On the radio

Visa adjudication is pretty repetitive and although quite interesting, fairly predictable. But, every once in a while, and hopefully more often, there are outreach opportunities. When it comes to outreach from the Consular section, it usually means doing town hall type meetings (often for American Citizens) or presenting at a forum or something similar (often information about student visas for prospective college students. If you weren’t aware, getting foreigners to attend U.S. colleges is a very, very popular thing among almost everyone involved. It allows for (hopefully) the US to make a great impression on motivated, ambitious young people from around the world, and it allows for foreigners to pay full tuition (very few scholarships or aid for foreigners) and thus subsidize the education of Americans. But, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to speak at either of these type of events. But, I did get the chance to speak to a much larger audience.

Almost every Friday, someone from the Consulate heads to Radio Cristal, 870 AM, one of the more popular radio news stations in coastal Ecuador. It’s been around for 58 years, and is a very well trusted news source across the country. It focuses a bit more on Guayaquil news, as that’s where it is, but it does have listeners throughout the country. The guy we talked to said the listenership varies from 50,000 to double that for certain programs, peak times. That isn’t really a lot of people, but it is a very reliable group. Unlike the pop music FM stations, Radio Cristal is a station people will put on when cooking, cleaning the house, driving to/from work, or working in labor jobs-not one they’ll quickly flip through looking for a hot song. It does all sorts of news, and some music, kind of like a local AM station you can think of.

Every Friday during the lunch time, there’s the dedicated Consulate hour. The format is pretty simple, there’s the host, an experienced radio news guy (he does morning news every day) and then 2-3 people from the Consulate. He introduces the show, and then takes questions from callers, an email address, and their Facebook page. He does a good job of kind of rephrasing and clarifying the questions. By this point there aren’t too many surprises, so we’ve got out talking points down pretty well. Which is probably clear by the fact they let me go on the show during maybe my fifth or sixth week working at the Consulate. Most of the questions are specific to one person’s case, and we give general answers, but answers that are helpful. I went with my supervisor’s boss-the lady that is the head of the entire Consular section, as well as with an older Ecuadorian woman, who has been working in the immigration visa section for some time. Besides introducing myself, I just fielded two questions, as my boss took another two, and then there were three or so about immigrant visas and lawful permanent resident rules.  I made a bit of a joke in one of my answers, but otherwise spit out the official talking points pretty much word for word.

Personally, I think this is an incredibly great thing to do and something we should be doing more and more of. While there are certainly lots of details about visa eligibility and reasons that people are denied the ability to travel to the US that we want to keep secret or at least not promote, there are plenty of tips, guidelines, and rules that we can share with prospective tourists, students, workers, and immigrants that will make their application process easier, and my job easier (less to explain to people, less people showing up with the wrong documents/forms).