A few years ago, an Italian friend of mine asked me if I would hire her son Luca as an intern for the summer. Carlotta ran an educational publishing company in Parma, just south of Milan, and Luca was attending a local business school and wanted to get experience in either a finance or marketing department of an American company so he could improve his English while utilizing the business skills he was acquiring in college.
Having no idea what the process of obtaining a visa to the U.S. for Luca would be like, I agreed immediately to give him an internship but asked Carlotta if Luca might be interested in working in our London office, which would have been easy since the UK was part of the EU at that time; there would be no visa issues and it’s just a quick, cheap flight between London and Milan. But she said that Luca preferred the States, which meant Chicago for me, since he had already spent a few summers in England.
I agreed, and began to take the necessary steps to get Luca a temporary work visa and a place to stay in Chicago for 12 weeks within a short subway distance to our office.
I had no idea how hard getting him a visa would be—how long it would take, how many hoops I would have to jump through, how much mental energy it would require, and how expensive it would be.
Getting a visa for Luca was very much like what I imagined it would be like to get an advanced degree in sociology.
The governmental offices that I had to work with, once I discovered which ones they were, required that I fill out dozens of forms, most of which had to be notarized and sent by regular post. Some I had to fill out several times, because they either lost them or found “errors.” Each form required fees, which I had to send as money orders. In addition, I had to write original essays on what Luca would be doing, not in general terms but week by week, what goals we had established for him, who his supervisors would be, their credentials, and how we would measure his progress. I had to commit to writing a review of his work and send it in by a certain date. That commitment had to be notarized.
On his end, Luca too had an onerous requirement of forms to fill out, fees to pay, and, on specific dates, had to make a two-hour trip to a visa office In Italy—twice—to finally get the travel visa.
In the end, it cost me more than $2,500 and Luca another $200 to get his 12-week visa.
The system is clearly designed to discourage anyone from sponsoring a summer work visa for a foreigner, even a citizen of a country with a government on friendly terms with the U.S. But I was determined to plow through the bureaucracy. For me, it was a kind of mission that turned into an obsession; I wasn’t going to let the system break me or keep Luca from coming to the U.S.
Both of us were able to get the paperwork done on time for him to get his visa, travel permissions, and flight. I picked Luca up at the airport to make sure that he passed through customs without incident. Before he had left Italy, he was able to find a roommate with a spare room in an apartment just a few subway stops from the office.
He had a great summer. He turned out to be a wonderful young man with a great attitude and personality. He was an excellent worker and enjoyed his colleagues, learned new skills, and improved his English. During his internship his parents came over from Italy for a five-day visit to see where he was working and living, tour Chicago, and to celebrate Luca’s birthday.
There were plenty of positive outcomes from this saga, even though the process of getting Luca here was unnecessarily painful. I’m convinced that most people will not go through with it—it is time-consuming, tricky, and costly. And there is no way to predict any of the outcomes. At any stage the visa could have been denied, for any arbitrary reason. In this case, though, good things came from stubborn perseverance. I didn’t let Luca or his mother know just how fraught with peril the process was.
But I would do it again if necessary—in a heart beat.
