Bribes for Visas Ho Chi Minh City Style

As reported in a story by the McClatchy Washington Bureau, a foreign service officer, Michael T. Sestak, who was head of the nonimmigrant visa unit in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam has been charged criminally for allegedly making millions of dollars accepting bribes in return for issuing visas.  While graft is exceedingly rare in the U.S. State Department, it is striking that these allegations implicate HCMC, which is widely regarded as one of the worst possible consulates for genuine visa applicants to apply for visas on the planet.  In fact, I filed a class action lawsuit in 2010 alleging that the HCMC Consulate General engaged in arbitrary and capricious adjudication resulting in unreasonable denials, and then failed to give the applicants any opportunity to rebut the consular allegations of sham marriage.  The consular officers and their local staff are immune from any review by the "Doctrine of Consular Nonreviewability", a court doctrine from the 1800's which cuts off any oversight of the visa denial process whatsoever, even if the petitioner is a U.S. citizen.  The lawsuit was dismissed under this antiquated Doctrine by the federal court in 2011, and in 2012 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that, due to all of the visa applicants being granted visas by HCMC the second time around, the case was moot.  The charges brought against Sestak should be a wake up call to the State Department and Congress that the Doctrine of Consular Nonreviewability not only erodes our basic form of government, but it also generates the kind of demand for access to visas that Mr. Sestak is alleged to have fulfilled, for a price.  The time for the Doctrine to be abolished has come.