"Have fun with that."

"I will!"

"Maybe you can bring me a list when you think it has everything?"

"We can do that."

Anitam is filling labor shortages at home with a work visa program. You can renew it every season if you have employment lined up. They have twenty million temporary workers and businesses are clamoring for more; there are still shortages. Conquering Earth has been a delightfully demanding-of-all-castes kind of occupation; there are researchers and linguists and anthropologists and marketers and translators and soldiers and police and teachers and doctors and construction workers and retailers. Unemployment in every caste is about one percent, well below the level economists consider healthy. 

There are three hundred million applications to be one of the twenty million temporary workers. They are accordingly picky. No one with a criminal record, no one who can't demonstrate they have the means to support themselves while they find a job, preference for people who've picked up passable Anitami. It bothers Amel slightly, being picky. There are still a lot of terrible places in the world and still no way out of them if you've ever made a mistake. He knows what Aitim would say - that that's a problem best solved by making more opportunities available, not by giving the terribly scarce existing ones to people with a more tragic backstory - so he hasn't raised it with Aitim.

He does enjoy granting visas to people from Calado, though. The permissions system is going to crumble when people can emigrate and he finds this very satisfying to think about.

His clerk has gone on leave to replace someone on Earth who turned out not to season there and in the interim, possibly indefinitely, he has this guest worker! "Good morning."

He had actually forgotten about that. " - oh, morning. Amel Isfina, are you finding everything okay?"

"Alaior Adaro. So far, except perhaps you can tell me what causes people to be filed under 'pending'."

"References haven't gotten back to us, they got flagged and were asked to submit additional documentation to resolve the flag, they'd qualify with language proficiency but not otherwise and were asked to take the test, they asked for review next period instead of this one because of delays at home - I guess maybe those should all be different categories. When you set them to pending you mark a condition to be fulfilled in the online form and then when the condition gets fulfilled they pop out of pending and back onto your to-do list."

She nods. "I'll split them up."

"Thank you! Did you just arrive -"

"I had a two day orientation but other than that yes."

"Well, welcome." 

He reviews specific applications, occasionally, if there's some complicating factor, and he reviews the overall statistics to check if they're matching labor needs, and he handles complaints about the program that need particular attention, and he is supposed to be apprised when there are problems of a kind that might produce a diplomatic headache. He's very busy. Blue labor force participation is up from around fifty percent to eighty, mostly out of patriotism and a distaste at the idea of inviting in blue temporary workers.

Alaior files things and forwards things up to him and interprets Calador work histories - "This probably means a personality conflict rather than a competence issue -"

"Oh? How can you tell?"

"New job in less than a quarter season but in a different city after being dismissed by a municipal level blue."

"And if they were incompetent it'd have taken longer to find something else?"

"And they wouldn't have moved."

Nod. "I've been worrying that screening for people who look like they'll be the least trouble is going to screen out people who have the most to gain by being here - which is one thing if they actually committed a crime, but if they're just in a tight spot because of bad luck it seems such a shame to compound it."

"Yes, there's probably some of those. And if you take people who aren't already between jobs you'll create an employment issue in other countries."

"Don't want to incentivize people to quit before they apply to us in case it'll make their application more favorable, though, then they're in a tight spot if we can't fit them in."

"Right. But people who are already between jobs will have some reason to be and it's not all going to be benign things like 'my contract ended' or 'I wanted more than half a season of leave for the baby'."

"Maybe we should only hire from places where it's likelier to be 'I got blacklisted from my industry by spilling coffee on the wrong person' than 'I'm not very good at my job'."

"I don't know how likely it is in most places."

"I don't think it happens at all here but I probably wouldn't hear about it if it did."