Source: Roger Froikin, November 9, 2023
One might wonder why there seems to be so many Palestinians in the USA Today. There have always been some since the 1950’s but the big bulk of immigration into the USA came between 1968 and 1975. And there is a reason that Americans should understand.
When one applies for an American immigrant-resident visa, one makes an application and there are some strict qualifications that must be met. An applicant needs to have a clean police record from every country in which one has lived. An applicant needs to have a working knowledge of English. An applicant must have proof that he or she will have a source of support – a job or a connection to someone with a job, so as not to be on welfare. The process generally, if a visa is granted (and that is a big “if”), it can take 8-12 months, and includes a consular interview. This is the bare minimum. In some nations there is a lottery and applicants often can wait for years.
But something happened in the East Jerusalem consulate, where all the workers were Arabs, that handled all visa applications in those years. There was an American woman who handled all the applications. She was a very tall blond woman who appeared to be very unfriendly.
Jews who applied for immigration visas generally had problems. Long waits of many many
months or years, lost paperwork requiring the whole process to begin again, even when the
requests were for people married to Americans who had a preference by law, the same delays and accidents happened.
Yet, the Consulate grounds were always filled with Arabs, mostly Palestinians, many Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqi’s, and from elsewhere. Talking to many of them, I discovered that they waiting no more than a few hours to get their visas —- no interview, no police record checks, no English, no guarantees of support, and all I spoke with were going, they said, to Detroit or Chicago, with a few that said California or Florida. I roughly estimated that this consulate must have processed 10’s of thousands of these visa applications that were fraudulent.
We found out a couple years later, that the woman approving and rushing through applications was sleeping with a man who was eventually arrested as a terrorist. She was returned to the USA by the State Department and ended up wortking for the Arab League office in DC.
One final note. Congresswoman Tlaib’s mother received her visa at that time from that
Consulate. Her father got a visa later based on family reunification. Perhaps had the rules been followed and the law mattered, Rashia Tlaib might not be in the USA.
