavellian scoundrels that they are — frequently schedule midterms or major assignments for the week after break. They tell us to “just do a little work over the break, just a little” — knowing full well we will do nothing of the sort. The result is that the week we return, we all rush to complete work and prepare for tests in a kind of painful anti-spring break.

This year, I found myself facing not only that, but another — more pressing — hangover exacerbated by the distraction of break.

As an international student, I am entitled to 12 months of what is called Optional Practical Training — work related to my field of study. The application process requires some doing, as you submit an array of documents first to Penn’s International Student and Scholar Services, and then — after paying a hefty fee — to a government office in Texas. And then you wait around for three months without having any idea of whether your application is being positively received.

Because of that long processing delay, it behooves you to apply early. So I was all ready to send off my documents in the week before spring break, only to forget. Returning to Penn, I found myself behind on the clock and consumed by paranoia.

Almost all foreigners who have ever come into contact with it possess an instinctual fear of the United States immigration and customs bureaucracy. Sit on any international flight or in any airline lounge and you’ll hear horror stories about hours spent in lines, paperwork denied without reason or small children detained for questioning because they share the name of a terrorist whose crimes precede their birth. And, of course, that one form that still asks you whether you worked for Nazi Germany.

So most international students try to have as little interaction with that bureaucracy as they can. But sometimes it can’t be avoided. OPT is a standard arrangement that most international students take advantage of.

Furthermore, some students have more exotic concerns. Wharton junior Pawel Hytry, a far more entrepreneurial fellow than I, regrets that it is “almost impossible for an international student to start a company in the United States.” It seems that whenever the international student has to interface with the regulatory arrangements governing his or her stay in America, the result is frustration, despair and occasionally terror.

Truth be told, much of this fear is built on myth. While there are some concrete real problems with the system, it’s really not that bad.

For all my paranoia, I’ve never had an actual problem when dealing with U.S. immigration or customs officials or with the processing of any documents of mine. If anything, things are getting better, and as someone who remembers vividly being in an LAX immigration line in 2000, those things have gotten a lot quicker.

Yet, despite progress, the fear remains. A report published last year by the U.S. Travel Association, an organization that lobbies the government on behalf of the travel industry, concluded that the country needs to “improve the visa and entry processes so that visitors are not discouraged from visiting.”

International students, tourists and all others who find themselves with cause to come to America need to be made to feel like guests, not security threats until proven innocent. Until the United States finds a way to overcome that so oft irrational fear, more foreigners will join the swelling tide of people who no longer bother to visit America at all.

Luke Hassall is a College senior from Auckland, New Zealand. His e-mail address is hassall@theDP.com. Hassall-Free Fridays appears every other Friday.

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