The Hindu : International : An immigrant, a terror list and a trip gone wrong

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jul 14, 2004

International

International

An immigrant, a terror list and a trip gone wrong

By Seth Kugel

NEW YORK, JULY 13. At 12.01 on the morning of July 8, Irfan Ahmed, a 35-year-old Indian immigrant living in the Queens area of New York City, left by bus to Montreal, Canada, for a whirlwind visa renewal tour. His plan was to reach the U.S. Consulate for his 8.30 a.m. appointment, wait for his paperwork, then take the 4.15 bus home to New York and be back at his city job the next day. He had done it twice before, with no glitch.

But on Monday, July 12, 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Consulate that is closest to New York.

He is exasperated and panicked, however, to be away from his job as a computer consultant for New York City's Human Resources Administration, as well as missing classes at Mercy College, where he is studying education.

``What's the big deal having a name Irfan Ahmed?'' he asked 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 organisation in Queens where Mr. Ahmed does volunteer work, it is distressingly unsurprising. ``What's happening with Irfan is something that's happening pretty frequently since September 11, especially to Muslim men like him,'' she said. His problem seems particularly ironic, she said, because of his volunteer work for her organisation 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, Mr. Ahmed said. This had happened before, at the Kennedy International Airport, in 2002. Officials there told him that an Irfan Ahmed who also had a mother named Begum 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 back, burned in a lentil-splattering pressure-cooker incident in India when he was five. He was released in a few hours.

Gary Sheaffer, an officer at the U.S. 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 cell phone. 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 Queens 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.''

- New York Time News Service.

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