“La Migra,” Syrian Style (Al-Hijra wa Al-Jawazaat)

A bad picture of the Immigration office. You get the idea.

I arrived in Damascus in September 2006, and immediately began working on getting my iqama (residency permit). We were told by the American Embassy that once an application for an iqama is turned in, it can still take three months to actually have the iqama in-hand. Immigration has to catch up to your file in its backlog, and it takes time for the authorities to check up on you and your activities in the country. Mukhabarat, or secret police, often come to interview you as well.

In my case, as a researcher, I considered the iqama as extremely important to guarantee my status in the country and to allow me to move more freely and to talk to people in the street and carry out interviews without worrying as much about getting kicked out. Nevertheless, it is now February, and I still am not sure if I will ever get my iqama. This makes me feel a bit insecure, because it means that I have to report to immigration every month or two in order to extend my visa. And each visit to immigration offers authorities a potential chance to get rid of me, for whatever reason. Perhaps I said something they didn’t like. Perhaps I spoke to someone they don’t want me associating with.

The latest installment in this drama of my facing the Syrian immigration authorities goes like this: my Embassy has always maintained that the Syrian Ministry of Culture was the office responsible for offering me official status as a researcher. We have been working on getting a letter of agreement for my research from them since October of last year. This finally arrived in late January, even though we were promised that it would take “a couple of weeks.” (For those familiar with Arab culture, any date/ time promises usually carry with them a connotation of at least a doubling of that amount [i.e., tomorrow ~ day after tomorrow, and two weeks ~ a month]). In the meantime, I kept visiting the immigration office every couple of weeks to see if the letter had arrived yet in a disorganized file stuffed with official papers dedicated to researchers in the country. Not surprisingly, whenever I visited over the past couple months, it had never arrived.

Finally a week ago or so, I was notified by my Embassy that they had received a copy of my letter of agreement from the Ministry of Culture in their office. I went to pick up a copy of it to prove that the letter did, in fact, exist, even if the immigration officials couldn’t find it. I was then told that I was “taken care of” in the eyes of the law, and all I had to do was go to immigration and turn in my application forms to finally get the process rolling.

Instead, I went down to immigration and was told that I need another letter from the Ministry of Work as a researcher, and a chest X-Ray to test for tuberculosis. I explained to him – as I had been advised – that I was not working and didn’t have any Syrian source of income, that I was living off a fellowship. He told me “It doesn’t matter. As a researcher, you have to have a letter from the Ministry of Work also. I have researchers from all over the world in my file. They all had to get this letter too.”

“Then why does the Ministry of Culture, and my Embassy, say that all I need is this letter?”

“Because they don’t know. It’s a new law. And you have to go to Bab Musalla to get your tuberculosis test.”

Great. So I have to pit my Embassy and Syrian immigration against each other in order to get anything done, since my Embassy insists that I am ready to apply for an iqama and that their responsibilities are over with, but immigration, on the other hand, insists that I still need more and more. The worst thing about it is that I took an AIDS test in November (which is mandated for all foreigners staying long-term in the country), and which is now technically expired. And this TB test, if it is indeed a valid law and not just immigration’s way of making my life difficult, then this regulation only came into effect after the new year. If the letter from the Ministry of Culture hadn’t taken so long, all these problems wouldn’t have happened.

In order to understand how unpleasant a visit to any government office is in Syria, you must know that there are no lines, that the only way to get to an employee to help you is to push through a thick crowd of frustrated people (crowds which are only getting worse with Iraqi refugees flooding into Syria daily) who push against you with full-body contact, and try to avoid the people who crowd by pretending that they are friends with an employee at the window (“Mahmoud! How are you!? I just need this form stamped…). For those familiar with the classic Arab parody of government bureaucracy Al-Irhaab wa al-Kabaab (The Terrorist and the Kabob), the sensations and atmosphere are exactly the same.

As it stands, an employee at the Embassy is currently trying to flex her “back-door” muscles and wasta (intermediation through connections) by calling a friend whose father knows an upper-level manager at Immigration to request that they put my iqama application through and stop making trouble for me. So far, no news has come. Perhaps this is a measure of the near-trivial influence the US Embassy has in Damascus. Many of my Syrian friends have offered to call in their connections with immigration as well. It seems that everyone “knows someone who knows someone.” Or, at least, they would like to think they do so they don’t have to feel helpless themselves.