Balance of merit
A daughter of mine recently got her Ph.D from Harvard and came home for a few weeks to meet family and friends before returning to Harvard to do research as a prestigious Swartz Fellow in the newly established Department of Neuroscience. Her sponsors were so keen to have her that they paid a huge amount of money as special fees, so that her H-1B visa for a temporary worker could be processed in only two weeks. The embassy here too was very cooperative and gave her a visa within two days of the interview.
However, when she checked her visa she was horrified to see that it was valid only for one year, though Harvard had explicitly asked for the usual three-year multiple entry permit. She is required to attend conferences in many countries as part of her job, and so asked the visa officers in the embassy about it.
They politely told her that they could not unfortunately do anything about it, as this condition of issuing a one-year visa followed a reciprocity agreement between the governments of the two countries. Since the USA gives a three-year multiple entry permission to most other countries, it appears that this reciprocal clause must have come from the insistence of the government of Bangladesh.
Are we to understand that, since before the financial crunch, highly skilled Americans have been queuing up in throngs to work in Bangladesh, endangering Bangladeshis, so that the government thought it was to this country's greater advantage to put restrictions on Bangladeshis going abroad than allow the universally allowed period to Americans reciprocally?
We would love to hear the Foreign Ministry's version.
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