{"id":51629,"date":"2012-08-19T09:11:42","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T09:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=51629"},"modified":"2012-08-19T09:13:44","modified_gmt":"2012-08-19T09:13:44","slug":"green-card-lottery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/green-card-lottery\/","title":{"rendered":"Green Card Lottery"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Atossa Araxia Abrahamian –\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I entered the green card lottery in the fall of 2010. It was a surprisingly simple form, composed mostly of questions on contact information, but a box that read \u201cCountry Claimed\u201d gave me pause. Most applicants write in wherever they were born, but for me it was a bit more complicated; I could not, in good faith, claim any country as my own.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I was born in Canada on July 19, 1986. My Iranian-born parents (of Armenian and Russian extraction) were living in Geneva at the time, but Switzerland grants citizenship only to the children of naturalized citizens. My parents, who both worked for the United Nations, didn\u2019t know if they would live there long enough to meet the residency requirements. I was destined to inherit an Iranian passport, and they knew all too well the lifetime of travel and work restrictions that would entail.<\/p>\n

So they came up with a third-country solution. My mother would fly to Vancouver, British Columbia, wearing an oversize raincoat just weeks before her due date. She would give birth at a local hospital, stay with her brother, who lived there, until my paperwork was processed, and return to Geneva with a Canadian baby in tow. It worked so well that she repeated the process four years later with my brother.<\/p>\n

My mother was finally naturalized when I was 8, so I was able to become a Swiss citizen after all. But my papers were, once again, misleading. Growing up, I spoke four languages at home \u2014 Armenian with my father, Russian with my mother and English and French with baby sitters \u2014 and attended international schools in which no one cared where you were from unless it was during the World Cup. I lived in Switzerland, but for all intents and purposes, I grew up on international soil.<\/p>\n

When I went to college in New York, I was invited to Armenian events on the basis of my last name and Iranian ones on account of my first name, and I didn\u2019t think too much about where I came from. I was busy making friends and falling in love with the city. I spent summers working here, and it was the first place I\u2019d ever lived that felt like home to me. Having spent my entire (albeit short) adult life here, I couldn\u2019t imagine leaving. So when I graduated, I found myself in need of a work visa.<\/p>\n

There are several types of visas under which foreigners can work here, from seasonal farm work programs to O visas for \u201cextraordinary aliens\u201d \u2014\u00a0Nobel Prize<\/a>\u00a0winners, celebrities and occasionally writers. For someone like me, just starting out in a career, this one was a long shot. The most common visa among college graduates is the H1-B. But the application process takes months, and the employer is required to shell out thousands of dollars in legal fees to pay for sponsorship. The foreigner\u2019s legal status in the country also depends on maintaining his or her employment.<\/p>\n

When I graduated, right before the Great Recession, no one was sponsoring. I asked a lawyer if there was anything I could do to stay. He took my $100 consultation fee and asked if I had a boyfriend I could marry.<\/p>\n

I left. But I had no idea where to go. I felt like a foreigner in Geneva, and most of my friends had left. I\u2019d spent no time in Canada. I had nothing in Iran. I tried out Russia for size, but lasted barely six weeks (life advice: don\u2019t go to Russia if you\u2019re depressed). Eventually, I found a job at an international organization in Paris and spent the year Skyping with my New York friends, listening to WNYC reruns on my laptop and applying to graduate schools back in the United States.<\/p>\n

Had I not had the good fortune and the funds to go back to school, I don\u2019t know where in the world I\u2019d be. In 2010, I was able to return to New York for a master\u2019s program in journalism, and I spent that year working harder than I ever had before. I would have to make up for my nationality with labor and talent, a school counselor told me. When I interviewed for jobs, I felt like a leper. My international classmates joked that coming clean about a limited work permit at a job interview was like telling someone you had herpes on a first date.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, I entered the green card \u2014 also known as the \u201cdiversity\u201d \u2014 lottery. They call it a lottery for good reason; the odds of winning are minute. But I\u2019d marked the deadline in my calendar the year before, and it seemed like a waste to let it pass. I didn\u2019t have the right-size photograph to attach to my application, so my boyfriend snapped a picture of me standing against a dusty white wall in our kitchen. It was 7 a.m., and head-on, I looked like a sleepy convict. I wrote down my phone number and address, and under \u201cCountry Claimed,\u201d settled on Switzerland.<\/p>\n

Last summer, when I found out I\u2019d won, I couldn\u2019t believe it could be that simple. I called three lawyers to make sure it was real. They said it was.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Two painful months later, I received a letter from the United States Embassy in Bern. It informed me that I was disqualified from the lottery because I\u2019d claimed the wrong country of origin. Although I had Swiss citizenship, I was not a Swiss native, because I was born in Canada. Canadians typically aren\u2019t eligible for the lottery, but if I\u2019d claimed Iran, where my parents were born, I wouldn\u2019t have had any trouble. I appealed and complained, but nothing could be done. My mother\u2019s trip in the summer of 1986 came back to bite me. The punch line, of course, was that I was too diverse for the diversity lottery. Even I can\u2019t tell you where I\u2019m from.<\/p>\n

I used to think of\u00a0immigration<\/a>\u00a0as a problem for the migrant poor, not something that affected college-educated global citizens. I now know that getting a work permit is a complicated and often heartbreaking process, no matter who you are. Thanks to months of pitching articles to whoever would let me write them \u2014 not to mention a good lawyer \u2014 I finally obtained an O visa this year. I don\u2019t have to get married, to a man or a job, to have a career in the United States. But I was able to stay only because I had the time, resources and support to make it work. For most people, the odds are stacked against them from beginning to end.<\/p>\n

*A journalist at Reuters and\u00a0an editor<\/a>\u00a0at The New Inquiry.<\/p>\n

Courtesy New York Times<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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