Via Prague

I share a flat with Islam, a guy about my age who is originally from Bangladesh. Yesterday Islam got up really early to go to the foreign police to renew his visa. While I have a one-year visa, Islam only gets issued one-month visas, mostly because he hails from a Third World country. This time around he was hoping to get a six-month visa. He works as a cook in a kinokavarna in our neighborhood, and has a Czech girlfriend whom he's hoping to marry.
He got home last night. 'How did it go?' I asked.
'Only month,' he sighed.
'You didn't get the six-month visa?'
'No, only one month. And next time -- maybe not.'
'So what will you do?'
His plan is to marry Monika as soon as possible. With the marriage, he'll get a two-year visa and he and Monika can go ahead on their plans to open a restaurant.
The hitch is he's got to get all the documents, the license, his birth certificate and divorce paper (he and his wife back in Bangladesh divorced) translated into Czech. He'll end up spending probably 10,000 crowns (roughly $700) to get married. He's also having to pay another 8,000 crowns to an advocate who will argue his visa case in court.
'Ah, everything you need money,' he says. 'The money, always coming and going. Now I have one month. It is do or die.'
I thought about this quite a bit, especially in light of my own visa issues, and also having read in the Times-Standard about the Mexican workers laid off at Sun Valley last week because of improper documentation. My school in Prague helped me through the visa process. So while it wasn't exactly cheap for me, at least I had people guiding me through the process. On top of that, despite the horrific hassles at the foreign police, I got a one-year visa, which I now must renew. Islam has really no one to help him, and I can't help but wonder if the folks at Sun Valley (and other employers in the States) actually take the trouble to sponsor foreign employees in getting their working visas. I know the US system must be at least as overloaded and inefficient, if not more so, than here in the Czech Republic, but you'd think there would be some way to expedite the process. And to be honest, it made me angry to see some of the feedback the T-S got from readers, those unsympathetic voices who said, 'Get legal, or get out!' I wonder if any of these people have ever taken the trouble to go to the INS office, or if any of these people have ever lived and worked in a foreign country.
Being an American, and a teacher -- a relatively respected profession -- I'm seen as an asset. It's not the same,unfortunately, for people like Islam.
'Ah James,' he said to me one night. 'There are two worlds. The world you live in, and the world I live in.'