The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

This week, the true story of how Rita got a visa to enter the United States of America…

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

These famous lines from “The New Colossus” by Jewish-American poet Emma Lazarus are engraved on the Statue of Liberty whose open arms have welcomed immigrants for generations. But Lady Liberty is not in quite such a welcoming mood lately. In this age of economic anxiety immigration is a topic ripe for demagoguery, and there is no shortage of demagogues ready and willing to take up the challenge.

According to some politicians and pundits the borders of the United States are so easily penetrated by illegal immigrants of all stripes, drug dealers, farm laborers, terrorists, pregnant women, and other assorted “wretched refuse,” that something drastic must be done. Maybe an electrified fence, a Berlin-style wall, armed posses, national identity cards, nuclear deterrents! No measure is too extreme to secure the homeland. I’m not so alarmed, because in my experience it is actually quite difficult to get into the United States. I didn’t have to cross an inhospitable desert under the guns of vigilantes, or ford a raging river, or stow-away in a shipping container, but the U. S. Department of State did almost succeed in keeping me out. Unbelievable as it may seem, back in 1970 I was perceived as some sort of threat to the security of the United States.

At the time I was a 22-year-old recent university graduate planning to visit my American boyfriend. Several of my friends were going to live in Canada, so I also applied for Canadian immigration papers. If things didn’t work out with the boyfriend I would join my friends in Vancouver. The first clue that there might be trouble with this plan came when a friend advised me to get the Canadian papers first, before applying for an American Visitor’s Visa. According to him, officials at the American Embassy in London suspected that young visitors really intended to stay in the country. Declaring my Canadian immigration papers on the Visitor’s Visa application would be evidence that I had other plans. I took his advice and proceeded accordingly. So I was totally shocked and in tears when my Visitor’s Visa application was returned stamped “Denied.” What possible objection could they have to my visiting their country? I had visited the previous summer and left before my visa expired, violating no laws as far as I knew. I was a young woman in love (foolishly as it turned out), now separated from my boyfriend by a heartless bureaucracy.

The hero of this story is my father, for it was he who came to the rescue in an example of selfless parental love that I didn’t fully appreciate till years later. He took my application papers and traveled up to London to confront officials at the American Embassy in person. He was gone all day. When my father took on a cause he could be very determined and tenacious. As he described it when he finally returned home to an anxiously waiting daughter, the first answer he got was a brusque “no” without explanation. But he wore down the first layers of officialdom, insisting on taking his case higher and higher up the chain of command. “Why don’t you want English people to see America? Aren’t you proud of your country?” he challenged them. Then the reasoning behind the mysterious denial emerged. It wasn’t that English people in general weren’t welcome, the State Department factotum explained. It was young university-educated people specifically. They go over and join all these anti-war demonstrations and stir up trouble on campuses, he told my father. “We don’t want these young radicals influencing American youth” was a direct quote. I would hardly describe my young self as a wild-eyed radical, just an average young English woman with a naïve faith in socialism and, of course, opposed to the war in Vietnam. But the American officials knew absolutely nothing about me. Apparently they were so spooked by the anti-war demonstrations in Grosvenor Square outside the Embassy that they attempted to exclude an entire generation from their country.

I’ll never know what exactly my father said to change their minds. Perhaps he painted a picture of me as a Young Conservative warmonger; perhaps he just wore them down by refusing to give up. All I know is he returned home with my Visitor’s Visa and two weeks later I left England for the New World.

When my Visa was due to expire I did just what the Embassy officials had feared. I stayed in the country. But I did it by legal means. Reader, I married him.

Rita Byrne Tull is an ex-pat librarian who lives in Maryland.