Last night we hosted another instalment of our monthly "book"club at our place. It's an excuse to meet up for a nice evening of food and drink. Note that the word "book" is in quotes because we alternate each meeting between reading a book and watching a movie. As you can tell from the photos, last night we watched a Russian movie entitled Ballad of a Soldier.
Capping a growing trend, members of the Whitehead institute outnumbered the folks from the Harvard Medical Campus for the first time in our bookclub's three year history.
Now not only are most of our club members biomedical scientists, but also foreign scientists. And it is no surprise that over the course of the night, the discussion drifted to visa issues.
One of our bookclub members is currently in Austria right now. She was suppose to be back for this meeting, but unfortunately she had problems renewing her visa. Apparently the American consulate in Vienna refused to stamp her H1-B visa because she had filled in her documents by hand and not typed. The instructions stated that she must fill out the "online document". Fortunately, she was able to schedule a second appointment with the consulate but not in time to catch her flight back to Logan.
We then exchanged other visa horror stories.
One postdoc working in an immunology lab at the Whitehead was denied a visa when she told the consulate officer that she worked with "natural killer cells". Apparently the officer thought that this type of research had obvious terrorism connections.
Another postdoc was denied a visa renewal when she told the officer that she was perfecting nuclear cell transfer technology. But what scared the officer in this third example was not that the scientist was essentially working on stemcells or cloning ... it was that she used the word nuclear. Once they heard it, all sorts of alarm bells must have gone off, even though she was a biomedical researcher.
So what to do? How do you explain your research to someone with the ability to obstruct your ability to enter the country?
A good friend, now in California, once told me to always declare that you are working on cancer - and to be honest, almost every part of biomedical science can be related to cancer in one way or another. And of course when they find out that you are a cancer-specialist not only will they let you back in, but they will fall over backwards to help you.
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And of course when they find out that you are a cancer-specialist not only will they let you back in, but they will fall over backwards to help you.
Heck, they'll probably even ask you to take a look at a funny-looking lump on their back . . .
Look, I work in computers, and it is a natural part of my job every day to explain technical things to non-technical people. If someone asks me what I do, I don't start waxing on about "crontab" or "rootkit" or "CMS" or (shockingly?) even mere "HTML."
Is my work fascinating and exciting? Absolutely. Do I have the gall to believe everyone else finds it fascinating and exciting (and, by extension, that they have bothered to learn about it)? Absolutely not.
Or, to put it even more to the point - do I think that a person who meets hundreds of people every day (eg - the visa reviewer), and has probably come across thousands of different professions in their career, understands all of those jobs and their jargon in depth? Um. No.
At least from the examples you've given, it sounds like the real problem is that your friends aren't willing to speak about their work in a way non-scientists can understand. And, yes, this includes having the commonsense to realize that the general populace is no longer familiar with any but one of the three definitions of "nuclear."
In other words, to answer your question So what to do? How do you explain your research to someone with the ability to obstruct your ability to enter the country?. Don't lie about some stupid cancer bs. You'll be in far worse trouble if you get caught out making things up. Just explain in non-technical terms that do not have threatening connotations. Start out with a one sentence intro that is wildly, insanely jargony, and that no typical person would possibly understand. Then say, "I bet that sounded crazy, huh?" or "And, since that almost definitely made total sense..." (This is actually a cute little joke, and puts the person at ease when they realize you are human being). That's when you bust out the 2 paragraph explanation you would normally use for a 6th grader. Make sure to include 2-3 interjections along the lines of "does that make sense so far?" and "okay?"
If you're really worried, ask them to explain back to you what you just said in their own words. It will quickly allow you to determine whether they have misunderstood what "natural killer cells" are.
AT,
I think that my friend was just trying to be sarcastic with his cancer remark. And I must say that it is true that most biomedical research can be couched as being pertinent to cancer or some other disease.
With regards to the visa stories, there are much more serious cases. A good friend of mine has been waiting 2 years for her greencard. She's not sure why, and they won't tell her. Because of many useless rules, dealing with immigration services can be a nightmare. Almost every foreign scholar that I've known has had some sort of problem with border or consulate employees. Not that they are all bad, but once you've uttered something "suspicious" you are flagged and then your file can sit in purgatory for quite a while. Why does the US government have all these hoops that scholars have to jump through? I thought that we academics were needed here.
It sounds like the biggest problem is being specific ("natural killer cells") rather than general ("specialized cells in the immune system"). It's easy to forget that non-scientists are usually satisfied by an explanation without the details.
The funniest (scariest) immigration story I heard was a postdoc in the biosciences who had trouble getting his visa renewed because his degree said he was a Doctor of Philosophy, which clearly didn't qualify him for his employment in a science lab. It was cleared up when he found an immigration official who had heard of PhD degrees.
It isn't just academics who are having a hard time. My wife's green card never showed up during the 6 month wait time. After about 8-9 months she finally went to ask what happened and then she got it in less than a month. As far as she could tell, they had just left her file sitting on a desk somewhere and forgotten about it. There was no problem, just incompetence.
Two other non-science stories of friends of ours. One lived in the US and worked illegally for 6 years, got married, and had a green card in three months. Another friend, moved here and did everything by the book. Two years on, still no green card. The system is a mess for everyone.
Sadly, science is so international that we are really feeling the brunt of all of this paranoia about foreigners. I suspect, however, that for the issues described AT is probably correct. Keep it simple and give people things they grasp that will satisfy their curiosity. Kind of common sense actually. Lets face it, you don't put "contains viral DNA" on every plasmid you send abroad. It may be accurate but it would be stupid to say.
Of course, this still doesn't address the fact that we are losing a lot of great scientists to Europe for no good reason.
Discussing these cases with someone in the lab I remembered another detail that was omitted from the above stories. The gal who told the officer that she worked on nuclear cell transfer was denied an extension of her visa. Fortunately for her, the Whitehead and Senator Ted Kennedy stepped in to fix the problem.
I guess I should include the caveat that I understand my previous suggestions will not guarantee positive results - for many of the reasons listed here by other commenters. I have had many foreign friends have difficulty with visas for absurd reasons, including a Bermudian (now there's a terrifying lot for you) who was deported because she got a job with a law firm when her degree was in forensic science - the rationale being that the two subjects were not closely enough related. Then there's the Australian who has been here for 10+ years in the same, steady programming job but who still hasn't been given her actual green card - just perpetual work visas that must be renewed, with difficulty, every year. I could go on.
So, yes, the process is infuriating, baffling, arbitrary, and unnecessarily restrictive. Which is why it makes it so important to pay attention to the little things that one does have control over - like how to explain a job in a way that makes sense and comes across in the most positive, relevant light. The rest is almost completely up to chance and the whim of the processing agents.
"Of course, this still doesn't address the fact that we are losing a lot of great scientists to Europe for no good reason."
The funding situation here also contributes to this issue.