Lousy Immigrants

Got a visit from an immigration officer today. He came to our school and was checking the work visas of our foreign teachers. I’d really like to make it sound scary but it wasn’t. Maybe if he had been wearing dark glasses and a suit and was chewing peppermint gum he would have fit my mental image of an imigrattion officer. Hard to take a guy in a tan windbreaker all that seriously.

I was happy to answer his questions, mainly because the assistant director had to pull me out of a class to talk to him. He asked to see Nick and I’s work card (Patrick wasn’t there) he jotted some stuff on a notepad and gave Nick back his card. He told me there was a problem with mine and he’d have to speak with me alone. So he took me into one of the empty classrooms and sat me down. Once again I really wish there was some tension here to relate but between the windbreaker and me getting out of precious minutes of work made me pretty upbeat.

Turns out he didn’t have me registered to teach at the school on the paper he had, he had nick and Patrick and someone named Joshua. Who wasn’t the guy that I replaced, he was the guy before him. So it was obviously just a matter of some files that weren’t updated, and after a series of phone calls the guy made he said that it was all cleared up. He explained that they had gotten some complaints about Oxford English School and wanted to know if I had ever been asked to work illegally. I told him no, which is truthful as far as I know. I did mention that there used to be something fishy going on with the elementary schools we teach at but that I hadn’t experienced anything personally. Now he seemed pretty interested in the elementary school stuff, and asked me quite a few questions about that. I take this to mean that a) we aren’t legally allowed to work at the elementary schools in addition to our private schools or b) he just plain did not understand my English and kept trying to get me to rephrase my answers. They are both quite possible, and frankly they both concern me about as much as eachother (which is very little). I was just happy to keep talking and get out of class. I didn’t really think too much about whether I would be screwing my school over with what I was saying. I think the chances are pretty low personally, as I really didn’t add much of anything to whatever investigation they were doing. For all I know talking to me was the extent of the investigation. I have no idea who would have submitted these complaints to Oxford, probably some former employee from a while back. Once again I wish I could work up some tension over this, but it occurs to me that I don’t really care if my school gets in trouble. In any case I’m not doing anything illegal so I know that I won’t be deported.

So after 15 minutes of intense interrogation (trying to build that dramatic tension) I headed back to my class, which had just started when I left. I would have figured since the Assistant Director pulled me out of the class she would have put someone in there (herself for instance) to look after the class until I got back. But that was not to be. Twelve 7 year old kids had been left on their own for fifteen minutes with nothing to do. It was like seeing a room full of care bears on speed. They were pretty much useless for any sort of teaching after that point, it took all my wiles to convince them to sit down long enough to play a game. I also found out today that if you distractedly tell a class with decent English they can use as much as they want when referring to the increasingly popular scented handsanitizer I carry around they will take it to extremes. Its kind of fun to watch kids just slather their hands with tons of the stuff and derive unending joy from it.