And Still They Come

In Warsaw the visa entrance to the American embassy is on Ulica Piekna -- Beautiful Street. And it has got prettier. In the past four years, the Americans have installed flower beds and wooden benches for the people in line for visa interviews. Perhaps the amenities are meant to soften the disappointment: now that the communists are no longer playing watchdog, it falls to embassy personnel to limit the traffic to America. And although roughly 10 times as many people will be granted visas this year as were in 1987, veterans of Ulica Piekna say half of those waiting here will be turned down.

It is a lovely, mild day, and the line is about 150 people long. There are matronly women and miniskirted girls, jeans-clad students and a mustachioed man in black suit and white socks -- a peasant in his Sunday Mass outfit. Robert, from the town of Plock, is among those in line. "I came to seek a visa because in Poland, there are very limited prospects of acquiring anything by work," he says. "I expect a different existence in America. I make about $200 a month. I wonder whether anybody would work for $200 a month in the U.S."

Elsewhere, the lines and the motives for standing in them, are much the same. In Beijing another line of 150 represents a far smaller slice of the general population, in part because the regime continues to frown on emigration. Still, a young lawyer explains why he wants to go to Meiguo, the Beautiful Country, the Mandarin name for America: "My colleagues tried to discourage me from going," he says. "But I feel I have to improve myself." In a displaced-persons camp on the outskirts of Nairobi, a cheery Somali is also waiting patiently to go to America, but he is in luck: he already has a visa and a seat on an upcoming flight. "There is no tribalism in the U.S.," he explains as a motive for his move. "There is a state of peace."

Embassy visa lines delineate America's outermost border; they are where cultural diversity begins. If America is a braided rope, its strands lead back to a hundred countries, each strand a line. Sometimes the line to reach America is metaphorical; more often it is as tangible as a battered suitcase, fear sweat and molded plastic furniture.

In the middle decades of the century, there was an apparent consistency to the kinds of people who waited in line and their reasons for being there. But the massive expulsions and migrations of the 1970s and '80s, combined with the recent geopolitical switch from the cold war to the new world order, scrambled all that. These days, by the time people get permission to leave, their initial motivation might have disappeared, sometimes replaced by another. Nonetheless, the longings themselves are familiar: to escape war, to find religious freedom, to join relatives, to make an honest buck.

Here are some lives that have been deeply touched by the powerful desire to realize those longings: