Here in America

"Here in America, we don't use a maiden name as a middle name."

Her emphasis was on "America". Reminding me where I was and who was in charge. As though the huge flag behind her and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services badge on her arm wasn't enough. With her declaration, she scratched out the name I'd printed on the document. The name I wanted.

"You can add it to the last name and hyphenate it," she told me, "but you can't replace your middle name."

"But...." I protested, "Everyone I know did it that way after they got married. I don't want my old middle name."

"You can go through the court for a name change. Did you go to the court?"

Of course I hadn't. I thought my marriage certificate was enough, as it had been for everyone else I knew. I dug through my folder to find it for her.

"That's not good enough. You need to do it in the court. What's your middle name?"

She moved her hand to the top of the form and wrote my middle name where she wanted it to be. A few more quick scratches of her pen, and she added the name I wanted to the "aliases" section. I have aliases now. Like a spy. A criminal.

She sighed. Shook her head. "You'd be surprised how many people come in here and think they can just change their names like that. It doesn't work like that. You need to go to the court."

I couldn't argue with her. You can't argue with immigration officials when they have your future in their hands. You can't risk upsetting someone on the wrong day and having your petition denied. You go along with what they say. You do as they ask. You apologize for being so ignorant, for being in the way, for doing everything so obviously backwards, even though you followed every instruction to the letter. They are right and you are wrong.

I want to be angry. I want to be offended that I was told not just that I'd made a mistake or misread instructions, but that here in America, things are done differently. Because I know that's ridiculous. Besides the fact that America isn't a homogeneous mass, I can point to dozens of personal friends and professional acquaintances who have done exactly what this woman tells me is not allowed. Maybe it's the truth; maybe there's some fine print somewhere that says I can't change my name with USCIS on the basis of a marriage certificate alone. But this woman dismissed me outright when I protested. She held fast to an approved script, instead of listening to me and seeing me as a person who needed help understanding the process. I am Canadian. I am white. I speak flawless English. I can only imagine how much more degrading it must be to face these people if you're wearing a veil or struggling to find your words in your second or third language.

Maybe I'm overreacting. Civil servants aren't known to be the most caring and understanding of individuals, and working with the public can harden and desensitize you until you see everyone as a problem instead of a person. But it is wrong for the words "here in America" to be used by a member of the agency that every single immigrant to this country will need to work with. I am already in America, contributing to America's economy, helping save American lives with my work. Yes, I am an alien here, but I am here.

When I told this story to friends, I was reassured by some that things will improve once I become naturalized and acquire American citizenship. That thought is why I'm hurt and saddened by this experience, and not furious as perhaps I should be. To think that once I cross that line and pledge allegiance and get a tiny American flag to wave, my slate will be clean and it will be like none of this ever happened. I'll be the exact same person before and after that ceremony, but everything will change. I don't know if that's what I want. Do I want to be one of them? But I'm also tired of fighting. What does my name matter, anyway? If they say my middle name has to stay, maybe I'll just keep it.

“But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” -- George Orwell, 1984

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To Those Who Wait

I arrived at the office five minutes after it opened, and every seat was already taken. People who arrived too late and lost the race for a chair were leaning against the back wall, clutching document folders and little paper tickets. I said good morning to the armed security officer at the door, who surprised me by smiling and responding in kind before handing me a little paper ticket of my own. That was the last happy moment in my day.

I found a bare spot between a poster offering the services of Spanish sign language interpreters and a pictogram instructing me not to take photos with my phone, and I joined the sullen group holding up the wall. I glanced down at my ticket. C306. The TV screen bolted into the corner displayed a row of blinking numbers: B46, C394, G30. A voice called out G31, and the screen changed. An old Chinese woman in the middle of a row stood and waved her ticket as she gathered her purse from under her chair. I wanted to hear her call "Bingo," but of course she didn't. She turned and inched unsteadily past the line of politely shifted knees to reach the aisle leading to the clerk's window. As she exited the row, a young man entered it from the other side to take her empty seat.

The numbers crept upwards in small groups. A few Bs were called. Two Cs and a handful of Gs. Then nothing. I glanced up to find the lone clerk sitting at her window and staring out towards the door. Soon, the smiling security guy came in holding a huge set of keys in one hand and pink tennis shoes in the other. He handed both to the clerk, who then changed her shoes and laced them up before calling G35.

The waiting-room musical chairs continued, with vultures swooping on abandoned seats before they could cool back to room temperature. An elderly man came unsteadily through the door with an orthopedic cast on his foot, and sighed as he scanned the full rows of seats. Only after eye contact could no longer be avoided and public shaming was imminent did the young woman with the Kindle stand to offer him a seat. The only smile in the room, besides the one on the security guard now grooving to his iPod, was George Takei's on the poster across the room.

No, George, it wasn't.

C304 and C305 must have had better things to do that morning, because they weren't around to answer when the clerk called them. After almost two hours, it was my turn. I approached the window with a smile, hoping honey would set the right tone for the interaction. 

"Good morning," I began, putting my documents on the counter.

"Ticket and application, please." Her eyes didn't leave her screen.

I gave her my crumpled C306 and my application form #SS-5, filled out and printed from my computer for maximum legibility. She impaled C306 on a metal spike and scanned my application form.

"Name change? You have paperwork?"

I took my marriage certificate from its envelope and handed it to her. Anticipating her next move, I opened my passport to the photo page and extended it towards the window just as she barked "ID." She looked at my passport photo, then at me. She flipped the passport over, read the all-caps CANADA across the front, and snapped it shut.

"Are you a US citizen?" She handed my passport back to me.

"Not yet," I replied. "I have a green card."

"Let me see it."

"The card itself expired last week," I explained. "I have a document here extending it while they process my renewal. This is the official paper that says I'm allowed to live and work in the US." I showed her the document that my immigration lawyer had rushed me by overnight courier.

She glanced at it and pushed it back to me. 

"Green card," she repeated. "I need to see your card."

I sighed and pulled it from my wallet. She took it from me, leaned it up against her computer monitor, and began typing. Her computer beeped. She looked up at me.

"We can't use this. It's expired."

I blinked. 

"I... I know. That's what this other document is for. It extends my green card until they can process the renewal."

"Sorry, the card is expired. You need a valid card."

I resisted the desire to connect my forehead with the desk in front of me. I held the extension notice out again.

"The guy I spoke to on the phone said that this counts as an official document from immigration and I could use it for a name change," I explained. "I've been married almost three years now and I would really, really like to use my married name. I had to wait to renew my green card, because otherwise the fee is almost $600 to change it. This paper is all I get for now - I won't have a physical card for another year, maybe. Are you sure you can't use this?"

She must have sensed something in my voice, because she softened. She took the paper back out of my hands and laid it on her desk to read it more carefully.

"Well, it's got your alien number on it. That's the same as your green card. Let's see if the system will accept this as an expiration date instead."

"I appreciate this so much," I told her. "It means a lot to me that you're trying to help."

She typed away for a moment, and then frowned.

"Honey, I'm sorry," she said, giving me back all my documents. She turned her screen so that I could read it. "Looks like they don't have your name changed with immigration yet, see? We can't do anything until that system has your new name in it. I'm sorry."

I nodded and thanked her again for her effort. I folded my documents neatly into my accordion folder and left the Social Security office, the same person I was when I arrived.


Note: Those of you who follow me on FB or Twitter may be looking for a post about the "Here in America" comment. I'm still working on that post and hope to have it ready by the weekend. 




 

Green Card Update!

I got a letter today.
It looked like this:


I has a happy.

Green Card Update!

My husband got a very official-looking letter in the mail yesterday, with a big blue government seal stamped on it and everything. Considering the return address read "U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services", I flew through the kitchen, poked him in the chest with it, and begged him to open it immediately while I jumped up and down in very unladylike excitement.

The letter inside says that his petition to let his foreign wife stay in this country as a permanent resident has been approved!

So the green card is on its way and I can resume normal breathing. I'm so happy to be done with paperwork for a while! The entire process only took 5 months, which is astounding, considering that most of the stories I read online about other immigrants' experiences said it took forever to get through it all. We had some help filing the paperwork and we made very sure to do everything by the book, from my initial work visa and subsequent renewals at the border, to my "advance parole" document so I could visit home, to the final adjustment of status. I think that helped speed everything up, but I also think we got very lucky and hit a period of quick processing times. I will take small miracles as they occur and thank the stars for them.

I get to stay. I'm so glad.

Immigration Interview - The Interview!

Anticlimactic, really. We left incredibly early, just in case we hit any traffic, because we were told that the worst sin you can commit in the green card process is showing up late to the interview. Much like bringing an umbrella to work guarantees clear skies, waking up at 6am guaranteed that of course we'd have the smoothest time ever getting there, which meant that we spent over 20 minutes sitting in the car in a parking garage because we were too early and weren't sure what time the building opened.

After the airport-style security checkpoint at the door to the federal building (except that we got to keep our shoes on), we headed to Room 103 to wait for my name to be called. There were two immigration-related waiting rooms, with applicants split pretty evenly between the two. I must say, as nervous as I was, I was very glad they didn't direct me to Room 101. Extra points to anyone who gets the reference.

The woman who did our interview was young and friendly and in a cheerful mood, and it was all much easier than I thought it would be. A few questions about our families, where we met, that sort of thing, and then she went through the photos, asking about them, and commenting on how awesome it was that we'd traveled so much. She also exclaimed over the quality of our photo books and asked where we got them made (Snapfish), and asked where we got married because the place was so pretty. We also got a "Oooh, was that at the Ren Fest?" out of her as she flipped through the albums. Not that she wasn't totally professional through the whole thing - she just made us feel a lot less nervous and I'm very grateful that she was the one who picked up our file today.

At the end of the interview, she said that as far as she was concerned, everything was in order and they shouldn't need anything else to approve me, but someone else needed to look over the file first before anything can be done. So I have to wait, again. If any documentation is missing, I'll get a letter within a couple of days asking me to bring it in, and if everything is fine, I'll get a letter in a few weeks saying my green card is on its way.

Almost there. Almost permanent.

Immigration Interview - Photo Printing Attempts

We needed photos for the big interview, so I loaded up the best of the best, a photographic retrospective of our long romantic history, and stuck them on a USB memory key, ready to print them out for scrutiny at the eyes of an immigration officer. Only, we got to Target too late and their photo area was closed. They had a self-serve kiosk with some sort of printer attached to it, so I approached for a look, only to read that it, too, was closed at 9pm when the employees abandon the photo lab. Apparently they have a different concept of self-serve than I do, because I'm fairly sure no member of the Target team is my "self".

No worries, I thought, I'll just leave early Monday and stop at the Target near the hospital before I go to work. Sadly, their photo lab was unmanned at 10:30am. Their self-serve kiosk was flashing a "need software update" message, but I figured I could use the regular kiosk and upload the photos from my drive, let Target print them at some point, and I could come back after work to pick them up. Except that the woman from the customer service desk said I shouldn't do that. She said that the machines are shut down until someone shows up at noon, so I shouldn't "send them now", because I might lose my pictures. I took a moment to try and explain to her how memory works, and how photos sent over the internet in the middle of the night are waiting patiently somewhere until the photo printers warm up, but she was terrified that I would lose my pictures and wouldn't let me use the kiosk. She told me to try Walgreens.

On to Walgreens!

Their kiosks were antiques, but they looked functional, and there was en employee sitting nearby, which was encouraging. No losing photos while the machines warm up at Walgreens! It was one of those kiosks with the various slots for you to stuff in a memory card, a CD, etc, so I poked around looking for a USB port. "You plug in!" "You plug in and touch screen!" This was the very helpful employee, for whom English was not a friend. I showed him my USB key, and indicated that there seemed to be no place to "plug in". He rolled his eyes, walked over, took hold of a cable laying by the side of the keyboard, and waggled it at me. "You plug in!" And then he walked away in disgust at how stupid I was. Well, it was a USB cable. So... unless my USB key was looking for a male-on-male hot gay USB escapade, it was completely useless. In the end I remembered that my memory stick contained an SD card, and just used it that way, and I got my pictures.

Bonus story:

When I went to pick up the photos after work, I shuffled through them to make sure they were all there, and the young girl at the register was watching me and looking at them. "Oh, wow, did you go on... vacation?" Surely confused, as there were pictures from Rome, Paris, Vancouver, DC, New York, and Philadelphia, and some wedding and engagement photos, with some Christmas thrown in for good measure. When I told her it was all for an immigration interview so I could get my green card, her puzzlement grew. Lily-white girl with unaccented (mostly, eh?) English? Immigration? I explained I'm from Canada and married an American, and she said "Wow, I thought they only did that for... you know... foreign countries. Canada's, like, right there."

Fun day.

Immigration Interview

After the paperwork, the background check, and the fingerprints, comes the interrogation.

My green card interview is this week and I'm a nervous wreck despite reading several encouraging posts about others' experiences and having a reassuring chat with the lawyer who's helping us through it. I don't deal well with this sort of situation and I'm very very nervous about forgetting something important, or giving the wrong answer and having everything delayed because of a stupid mistake. And the appointment is at 8:30am in Baltimore, adding traffic to my list of terrors - what if we're late? The lawyer said that no matter what else happens, do not be late, so I guess I'll be sitting in the car at 5am to be sure.

I've got piles and piles of paperwork to bring with me. They want originals and copies of our birth certificates, passports, and marriage certificate. They want proof that my husband can support me financially - never mind that I lived on my own for a year when I moved here and was perfectly successful in supporting myself thankyouverymuch. He's got tax returns and pay stubs and letters from his employers saying he's working there. I'm bringing the same information for myself, just in case. I have every single document USCIS has sent me since the beginning of the process, from the "we got your application" letter to my work permit and my appointment notice for this interview. And then we have the evidence that we're in a legitimate good-faith marriage.

Because, you know, so many Canadians are rushing across the border and entering into sham marriages with Americans so they can live here and escape from universal health care and hockey.

So we've got a wedding album, several pictures of us from the last few years, including many of us with various members of both our families. We've got the mortgage documents with both our names on it, the joint accounts at the bank, the title to the car, even the paperwork from the last vet visit because the vet gave my little Horton my husband's last name. I've got a Christmas card and a birthday card from a few years ago (I'm sentimental, I save things). I have some emails with travel plans from when we were long-distance and racking up the miles on USAirways.

I hope it's enough. I hope they don't deport me. Or waterboard me.

Biometrics day - update

Easy peasy. There was nobody else ahead of me so I was able to walk right in and get everything finished within about fifteen minutes. It was a nondescript little storefront in a strip mall, with the unhelpful words "application processing center" on the front door.

Step One: Surly government worker checks my ID, stamps my paperwork, and hands me a clipboard. He instructs me to fill out the demographic info and bring it to the next guy.


Step Two: Fill out demographic info and bring it to the next guy.
Step two-and-a-half: Cry inside at the weight I had to put down because it's a crime to lie to the government.

Step Three: Next guy wipes down my fingers and smooshes them onto a glass panel and my fingerprints appear on a screen. My right ring finger was a rebel and required three smooshes before giving up a decent print.

Side note: my fingerprints are pretty. I wonder if I can get "prints" of them enlarged and framed as artwork.

Step Four: Take off earrings and glasses, tie back hair, and sit unsmilingly for a photo. They say you can't smile because they need the photo to be identifiable through face recognition software, but I think it's because these employees have forgotten what smiling is and it would confuse and frighten them.

The end. As usual, I stressed out over nothing. The next part is waiting for our summons for an interview in the Baltimore office, where they will determine that we're actually married because we, you know, love each other and stuff, and I'm not just some foreign hussy marrying an American dupe so I can get a green card. No idea how long it will be until the interview, unfortunately, but I'm hoping it's before our first anniversary.

Biometrics day

Today I will be fingerprinted and photographed and put into a database. I am doing this because it's the next step in the green card process. I'm nervous about getting there on time so I want to leave very early, just in case we get lost or hit some traffic or can't find parking. In big BOLD letters on my appointment notice it says that failing to show up for my scheduled appointment will be considered as abandonment of the petition. I'm sure they won't tear up my paperwork if we're a few minutes late, but I feel like these folks have complete control over whether I get to stay, and what if we get an asshole who's having a bad day and wants to spread his misery around? I've encountered those everywhere - I'm just hoping everyone we deal with today got up on the right side of the bed.

The entire process is very stressful. It's a whole lot of paperwork (in duplicate or triplicate) and waiting, and confusing instructions. I understand the need for the background checks and the fingerprints, but it makes me feel like a criminal. It doesn't help that the document I received allowing me to travel freely while my case is pending is called "Advance Parole". At least I don't have a parole officer or an electronic ankle bracelet tracking my movements. I promise to be better at "parole" than Lindsay Lohan.

Oh well, whatever it takes to be able to stay here with my husband and not get my ass deported back to the Great White North. I just hope they don't implant a microchip in my skin...