Resident Alien Abduction

The above application has been received by our office and is in process, but it has been noted with one or more of the following exception(s).
Missing evidence(s) - Your application was missing evidence(s) that you will need to provide at the time of your naturalization interview.

Now what on earth could that mean, I wonder? The only "evidence" I’d been asked to submit with my Citizenship Application was a photocopy of both sides of my Green Card, two recent photos and a huge wad of cash in check or money order form. I’d made sure that these were all included before sealing the envelope, but as the next line went on to say "You will be notified under separate notice of the necessary evidence(s) that you will be required to bring to your interview. Do not submit any evidence(s) by mail." there’s not much I can do but wait to be told.

I knew this wouldn’t be easy of course; working with the Immigration and Naturalization never has been but it brought back painful memories of when I was first attempting to become a resident of the US.

On the advice of the US Embassy in London, Dear Wife had returned to the USA to file my petition there, while I remained in Britain, awaiting the nod to move. Things went smoothly at first with US immigration approving my application after about 3 months which was par for the course. Unfortunately, this news was never transmitted to the US Embassy in Britain who steadfastly refused to acknowledge my existence.

While nowadays, I would be able to check my status on-line, back then one had to call a long-distance number and be charged premium rates to listen to muzak for 6 or 7 hours (that’s not poetic license – I would begin the call as soon as the lines opened at 9am and sit there until late afternoon) before finally being connected to a person who would go out of their way to be unhelpful for a few seconds before hanging up, often while you were still talking. If you were lucky, the information you gave you was correct, but there was no guarantee of this.

Dear Wife, back on this side was going through similar pain but as the US had done their part, they refused to get involved further. Daily calls to the Phoenix office yielded nothing but stonewalling, while similar entreaties to the embassy in Britain merely racked up my parents’ phone bill. I was in effect, in limbo and there I might still remain if it weren’t for a little known law which requires any US government department to respond to an enquiry from a Congressman’s office within 24 hours of receipt. We enlisted the help of an assistant to our local politician and by the following day, my paperwork was miraculously found on someone’s desk. Two weeks later I was on the plane.

But of course, that was just the beginning.

Like all new migrants to the US, I had to follow a number of procedures as I progressed from Temporary Resident to Long Term Resident to Permanent Resident or the more endearing "Resident Alien". Applications to be submitted, forms to be completed, interviews to be held. That was all fair enough, but what astonishes me to this day, was the lengths the INS went to in order to make this as mind-numbingly difficult as possible.

To begin with, there was nowhere, nowhere one could find out what forms were required to be completed for the next stage. No leaflets, no recordings, no information booklets. The only solution was to sit on hold for the aforementioned 6-7 hours in the hopes that the drone on the end of the phone might tell you before they hung up. doG help you if you didn’t ask the right question (or tried to ask more than one.) They wouldn’t send you the forms, you had to show up at the local INS office for these. In a tidy display rack by the front door? Don’t be absurd. No, in order to receive a simple blank form, it was necessary to take a number and stand in line for, you guessed it, 6 or 7 hours. This just to be handed a form.

Want to know what happened once you’d completed it? Ship it in the mail, right?

Wrong.

Back to the office where after standing in line for 6 or 7 hours, you were allowed to hand it to a clerk, who turned and dropped it into an in-tray. I’m not making this up. From the early hours of the morning, people were standing in a queue stretching down the street with sandwiches and thermos flasks, ready to wait for the entire day simply to ask for a form, or to hand one in. When the clerk took his break, nobody relieved him so the line stopped for 15 minutes. When he took his lunch, it stopped for an hour. If you weren't through the door by a certain time, you got turned away. One time I arrived at the front only to learn that I hadn’t been told of a particular form I should have brought. It would have taken me 2 or 3 minutes to complete and I wanted to do it there and then but the clerk refused to allow this and I was forced to return and stand in line another day.

Fortunately my employers were very understanding and allowed me time off every few weeks as things progressed. Looking around at some of my queue-mates, I could only imagine the lost productivity, lost wages and lost jobs this was causing. By the time my application slowly ground towards permanent status, I was the supervisor of my department with almost 40 people reporting to me. I can’t imagine what would have happened had I allowed them to operate at this level of inefficiency.

Finally the day arrived when Dear Wife and I were ordered to report for an interview; the final step on the road to permanent residency status (just one notch down from the Citizenship for which I’m now applying). Despite having been assured that the movie "Green Card" is pure Hollywood (as long as no money is changing hands and you’re not breaking any other laws, the government doesn’t really care about your motives for marrying) we were prepared for an ordeal.

Instead, the gentleman turned out to be the kindest, politest and most helpful government employee I’ve every encountered, before or since. The whole interview was a pleasure.

Except for when he glanced at my form and saw where I’d given my nationality as "Scottish." He crossed this out and wrote "English", explaining cheerfully "Scotland is part of England".

I realized this man had the power to screw up my life in a million different ways, and as Dear Wife was already kicking me under the table I simply gritted my teeth and muttered.

"OK"

May William Wallace forgive me.