Immigration Blog
One of my longtime friends got hitched. To a foreigner. Trouble is, it’s hard to get them in the country, despite what you may have learned watching sitcoms. I told him to fly her to Mexico and meet her in Texas. He chose the high ground and decided to go legal. He started a blog about it here:
A married couple transversing the strange waters of the immigration process, all the while trying to keep from being eaten by the gigantic, souless shark that is bureaucracy…
June 1st, 2007 at 11:07 am
My sister and I have both been through that, but on simpler terms. My wife is Canadian, so we were close by while we waited for the process to unfold, which we started a year in advance of moving to the USA. My sister married a Fin, but he was already in the US on a student’s visa. He simply couldn’t leave until the process was complete. Still, it cost me over $1000 in fees and then the airfare to Montreal for a ridiculous 5 minute interview. Argh!
June 1st, 2007 at 12:39 pm
My friend Jason is married to a Venezuelan national. I seem to recall there was a time when she couldn’t leave the country because she wouldn’t be able to get back in. Marriage definitely doesn’t get you the special treatment you see on TV.
June 1st, 2007 at 1:14 pm
No, it does not.
The best advice I can give anyone looking to immigrate to the USA by marriage to a US citizen is to get married here. Because if you’re here when you marry and file the paperwork in the USA, you get to stay here (stay, not work or travel, those are separate applications) until your paperwork is processed. If you marry outside the USA, your foreign spouse gets to wait. And wait.
If you marry here, you may get the hairy eyeball from the INS but as long as you just roll with it and prove to them over time you are not marrying for convenience, you get through the process. All that matters here is the stamp on the form with the acceptance date. For all intents and purposes, that is all you need. Then you can apply for your work and travel permissions separately. From my own experience, I never applied for travel since it is a serious pain. I simply did not want to risk my application being suimmarily cancelled due to a paperwork snafu on the part of the INS. And I told my family as much when I said I might not be visiting for a few years. In the end, it was only a year and change but why take chances?
I’ve been through the wringer with INS and my experiences have been TAME (although the NICS denial incident I suffered stands as one of the most unique and not many people get to survive a situation like that one unscathed).
I’d be happy to share my experiences to any of those interested. Part of why I started blogging is to share that perspective that immigration here is not the easy, simple, stereotyped and totally inaccurate process that is portrayed on TV. It is brutal, messy, impersonal, frustrating, expensive, disappointing and only in the end, worthwhile. You feel like an exhausted marathon runner at the end and at worst, it is a pyrrhic victory.
June 1st, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Perhaps if legalized immigration were less of a beuracratic screw job, more people would go that route rather than sneaking into the country.
June 1st, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Stormy Dragon,
It wouldn’t matter if legalized immigration was easier or simpler or kinder. The illegals simply do not care about our laws or the process. Even when amnesty (spit) is proposed, they COMPLAIN because it doesn’t do enough to accomodate THEM! The fines are too large, it’s unfair, we have families, it’s inconvenient and so on. Short of it being free and people handed citizenship papers without question, the illegals will see any legalization process as somehow discriminatory and infringing on their “rights”.
What people fail to realize is the immigration process is supposed to be discriminatory! That’s the whole point. The country has every right to pick and choose which foreigners they will let in and it doesn’t have to be based on what the immigrant’s concept of “fairness” may be. Their opinion matters not a whit. If the USA suddenly decided they no longer wished to allow foreign-born left-handed redheads into the USA, they could do it and best the foreign redheads could do is bitch.
There will always be illegal immigration. The issue is in managing the numbers. Right now, the system punishes legal immigrants. Illegals get free care, gov’t benefits, entitlements (like in-state tuition) and so on that as a legal immigrant in the precisely the same places are summarily denied to me like they would be to any US citizen as well. That isn’t right. Why should an illegal alien get state welfare or other such benefit (like food stamps) when as a legal resident I am specifically barred for a period of 5 years from seeking ANY such benefits as a condition of my immigration? Yes, you sign a waiver to that effect when you apply for residency. Your sponsor promises that you will NOT become a public charge (read: welfare recipient).
I feel for the couple that SayUncle writes about because I’ve been through what they are about to start going through. It’s a long road and it will have some nice potholes. Provided they are above board, organized and patient with the INS, they’ll come through it. Perhaps jaded and exhausted, but through it. And once there will have a very deep appreciation of the concept of “earned citizenship”. Hence why any legal immigrant seethes with fury at the mere thought of granted the privileges and rights we’ve had to earn at a discount or free to illegals who have done NOTHING to earn it except break the law by being here in the first place. Leftist liberals who piss on the American flag might not care about such things but to the legal immigrant and naturalized citizens, these things matter a great deal to us and why we feel proud at having earned it. Citizens may not care about this country but we certainly do!
Think this issue bothers me just a little? 🙂
June 1st, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Well, setting aside Matt’s “illegals are just naturally evil” theory for the momment, it seems to me that like any economic decision, the choice between illegal and legal immigration is largely going to be made by comparing the costs of the two options. If we want more people to choose the legal immigration choice we can either make illegal immigration more expensive or we can make legal immigration cheaper or some combination of the two.
June 1st, 2007 at 8:03 pm
IIRC, Matt is an immigrant himself.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Aren’t we all, aren’t we all…..
:hic:
June 1st, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Stormy, most illegal immigrants don’t have a legal route here. Skilled workers (like myself) have a relatively easy (though way too long and way too bureaucratic) route to immigration. Unskilled workers have a much more expensive process that most of their employers don’t bother with (and its only the employers that can go through it). The proposed system puts much more control in the hands of the immigrant rather than the company.
As to all of the “benefits” of illegal immigration that Matt refers to, I’m pretty sure they are entitled to none of those things. Every person in the US is entitled to emergency medical care even if you don’t have insurance, but thats about it. Now, there probably are illegals who are getting these things illegally. In-state tuition is granted to legal immigrants (atleast in PA and CA),
June 1st, 2007 at 10:48 pm
I am a U.S. citizen, of U.S. citizen parents. (We can talk about my uncle who received three separate death sentences some other time.) My wife is not. I married her in 1992. We had a kid together in 2002. She is an internationally recognized physician and medical researcher. Her continuous presence in the United States has been certified by the Department of Health and Human Services as vital to the national interest. She got her green card in 2004 after $35,000.00 in legal fees and the intervention of a U.S. Senator. I [defecate upon] you not.