Donald Trump’s temporary immigration ban has caused a lot of distress; even for Nigerian Software Engineer, 28-year-old Celestine Omin, who on Sunday, was travelling from Lagos to the US on business.
For the last six months, Omin had been working for Andela, and for this particular role, Omin was helping NYC-based fintech startup First Access create a JavaScript application for emerging markets and had secured a short-term joint B1/B2 visa.
When he got to the airport, he waited for approximately 20 minutes before being questioned by a Customs and Border Protection officer about his occupation.
I was just asked to balance a Binary Search Tree by JFK’s airport immigration. Welcome to America.
— Celestine Omin (@cyberomin) February 26, 2017
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After a few minutes of interrogating him about the job, the border agent took Omin into a small room and told him to sit down. Another hour passed before a different customs officer came in. This time, he was given a piece of paper and a pen and told him to answer the following questions:
“Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced.”
“What is an abstract class, and why do you need it?”
According to this post, Omin was tired and unprepared for the test as he had not slept in 24 hours due to some flight issues. Because he is a skilled software engineer with more than seven years of experience, Omin said that the questions looked to him like someone with no technical background Googled something like, “Questions to ask a software engineer.”
After about 10 mins, he answered the questions, which were technically correct to him; but the official said he was wrong. “No one would tell me why I was being questioned,” Omin said. “Every single time I asked [the official] why he was asking me these questions, he hushed me… I wasn’t prepared for this. If I had known this was happening beforehand, I would have tried to prepare.”
More time passed and then the official said, “Look, I am going to let you go, but you don’t look convincing to me” Omin later learned that U.S. Customs allowed him into the country after officials called Andela and First Access to corroborate his story. Jeremy Johnson, the co-founder and CEO of Andela, said that his co-founder Christina Sass was the one to receive the call to defend Omin.
For fear of similar roadblocks taking place in the future, Johnson reportedly reached out to Customs and Border Protection to seek additional information surrounding the mishap with Omin’s work visa.
