Tomorrow morning I will become a citizen of the United States and thus a dual citizen of this country and of Canada. A few weeks ago I mentioned this in Dawn Chorus and someone asked if I would write a diary about the experience. After a bit of discussion I thought I would expand it to discussion my entire experience with US Immigration. As was said at the time - most readers of this site have no experience with immigration officials except for passing through customs.
It turns out that tomorrow is going to be very busy day and I doubt I will have time to do any diarying. So I am going to post this as the 'prelude' leading up to the grand finale. I'll post another diary on the ceremony itself in the next few days.
Over the last 27.5 years I have held four different types of status within the US: student, temporary worker, someone who had filed for permanent residency and was waiting, and permanent resident. Tomorrow I will have a fifth status, citizen. After the orange icon of transition I'll go through these one at a time. It'll be more interesting than it sounds, I promise!
Part 1: Prehistory.
I was born in the town of Niagara Falls, Ontario and lived the first almost 23 years of my life within a dozen miles of the US border. Despite the proximity of the border, we didn't cross it very often, visiting the zoo in Buffalo, or something like that about once a year. And about three times in my childhood we embarked on longer trips in the US. Crossing the border was very casual in the 60s and 70s. Going into the US we'd be asked about our citizenship, where we lived, and how long and why we were visiting the US. Then we'd be waved through. Although we were supposed to have ID it was never inspected.
Part 2: International Student (1984-1987, 1987-1993)^
^Yes, I know, I was a student for a really long time.
In 1984 I decided to go to graduate school at the University of Oklahoma. I was pretty excited about moving somewhere so exotic where there were a lot of reptiles. I didn't think much about the fact that legal details relating to moving to another country would need to be addressed. I knew quite a few Americans that had moved to Canada and some Canadians that had moved to the US and it didn't seem like a big deal. The University offered me a teaching assistantship and it seemed like I was all set
I went down early, in May, to take part in the summer session at OU's Biological Station before graduate school started in earnest in August. A few weeks before I left a bunch of paperwork arrived in the mail. It was my immigration documents. I got my mom to take me to the border and we got it processed in advance so everything would be in place when I actually left. This involved actually going inside the Customs office at the border crossing. There was a picture of Reagan on the wall which made the fact that I was moving somewhere different seem much more real.
I had a great time at the Biological Station that summer but when I got to Norman I found myself short of money and long on time with nothing to do for a couple of weeks until classes started. Worse I had forgotten to bring a check book so I had no way to easily transfer money down from Canada. On an impulse I used most of the rest of my money to go home.
When I headed back to Oklahoma on the plane I ran into my first immigration glitch. I had received 3 documents from INS through the university. One was some sort of student ID document that never appeared to be used for anything as far as I could tell. Another was an I-94 which is a departure record document (more about which later) and the third was an extensive multi-page deal which detailed the program I was in, its expected duration, my source of financial support and so on. This document had a signature page. A university official was supposed to sign this every time a student left the US to verify that the individual was, in fact, still a student. I hadn't officially started grad school yet, hadn't been to the orientation, and didn't know this. So I had left the US without my signature.
I got yelled at for about 30 seconds for not following directions and then the official stamped my form and waved me through.
Getting the signature turned out to be the only real hassle to being an international student. I couldn't work off campus but I wouldn't have had time to in any event. I didn't have to worry about the I-94, nicely stapled in my passport. It is supposed to be surrendered when I left the US (so they would know I was gone and not nefariously hanging around) but short trips to Canada or Mexico were exempt. And as all of my international travel was short trips to Canada the I-94 was basically just decoration in my passport.
In 1987 I finished my masters, returned to Ontario for the summer, and then came back to the US to pursue my PhD in Chicago. I got new Immigration documents. As I approached the border I realized I hadn't turned in my I-94 from Oklahoma when I left. Would I get in trouble? Get turned back?
The official removed it from my passport without a word and put a new one in. And it was six more years of getting signatures each time I left.
I was quickly learning that a lot of the officials really would rather not deal with more paperwork that absolutely necessary. I went to Costa Rica and again forgot to turn in my I-94 On my return I filled out a new one on the plane only to have the official throw it away and wave me through when he saw my old one still in my passport.
Part 3: NAFTA and Temporary Work Permits. 1993-1999.
Of course I didn't stay a student forever. Eventually I graduated and had to face the world of employment while only in my early 30s (gasp). Part time (adjunct) teaching work was easy to get (if low paid) but suddenly I was faced with the fact that I couldn't work any more. Or could I? As part of the US/Canada Free Trade act (shortly thereafter expanded to NAFTA) there was a provision that workers in certain fields could get work permits for a year at a time. All you needed was to show up at the border with a written job offer and documentation of your qualifications. So my girlfriend (now wife) and I drove from Chicago to Port Huron, Michigan with the requisite paperwork. There we were met by two friendly customs officials in late middle age. They had vaguely heard of these work permits and entertained us and themselves for 10 minutes or so talking over one another and genially bickering about where the forms were while they figured out what needed to be done. And then I was all set to work in the US for another year.
My wife and I married at the end of 1994 but I kept getting NAFTA work permits for a while, largely because it was so easy. We ended in Arizona where the border was close by and the officials were diverted by dealing with a foreigner who didn't speak Spanish. I really should have applied for permanent residency several years before I did, but I knew it was going to be a hassle so I procrastinated.
Part 4: Immigration Limbo 1999-2002.
Up until this point I had a pretty positive view of the INS. I had gotten scolded a couple of times for not properly following procedure but by and large border officials had been quite helpful and I had never had any serious difficulties. So I was blasé and unprepared when it came around to actually applying for my green card.
It turns out that Phoenix in 1999 was not a good time and place to be dealing with the INS. In the late 90s the agency was seriously back-logged and overwhelmed with applications. Phoenix was one of the places that was the furthest behind and inadequately staffed for the size of its clientele. On the plus side, the INS office was only three blocks from our house.
I read up and knew what forms I needed to fill out. My wife had to fill out a petition for an alien relative, and I had to fill out a request for change of status as well as an application for a temporary work permit. I also had to get a medical exam including an HIV test. The medical exam could only be done a certain doctors. I went to one that wasn't too far from my house. They took blood, weighed me, took my temperature, etc. The doctor, who was dressed like a (very stereotypical) tourist with lots of rings, gold chain, a floral shirt, etc. came in and chatted with me for a few minutes, asking me quite casually if I was healthy without making the least effort to actually examine me. All the results went into a sealed envelope to go with the other forms. Seemed like quite the scam to me.
We had to fill out a form that included information on each of us, any previous marriages, when we got married etc. We were encouraged to include as much supporting documentation as we could that ours was a 'real' marriage. We are really bad at taking pictures of each other (mostly animals and scenery) and had exactly one vacation picture with both of us in it. Fortunately at that point we had an 8 year history of cohabitation and could supply copies of mortgage documents as well as a few old apartment leases. My wife had to report her income and swear that she would support me forever even if we got divorced.
The result was a very thick envelope of stuff. I had the option of either mailing it in or taking it to the office and turning it in in person. I (foolishly as it turns out) elected for the former given the immensely long lines I could see at the office. So into the mail it went and then....nothing. It turns out that if I had gone in person I would have gotten a receipt. By sending it in the mail it went into a pile that would eventually get opened - I had no way of knowing if they even had it. I was able to get the congressional office to make them look and confirm that it was received.
I didn't hear anything back for 3-4 months when I was told to come in to get my temporary employment authorization. My NAFTA permit had expired and I had lost a promising teaching job as a result. I had had to cool my heels for a couple of months until I could work again.
So I still had to show up early early in the AM and stand in line for hours to get in and get my employment card (good for a year). However then I could work.
Just over a year later (on my second temporary employment card) we ended up moving to Urbana, Illinois. Before we left I called up the INS (which involved being put on hold for up to an hour with a reasonably high likelihood that your call would get dropped and you'd have to start over again) to find out what I should do. I was told to write to both my current INS office and the one that had jurisdiction over my new home (in this case the Chicago office) and request that my application be transferred. I dutifully did this and we moved to Illinois.
A few months later (late spring 2001) I went to Chicago to submit an application for another temporary work permit. The Chicago office was almost as busy and backlogged as the Phoenix one with the added bonus of being a 2.5 hour drive from my house instead of a five minute walk. When I finally got to the end of the line I was told by the agent that my application had been transferred to Chicago and then, inexplicably, it had been archived. She put in a request to have it taken out of the archives and told me to return on a specific date.
When I cam back, after getting up at 3 AM, driving to Chicago, and standing in line for several hours, I got to to speak to an agent who didn't have any idea what I was talking about. I also didn't have a receipt. It turns out that in Chicago you weren't allowed to mail in applications, you had to turn them in personally. They wouldn't do anything related to your application unless you produced the receipt. This agent asked who the agent had been the last time. I had seen her downstairs and I was told to go down and talk to her. I did so. Fortunately she remembered me from last time and made sure that I was able to submit my application for a new work permit. If she hadn't helped me I probably would not have been able to work for the last ten months or so of waiting for my interview. I still had to wait three months before I came back again to get the new permit (this was before the old one expired).
Another aspect of the green card application is that you are not allowed to leave the US between applying and actually getting residency. If you are waiting a few months this is not a big deal - three years is a whole different matter. You can apply for something called advance parole which allows you to leave if you explain why you need to leave. It seemed to be issued as a matter of course and I got a multiple re-entry version in 2001 which allowed me to visit my family for the first time in two years.
One thing that struck me was that the incredible slowness of the bureaucracy was a self-feeding monster. Because it was taking 3 years or more to get green cards the INS needed to be issuing temporary work permits to all the applicants every year so they could work, granting permission to leave the country and so on. Each application generated another 3 or 4 applications along the way. I'm surprised that the entire system didn't grind to a halt.
The system's hardships also varied a lot depending on where you lived. States with major cities and lots of immigrants tended to be more backlogged, had longer lines etc. Also the center to which you were assigned was determined solely by the state in which you lived. I actually lived closer to the Indianapolis office which would have been much less busy but because I lived in Illinois I had to go to Chicago. For a guy living in Carbondale (in southern Illinois) who I met on one of these trips that meant a five hour drive to Chicago rather than a one hour drive to St. Louis.
Just about the only perk of the lengthy waits and long lines was an insight into first world privilege. For most the immigrants with whom I stood in line this probably wasn't much different from their experiences with government in their native countries. I recall seeing an American relative in the Phoenix office yelling at officials, in complete disbelief at the incredible slowness, the lack of ability to access information, the fact that you couldn't do anything except wait. That was how the rest of the world functioned, but not America in his eyes. Everyone else in the room knew better.
I did have a few interesting conversations with my fellow line mates. I remember one guy who worked for some fancy hotel complaining about having to clean semen out of his pool after a particularly wild party. A woman apologized for speaking to me in Spanish because she thought I was Mexican. Granted at least 90% of the people in the line were Mexican. I assured her I wasn't offended - I didn't understand her Spanish but it didn't injure me in any way. Both of those incidents were in Phoenix. People in line in Chicago were less talkative.
After getting the work permit straightened out I finally got notice to come to a location in Hammond Indiana (a suburb of Chicago) to get finger-printed. Was the end in sight? For once there was no line, minimal waiting, and a friendly technician who was very curious about life in Champaign-Urbana.
Part 5 - The Interview, July 2002
In the spring of 2002 I received notice that our interview was scheduled for June. It seemed kind of unreal - I didn't believe that the application had actually finally been processed. However I had already made plans to visit family at that time - using my advance parole (see previous section). I requested a rescheduling and this was actually done quite promptly. The new date was set for early July. By this time the INS didn't exist any more. It had been split in two and placed under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security. Immigration services (as opposed to enforcement) were (and still are) now the responsibility of the US Citzenship and Immigration Services.
My wife and I drove up the night before and stayed in a hotel on the loop. The interview was set for 930 or 10 in the AM. It wasn't in the normal building but in another location in the loop a couple of blocks away. There were no lines - we passed through metal detectors and then took an elevator to an upper floor and settled in for a potentially long wait.
To our surprise we were there no more than 10 minutes when we got called in. It turned out that the previous interviewee had shown up without his wife (the officer told us she had thought it was a sham marriage before he even arrived) and had been sent away. Out 'interview' took less than a minute. The officer who did our interview was not in uniform and could have been any one of thousands of office workers in downtown Chicago. She was friendly and casual. Apparently there was no doubt we had a genuine marriage and no reason to ask us anything. Because we had already been married for over seven years there wasn't even a conditional period where the residency would be waived if we got divorced. Kind of anticlimactic after 3 years of waiting!
The only snag was that I didn't have a valid Canadian passport. If I had, she would have stamped it with my new status on the spot. I hadn't bothered to get a new one because it wasn't necessary to visit Canada at the time and I wasn't likely to be going anywhere else until I got the green card. This wasn't a major problem - it just meant that I had to wait until the card arrived in the mail to have proof of my new status.
The card actually arrived sooner than expected, well before my last temporary employment authorization expired. The card is not green and came with a document that said 'Welcome to the United States of America' which I thought was pretty ironic given that I had been living here for most of the previous 18 years.
Part 6 - Permanent Residency, 2002-2012.
At the interview I was told that I could apply for citizenship in as little as three years. However my experiences of the previous three years gave me the inclination to have as little to do with immigration bureaucracy as possible for a while. My green card was good for 10 years before it needed to be renewed and I could work anywhere I liked and visit other countries freely as long as I didn't stay away for more than six months at a time (I think that was the cut-off). Given that I had a job an absence of that long was out of the question anyway.
So for years I didn't really think about citizenship, or if I did, I procrastinated about doing anything about it. Border crossing were pretty easy for the most part. In 2007 when I returned from Ecuador I was mysteriously whisked off into a back room but I think that was just because I had a new Canadian passport and they wanted to take down all the particulars. I've only been fingerprinted once by the fancy gizmos they have now at their booths. Generally I've been waved through with only the most cursory inspection.
Then last spring I realized that my card was going to expire in a bit over a year. So I would have to get a new one. Or I could become a citizen.
Part 7 - Applying for Citizenship, 2011.
Not wanting to make any errors and wanting the process to go as smoothly as possible I decided to hire a lawyer. In retrospect it wasn't very good value for the money as my case was so straightforward that I didn't really save myself much effort. Compared to the green card everything has happened really fast. According to the attorney this is due to both greater efficiency on the part of the agency and a less busy regional office. The process has been smooth sailing with one (fairly minor) exception.
Because of the length of time I had been a permanent resident my wife's participation was not needed. The only hold up in completing the application was that it was required that we list the date of any divorces from previous marriages (for either of us) on the application. I'm not sure why this was relevant and in any event that information would have been included on the original application for residency. It turns out that my wife was no longer sure exactly when her divorce had happened (she knew the year but not the month). We eventually found her divorce papers and all was well.
The other 'tricky' thing on the application is that you have to list every time you left the country since you became a resident, where you went (what country), and for how long. Now I probably travel more than the average person, but compared to some academics I know I am a regular stay at home. My list of trips was quite extensive and fairly hard to complete. Who remembers the date you left on a trip eight years ago and the date you came back? For most of them I could use the stamps in my passport although Canada wouldn't stamp my passport entering so I would back estimate from when I got back. For a couple of the trips in the early 2000s the US hadn't stamped my re-entry either so I used the dates on digital pictures to figure out when I was actually away.
I really wonder what someone who lived close to the border might have done. It is conceivable that you might cross the border several times a week. How could you possible document that?
The lawyer mailed off my application in early June. Much more rapidly than I expected I got first, a notice that my application had been received and was being processed, and second, a notice that I was to come to the office in Jacksonville for fingerprinting. Unfortunately this was scheduled for when I was going to be in Ecuador, teaching a tropical biology course. We sent in a request for rescheduling and they promptly rescheduled it for the day I got back from Ecuador! The request had included the duration of my trip and a request that it be rescheduled for a time after it was over. Another request for rescheduling led to a date I could make in September. It was for 8 AM, in Jacksonville, almost 3 hours drive from house. Up at 4 AM and a long boring drive in the dark down I-10.
I arrived to find the Jacksonville facility to be minuscule relative to Phoenix or Chicago and not much in the way of a line. I had to wait about 5 minutes and the fingerprinting took maybe ten. Then I was done.
My interview was less than a month later and the day after I had a root canal. This time at 730 in the morning. The interview consists of asking you a bunch of questions that were already answered on the application (have you ever been a member of the Communist party, etc.) plus the citizenship exam. The exam draws from a pool of about 100 questions. You will be asked up to 10 questions and you have to get six correct (i.e. they stop once you get six correct). Some of them are extremely easy and most of them I knew anyway but there were a few I had to study. While in Ecuador I asked my students about them. They did very well on the history questions but bombed miserably on the current politics ones - not a single student could name a sitting Senator from their home state!
An easy question would be something like: Name two wars in which the US was involved in the 20th century. A harder one would be one asking about specific right guaranteed in the constitution or powers granted to the states.
The newer set of questions features some that provide a broader spectrum on American history such as naming tribes of native peoples and questions about the reasons for the Civil War.
The interview took no more than 10 minutes and then I was on my way back to Tallahassee to wait for the letter giving the date of the oath taking ceremony. These are done in courthouses rather than at an immigration office. They are done periodically and in a smaller city like Tallahassee they don't happen every month. So I had to wait three months to find out that my oath would take place on January 26. Which is tomorrow.