In the parking lot of the new Jain temple in Bartlett, workers are prying open crates of white marble shipped from India: slabs, carved columns, elephants and lions, intricate domes for the interior niches where 24 stone deities sit.
All would seem to be ready for wrapping the cinder-block walls in marble and adding the ornamentation, but there’s a problem. Five masons needed to set the stone in place are stuck in India.
The U.S. government has yet to issue the visas the craftsmen applied for in September, delaying the project by at least a year, temple officials said.
Nationwide, Eastern religions are struggling to import workers they regard as essential to the practice of their faith but who do not fit traditional categories under which religious organizations obtain visas.
In some cases, like the Bartlett Jains, temples try to bring in workers with special skills as well as deep familiarity with their sacred iconography. Masons must know how to fit 441,000 pounds of stone together without any steel binding and be able to accurately rechisel details of carvings damaged in shipping, said Vinod Patel, whose Austin, Texas, construction firm is overseeing the stonework in Bartlett.
Other temples are trying to bring in people who perform a ritual purpose, such as musicians, and priests who cook food for the deities in Hindu temples.
The delay is making the Bartlett congregation restless.
“People who donate, everybody calls every single day,” Patel said. “They say, ‘You take our money, and you don’t provide us anything!’ How can we answer?”
The temple, known as the Jain Society of Metropolitan Chicago, has spent $26,000 on attorneys and a consultant in an attempt to get the workers here. Patel has flown to Delhi to plead his case, and the consultant followed on Wednesday. But so far, no luck.
Temple trustees blame security concerns in a post-Sept. 11 world. Yet, Jainism is a faith, which dates to as early as the 7th Century B.C., that teaches a path to enlightenment through a life founded on non-violence to all creatures. Jains comprise less than 1 percent of the Indian population.
While the Bartlett temple trustees blame embassy officials nervous about admitting security risks, Hindus facing similar construction problems say federal changes to visa regulations are an issue as well. Projects have stopped in several places for lack of workers, said Ishani Chowdhury, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation in Kensington, Md.
“These temples that need people to come in and perform these essential services really can’t,” Chowdhury said.
The new regulations, which some embassies already have applied, list categories of workers in terms better suited to Judeo- Christian practice, Chowdhury said. Cantors, missionaries and even ritual slaughter supervisors can enter the U.S. under the R-1 religious visa category. But stonemasons-essential in faiths whose rituals center around carved images of the gods-are not on the list.
U.S. officials revised the system because they were seeking to eliminate fraud, said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokeswoman Chris Rhatigan. The stonemasons would have to apply under a category that includes hotel workers and seasonal laborers.
But that kind of visa has an annual cap of 66,000, and “we have reached the limit in the last two fiscal years,” Rhatigan said.
Construction has stalled at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery in Hawaii because, after bringing in three groups of stonemasons since 2000, six workers were denied visas this year, said Rev. Swami Arumugam Katir, managing editor of Hinduism Today Magazine. The Hawaii center has a grand temple in the making, with 26 million pounds of stone, carved in India.
The comment period for the new visa rule changes ends Monday, and Katir was in Washington last week to meet with Hawaii’s congressional delegation and immigration officials in an attempt to push for a more inclusive description of religious workers.
“All of a sudden, there’s this clampdown,” he said. “These new rules are overly restrictive. What the Jains ran into is exactly what we?re facing.”
The Jains are aware of the broader problem. But they say a slip of the lip may have compounded their troubles.
Patel, who was in Delhi the day the men were interviewed at the embassy, said they were asked in interviews where they were heading. One mason said “Austin” instead of “Bartlett,” knowing the construction company is based in Texas. That didn’t match the paperwork. A suspicious consular official said he had doubts about the visas, Patel said.
“The guy who said that, every month is calling me in Texas,” Patel said. “I am based in Texas; I live in Texas. . . . That’s why he knows Texas. He doesn’t know, because he never moved from his home state in India. What is Chicago? He doesn’t know it.”
A spokesman with the U.S. Consulate in New Delhi did not return a reporter’s phone call or e-mail asking about the Jain workers’ visas.
After the interviews in New Delhi, a government official examined the marble in Bartlett, but temple officials say they never saw his report.
The temple’s consultant, Thomas Hutson, a former U.S. diplomat who has served in 41 countries, sympathizes with overworked embassy staff and says officials abroad are understandably edgy about issuing a visa to the wrong person.
“Before 9/11, the thrust was service,” said Hutson, who pleaded the temple?s case in Delhi. “After 9/11, it’s all about security. And you never make a mistake by refusing a visa.”
Inside the unfinished temple, the 24 carved deities sit in exalted positions, eyes closed, faces at peace.
“They don’t have any attachment to any bodily thing,” said Prabodh Vaidya, temple trustee. “So when we come to the temple and pray to them, it’s not that they are going to do anything for us. It’s that the environment from them helps you to have a positive karma.”
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