Another INS Screwup? (Arabic-speaking Dopers, please confirm!)

Factual Questions
1

Our office just received notification that INS has made yet another screwup in its public information releases about the special registration procedures for nonimmigrants from certain countries who are deemed to produce terrorists. (The first mistake, IMHO, was the boneheaded nature of this program; it will accomplish nothing useful, and will create great inconvenience for thousands of innocent people, not to mention a flurry of Federal lawsuits. The second mistake was designating Armenia as a country whose nationals are subject to special registration; INS has since admitted this mistake and retracted the designation of Armenia.)

So now, without further ado, from the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association: “The Arabic-language notice on the INS public website, and being distributed by INS and community groups around the country, indicates that people who ‘entered the US legally on or AFTER’ September 30, 2002 must register. It should refer to people who entered ‘on or BEFORE 9/30.’”

Can anyone confirm that this is indeed the case? If it is, I think the entire Special Registration program will go out the window, or need to be substantially revamped (maybe new, later deadlines?), because any moron will have an excuse for failure to comply with the current requirements. (Not that they didn’t already; in many cases, INS officers have been completely uninformed about the requirements. There are credible reports that people have been turned away after being informed by INS that they weren’t required to register for a variety of reasons.) There will definitely be lawsuits over this.

Info on Special Registration can be found at:

http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/lawenfor/specialreg/index.htm

If you scroll down a bit, you’ll see the Arabic-language notice (it’s a .pdf file).

2

No clue, sorry, but I’ll bump this from the bottom of Page 2 for you. :slight_smile:

BTW, there are a number of documents on the page that are in Arabic, for different “Call In” groups and different Qs and As. Which one is it exactly that you want translated?

3

Thanks for the bump! I was beginning to think nobody would ever read the darn thing…where’s Collounsbury when you need him? Oh yeah, banned…

The first Call-In notice on the page (titled “Call-In Group 3: Notice of Special Registration Procedures,” for nationals of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) seems to be the one of concern. At least there’s a 30 inserted into the text. I’d certainly be interested in hearing about any errors in the other Arabic-language documents, though, or in any of the other translations (into Farsi, Korean, Pashtu, and French, anyway; I can handle the Spanish myself).

4

Its so sad, all I hear about the INS is how terrible they are from both people trying to get in and taxpayers. How can this be? Is there a severe budget shortage over there or something? They do have computers, right?

5

Of course they do! I believe that they have two TRS-80’s. Oh, and a VIC-20 with a broken monitor.

6

Gah, if only I had an Arabic dictionary here. I see the word in question, but I don’t know what it means. It’s fabl or something close to that.

7

If you mean the first bulleted paragraph in the December 18 file, it says “on or before” (fi aw qabl) September 30, 2002.

Perhaps they corrected the file in a hurry after the mistake was pointed out.

Kyla, the f has one dot, the q has two. Otherwise they look the same. qabl means ‘before’. If it said “after,” that would be ba‘da.