In fact in five minutes of Googling I was able not only to learn about the visa’s provisions, but that some of the claims made about it in the video were exaggerated or false. For example, true that you can’t get an SSN, but you can get a taxpayer ID and there’s nothing to keep you from opening a bank account with it. You can also attend school. The restriction on self-employment is ridiculous, because entrepreneurs only add value to the economy, not taking anything from anybody. But the work restrictions exist precisely because policy makers know that overwhelmingly, immigrant women will take the opportunity to work if they can (this stuff about “their culture” is nonsense, incidentally – I’ve known many South Asian women all my life and all of them work); and rightly or wrongly, they wrote the law so as not to create a daisy-chain of foreign workers stemming from a single visa. While the lack of provision for women who find themselves in an abusive relationship far from home is alarming, there’s an argument to be made (and probably was made during the drafting of policy) that if you’re only here because you want to live with the person who’s coming here to work, and your relationship with them ends, then you haven’t gotten a reason to be here anymore. That doesn’t do justice to the messy situations people often find themselves in, and much depends on the application, but in and of itself it’s not an atrocity.

And certainly no woman in the United States, regardless of documented status or lack thereof, needs her husband’s legal permission to go to a doctor. That’s just a lie. Although some of the unforeseen consequences of the law are ugly, I take strong exception to the idea that the U.S. government somehow deliberately designed the law to make things as bad as possible for foreign women, or that our lawmakers are somehow responsible for all the crazy stuff that can happen when people try – as we all, in some sense, must – fit our lives into a one-size-fits-all legal regime. According to the old saying “the law is an ass,” and this seems to be an example of that. But there’s a big difference between the law being an ass and the law being a deliberate, nefarious scheme to oppress.

As a mother, I have no words for hearing “babymaker” described as a “base function.” Not “basic,” mind you – “base.” The title of this post implicitly puts those words in the mouths of – well, who exactly isn’t clear… policymakers? South Asian men? That turned out to be dishonest too.

So the moral of the story is, “if your career is essential to your personal identity and self-worth, don’t quit your job to immigrate on a non-working visa.” Simple, really.

I actually agree that “dependent spouse” is an outdated, perhaps even offensive category. I understand that to many people a law like this looks like it is dictating people’s personal arrangements in a 1950s direction. I would absolutely agree if it were anything other than an immigration issue. No country is obligated to take anyone. (I am actually in the process of temporarily immigrating out of the U.S., so I am particularly mindful of that.) The law here isn’t “families can come, but only those in which the wife doesn’t work”; there’s no sex discrimination in working visas, and one can only imagine that if the women are really so highly qualified, they can apply for one on their own. In fact, I know many immigrant women who have, my own mother included. What the law says is, “if you get a working visa, you’re welcome to bring your non-working spouse.” I disagree with this as a matter of policy – if you’re good enough to be here at all, you’re good enough to participate in our economy – but there’s a big difference between disagreeing with a policy and believing that said policy is a nefarious misogynist plot. And the political reality around immigration is that the only way you could convert H4s to working privileges, or start giving out H1Bs on a couples basis, would be to reduce the total number of H1Bs.

Note, also, that these are not women who *need* to work. The unemployed woman had better wardrobe and beauty supplies than I do. If they weren’t doing better with the husband just working here than with both of them working back home, they obviously never would have come in the first place (again, spare the inaccurate and racist comments about “their culture”). Of course it is unjust to deny people the ability to support themselves as needed – as in the case of abused women, which even the video was forced to admit was already corrected several years ago by the VAWA – but I don’t think we’re under any obligation to grant working opportunities on grounds of personal fulfillment. It may even be that what they thought was a “powerful” career back home was really something they floated into on class privilege, and they don’t actually have many portable skills. Even among Americans, one often sees such self-deception about one’s economic worth, particularly among those in generic white-collar business work as opposed to credentialed professionals. Most of the well-groomed cubicle dwellers in your local office park probably wouldn’t do too well in a foreign country, either.

Also, what’s with the Soka Gakkai angle? Has nobody else picked up on this? It seems more like a recruiting tool directed to similarly situated women – I thought the ominous, unsympathetic depiction of Hindu ritual was pretty yucky – than a serious contribution to political discourse. Are they trying to increase their vulnerability to their religious message by making the situation seem worse than it actually is, e.g. the “going to the doctor” thing? Creepy.