Hi. I represent you overseas. I'm part of the Foreign Service. I'm about to be furloughed.
I'm not one of the real diplomats (my wife does that), but I do IT work at the consulate here in Mumbai. We process over 200,000 visa requests annually for Indian citizens hoping to visit the US. Yes, some are H1-B visas, which I know are controversial, but the vast majority aren't. The vast majority are J-1 and J-2 visas, which are the sort of tourist, visitor, and student exchange that we should all be supporting whole-heartedly.
Mumbai alone has a 300,000-strong alumni network of Ivy-league graduates who meet regularly. This is the kind of cultural diplomacy you absolutely cannot buy: we earned it with centuries of building the finest universities on earth.
The United States remains the place everybody wants to go. When I put my card down at the bar, I immediately get a dozen people who want it. If you haven't been to the developing world, you may not understand how unbelievably rich the US is compared to that. That's the comparison I see and hear every day.
I know there is no shortage of stories about how bad a shutdown would be, but I wanted to add the perspective from here. (See here for my humorous take on how my malaria prophylaxis will stop and how I'll use gin & tonic as a replacement. Semi-humorous.)
Roughly half of these 200,000 per year applicants are students of one sort or another. These people represent in my mind the best parts of US immigration policy. The best & brightest of the world continue to come to our shores to study, and enrich our institutions of higher learning. Like I said, that's public diplomacy you can't buy; we had to earn it by building those schools and their reputation.
Unfortunately, at 9:30 am tomorrow (we're 9 and a half hours ahead of Eastern time; I can get into why but it would take too long to explain) that will all stop. Visa applications can still but dropped off, but will not be processed.
Don't get me started on the stupidity here: consulates are self-funding (visa applications pay for all of our cultural programming as well as consular duties). But the House has specifically forbidden even self-funding agencies like consulates.
That's the kind of sociopaths we're up against. A quarter million Indians want to come visit their family or study in the US, and House Republicans would rather make less money than allow them that, all for a political point.
My job is not really the issue. I can take a furlough (hell, my wife and I can do a second honeymoon if it lasts long enough). Obviously we'll miss the money, but we're not who's getting hurt here. The real people getting hurt are the kids from the Mumbai high school who got all their ducks in a row to apply to a US university for the spring, but will show up at an empty consulate, all because Republicans are fucking tyrannical douchebags.
This isn't OK. This isn't cool. This isn't right. We have to stop this.
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They constantly flag approachers with their machineguns, which is only OK because they aren't loaded. 
The Marines remain armed and on duty. Note that Benghazi had no Marines.
