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| January 23, 2003 | Thursday | Ziqa’ad 19, 1423 |
Students find registration rules ambiguous
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 22: Pakistani students, who are required to register with the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) by Feb 21, are worried because rules for registration are ambiguous.
“I was nervous because I didn’t know exactly what the process would entail and I could only guess,” says Kamran Bokhari, a Pakistani student of University of Texas, Austin, who went for INS registration last week. “The rules of the game are not set,” he told the Austin American-Statesman newspaper.
Bokhari, who is 34 and has lived in the United States on and off for 20 years, said that
his papers seemed in order, but he couldn’t help feeling anxious.
In the company of about a dozen other Pakistani students, Bokhari went to the INS office where the group was interviewed, photographed and fingerprinted.
Bokhari, a graduate student in Middle Eastern studies at the LBJ School, said the trip was tense. “There was this anxiety about what’s going to happen,” he said. “Your imagination runs wild.”
After the interview, Bokhari was asked to smile for a digital camera and then had his fingerprints taken.
Finally, the caseworker handed back Bokhari’s documents and gave him a date for an appointment next year.
Bokhari and others made it through the registration process without incident.
So far in Austin, Muslim community leaders say they haven’t heard of anyone being detained or deported as a result of the registration. But fears persist as the INS list of countries continues to expand.
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