A software engineer from Lagos, Nigeria, is claiming that he was made to sit a written test by US airport immigration officers because they weren’t convinced he was telling the truth about his skills.
According to social networking site LinkedIn , Celestine Omin, 28, landed in New York’s JFK airport last Sunday after a 24-hour flight from Nigeria.
Mr Omin is employed by Andela , a tech start-up with offices in New York, Lagos, Nairobi and San Francisco.
The firm says it recruits “the most talented developers on the African continent” and connects them with tech employers in the US for potential job vacancies. Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg
visited Andela’s office in Lagos last year.
Mr Omin had reportedly been granted a short-term visa to work with First Access , a financial technology company in New York’s Manhattan district.
After being asked a series of questions by a US Customs and Border Protection officer, he was taken into a room for further checks.
“Your visa says you are a software engineer. Is that correct?” an officer is reported to have asked Mr Omin.
He says he was then given a piece of paper and a pen and told to answer these two questions to prove he is actually a software engineer:
“Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced.”
“What is an abstract class, and why do you need it?”
Mr Omin told LinkedIn it seemed to him the questions had been “Googled” by “someone with no technical background”.
He said later on Twitter that he was “too tired to even think”, and told the officer they could “talk about other computer science concepts”.
After he handed back his answers, he was told by the officer that they were wrong. He said he presumed he was required to provide “the Wikipedia definition” for the questions.
However, he was even more surprised a little later when the officer told him he was “free to go”.
“Look, I am going to let you go, but you don’t look convincing to me,” said the officer, according to Mr Omin.
“I didn’t say anything back. I just walked out.”
He later found out that border protection officers had phoned Andela to verify his story.
The BBC has approached the Customs and Border Protection department for a comment but has yet to receive a reply.
What’s wrong in being asked to verify information on who you claim to be.
I think we should also adopt some of those verification methods at our airports and weed out all these casual Muhindi and Chinamen from competing for basic level jobs… not forgetting activist expatriates
Whites have committed plenty of evil from slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow etc. yet the world still gives them the benefit of doubt. If this guy was a white, high school drop out trying to pass as an engineer no one would’ve doubted his skills.
That’s the way of the world. Being a nyeuthi, I remember in undergrad & grad school we had to work twice as harder. But we let the grades speak for themselves. Lakini Nigerians, hapana. Even their fellow West Africans like Ghanaians hawataki uhusiano nao.
Sure, you had to work twice as hard to get half the recognition. The question becomes whether they subjected him to a test because he’s Nigerian or black in general?
The level of ignorance on this board is amazing. Even if one were to shock readers with their divergent views, you have to do so intelligently. Just because you’ve personally have had bad experiences with some Kenyans, you can’t paint all Kenyans with the same brush. More poignantly, you can’t even say that the immigration officials have been TOLD to ask such questions. They just see that their leader is a bigot and take cue from there.
You from kenya @4makind ,I’m the border patrol and I ask you " Are you from kenya?, name me two subtribes in the ogiek community.Please write the answers on this piece of paper"
What will you say ?