Indian High-Tech Workers Find U.S. Port of Reentry in Mexico

Three-thirty a.m. In the darkness, lights are flickering on in the windows of Econo Lodge No. 119, a bleached horseshoe of a motel close by the scrub-brush runways of El Paso International Airport.

Something is happening here on the frontier of the new world economy. By 4:15 a.m., guests begin to leave their rooms and gather outside the motel office. There are nine of them, shuffling nervously in the predawn chill. They don’t talk much.

They wait.

Just before 4:30, Marco Antonio Moreno pulls up in a tan Ford Club Wagon van with Texas plates. He checks names as his passengers climb aboard for the trip across the border into Mexico.

Vikram Kallepu.

Venkatesh Ramachandran.

Srinivas Bandaru.

Irfan Ashraf.

And so it goes through the entire list of nine--eight from India, one from Pakistan. All work in the computer industry, most of them as software engineers. All are neatly dressed, most in jackets and ties, some carrying briefcases. And all are here on the same strange mission: They are about to leave the United States for a few hours so they can legally reenter the United States. For this, they have come from all over the country, from as far away as Boston and California’s Silicon Valley.

Marco starts up the van and they lurch into the night.

Each day, Moreno and his father, Victor Garcia, take as many as three vanloads of people--almost always from India or Pakistan, almost always software engineers--across the border from El Paso to Juarez, there to stand in serpentine lines that wind around and through the U.S. Consulate.

The passengers are in the United States under a program designed to lure the best and brightest of the world’s high-tech workers to American corporations for stints of up to six years. By far the largest number of these workers are from India, home to a rapidly growing software industry.

They are in the United States legally, but there’s a catch: If they leave the country, they can’t get back in without a new visa.

And that’s where things get weird.

The visas should be available from U.S. consulates or embassies anywhere in the world. A software engineer returning home to, say, Bombay, for a vacation ought to be able to walk into the U.S. Consulate there and get his passport stamped with the appropriate “multiple-entry” visa. This allows him to reenter the United States as many times as he wants.

*

But through word of mouth, and over the Internet, the rumor has spread: It’s risky. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who was turned down by the U.S. Consulate in their home country and thereby stranded thousands of miles from work.

The solution: Juarez. Here, the grapevine has it, rejections are rare. And even when people are rejected, they still can cross back into the United States because of what’s known as the “contiguous territory rule.”

No one gets stranded in Juarez.

And so, a curious pilgrimage route has been established. In some pockets of the Internet, Victor Garcia--a man who, not so long ago, was a mechanic and part-time taxi driver--has become a famous man. Go to Victor, people say in chat groups with such names as soc.culture.indian. Victor will take care of you. “Don Garcia,” some call him.

Don Garcia, who doesn’t own a computer.

The van rumbles toward the border. Moreno steers over the crest of a hill. All of El Paso and Juarez are splayed before him, the twin cities as a common quilt of lights. But there’s something odd about the view. Because Juarez uses old-fashioned mercury vapor lamps for its street lights and El Paso uses modern high-pressure sodium, the border stands out as the line dividing the harsher white light of Mexico from the softer, copper-colored light of the United States.

“Only in the night can we see the difference,” says Moreno, a soft-spoken, 21-year-old native of Juarez who lives in El Paso. “Because in the day, the two cities are so close.”

By about 5 a.m., the van is crossing the bridge over the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Cars are backed up for 45 minutes heading into the United States, but there is almost no traffic headed into Mexico.

At the border checkpoint, a bored-looking Mexican official checks passports and counts heads. “Uno, dos, tres. . . . “ They add up; he waves them through. Soon, they are piling out of the van in front of the U.S. Consulate, a walled-in compound of undistinguished sandstone-colored buildings plopped down on a strip of motels and restaurants. It has the generic look of so many U.S. outposts in Third World countries; it could as easily be in Bombay or Karachi.

*

Already, there are hundreds of people, almost all Mexican, waiting in line. Vendors are selling coffee, pastries, gum. People are chatting, laughing. The desert sky has not yet begun to lighten. The consulate won’t open until 7 a.m.

And so they wait.

Passing the time, the passengers begin to tell their stories.

There is Sudhir Kamath, a 27-year-old software engineer from Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, who holds a master’s degree from Northern Illinois University and now works in Chicago. He’s planning to visit family in India and wants to make sure he doesn’t get stuck there.

Anyway, he said, “If you’re going back home after two or three years, you don’t want to spend time waiting in line at the consulate.”

There are a husband and wife from Boston via Madras--Gopal and Rajshree Subramanian, a handsome couple in their late 20s. Gopal has a visa already, but Rajshree needs one so she can do software consulting work abroad, most likely in Europe.

Gopal got his visa in India, with no problems. “If you have all the papers right, it shouldn’t be a problem,” he says. He looks around and recalls the scene at the consulate in Bombay. “Exactly the same,” he says.

First in line is Vikram Kallepu who, with his broad face and deep brown complexion, could pass for Mexican. That’s his problem.

Kallepu is a 26-year-old computer programmer from Hyderabad, India, now working for a company in McLean, Va. In December, he came to Juarez to get a visa so he could travel to India on vacation.

Everything went smoothly until he got back to the motel in El Paso and took a close look at his visa.

In the place where it was supposed to list his country of origin, it said this: “Mexico.”

When Kallepu got back to Virginia, he called the State Department. Sorry, he was told. To fix the mistake, he would have to return to the consulate that issued the visa. So here he was again, out $500 for another trip to Juarez, smiling at the insanity of his misfortune.

“The State Department,” he says, “is so bad.”

Last in line is Syed Ashraf, who, being Pakistani, is the odd man out in this crowd. He is 27, holds a master’s degree in computer science from City College of New York and works for a company in Santa Clara, Calif. He wants a visa so he can go on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Initially shy, Ashraf warms after a few minutes and begins to talk about the controversy surrounding the immigration program, known as H-1B, that allows him and the others to stay and work in the United States.

American-born software workers have attacked the program, saying companies use it to hire low-wage foreign workers instead. The Labor Department has expressed similar concerns, and has fined some companies for abuses.

*

The immigration bill passed in the last congressional session originally contained sharp limits on the H-1B program, but the software industry mounted a vigorous campaign to save it.

Ashraf, like everyone else in line this day, says he is paid the prevailing wage for his job. He doesn’t doubt that some employers abuse the program but, as someone who sometimes hires software engineers to design complex “real-time” software, he sees a need for foreign-born workers.

“If I’m looking for the correct kind of experience, all I see are Indian resumes and Oriental resumes,” he says. By Oriental, he specifically means workers from China, Japan, Korea and Thailand. “It’s very rare that I find someone who’s a Caucasian American.”

And, he says, the immigrants work harder. “You just set them up in front of a computer and they’re going to work from 9 in the morning to 9 at night.”

By the end of this day, those will sound like civilized hours.

At 7 a.m., the huge line, three and four people wide in places, begins to move--but only for Mexicans, who are given priority.

The non-Mexicans continue to wait. At 9:30, they are admitted to the compound, only to wait in another line that winds through a garden. At 10 a.m., that line moves into Building No. 3. There are more lines inside. The applicants line up to pay $20, then wait to be called for an interview.

And wait.

Kallepu, the Indian mistaken for Mexican, is the first from the van to get his interview. It takes less than one minute to get his error fixed. The examiner says he won’t have to pay any additional fees. Victory!

The others’ interviews take scarcely longer. The examiners check a few papers, ask a couple of questions--wham, bam, visa.

Well, sort of.

After the interviews, the applicants are told to return at 3 p.m. to pick up their visas. That leaves them with about four hours to kill, so most of them go to a nearby mall to have lunch.

And wait.

After lunch, hanging out at the nearly deserted mall, Gopal and Rajshree Subramanian talk about the future. Eventually, they say, the Indian software industry will be robust enough to employ all the people who are here today.

*

Anyway, all things considered, they’d rather live in India. Rajshree seems especially homesick.

By midafternoon, a nasty wind has begun to whiplash Juarez with a gritty barrage of dust. Walking back to the consulate, the nine applicants shield their eyes from the sting. They are a bit giddy now, both exhausted and elated to know their ordeal is nearing an end.

They get back in line, and move through the consulate fairly quickly this time. Then they pile into cabs to head for the bridge back, where Victor Garcia is supposed to meet them.

At 4:25 p.m., they reach the bridge, only to discover that they must stand in another line, in another cheerless office. This time, they need to be admitted back into the United States by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

They wait.

“It’s a tough procedure,” Venkatesh Ramachandran grumbles. “It never ends.”

At 5:15 p.m., they begin reaching the window at the INS office. It takes only a moment for each applicant to be approved.

They get in another line to pay a $6 entry fee.

Finally, the end. Ramachandran looks at a card in his hand. “Admitted H-1B until Oct. 01, 1998.”

“This is what we’ve strived for,” he says with a sigh.

In the parking lot on the U.S. side of the bridge, a slender man with shaggy black hair, black jeans, black cowboy boots and a huge white grin stands next to a van. “Hi! How are you? I’m Victor Garcia!”

His passengers climb wearily into the van. “I heard everybody got it!” Garcia exclaims. “That’s very nice!”

They pull away and into the streets of El Paso, which are hazy with the dust that defines the border. They head back to the Econo Lodge. They are smiling, loose, and bone-weary. Voices percolate through the van.

“Finally!” someone says.

“Oh God, what a day,” says another.

“End of the story,” someone else pipes up. “Right?”