Getting my Green Card Approved was Heavenly, but the Application Process was Hell on Earth
I knew when my husband and I got engaged in 2016, that we would have more than the average amount of paperwork to complete. Like so many couples in the digital age, we were geographically challenged. Him being a native of Los Angeles and myself having been unfortunate enough to have grown up just outside of Birmingham, a part of the UK which hardly seemed to exist even in British media before the debut of Peaky Blinders. Even so, if I had the ability to travel back in time and warn myself about the hell-scape of bureaucracy that lay ahead of us, frankly, I’m not sure I would have believed it.
That is not to say that we thought it would be easy. A quick google search for the terms ‘US Spouse Visa’ will convince anyone of that. But after our own first failed attempt to file the petition ourselves, fueled by the plethora of conflicting information out there on the internet, we quickly decided to employ some professional assistance. Legal advice does not come cheap. The combined total of our wedding costs, legal fees and immigration fees pretty much obliterated our meager savings as recent graduates. The cost of being with the person I love most in the world is priceless, but had it been a few thousand dollar less I can’t say I wouldn’t have minded.
If the costs were not high enough in monetary terms, the Immigrant Visa process seems designed, like the trails of Hercules to test you in as many ways as possible. It is complex, confusing, stressful and filled with a huge amount of radio silence. You submit paperwork, you wait for months, you eventually hear back that its been accepted. So you pay fees, you wait a week, you pay more fees so that you can submit more paper work. Then you wait almost two months to hear that they were the wrong ones, you resubmit and wait some more. Its enough to make even the most patient person want to tear out their own hair in frustration. I cannot even begin to imagine what this process is like without an immigration lawyer preparing all their paperwork.
In 2018, the US Government issued 236,526 immediate relative immigrant visas*, mine was not among them. For most of 2018, our visa application was stuck in a state of limbo, waiting to move from one stage of processing to the next. While the visa figures for 2019 have yet to be released, it is clear that we were not alone in this seemingly endless wait period.
Going months without hearing anything about what is possibly the most important application of your life is irritating enough. But this combined with the USCIS process for getting through to someone when your application is sitting with them is a recipe for the kind of frustration that makes you want to scream into a pillow.
There are two methods of getting in touch to speak with someone about your application, an online form and a phone line. Both of these had issues. The online form, in my experience, was the worst as for some reason I could not utilize it at all. Every time I tried to, it told me my birth date was incorrect and therefor my request could not be completed. The phone line, when it did work, was hardly better. The waiting times to get through to someone were hours long, and when you finally heard a live human voice on the other end, they offered little relief. For reasons unknown to myself, they were only ever able to give vague answers to the most generic questions, rather than case-specific advice. So after spending five or ten minutes trying to talk to someone with no actual answers to give me, the months of waiting in silence continued. As you can imagine, this process was utterly unhelpful when trying, at one o’clock in the morning after 16 hours of stressed anticipation, to decipher why they have submitted a request for a document I had submitted three weeks prior, and that is just one example.
Globally, immigration is at the receives a seemingly endless amount of negative press, whether legal or illegal. Immigrants are increasingly used as scapegoats for all of a nations ills, particularly by right wing organizations. But if my own experience has taught me anything, its that anyone who has gone through the current immigration process for the United States, or any other nation, deserves a pat on the back, a hug and a huge amount of respect.
If you or someone in your family is going through immigration hell right now, I wish you all the luck in the world. And if you need somewhere to vent, there are plenty of internet forums where you will find some of the other thousands of people going through the exact same thing as you are.
As I settle into my new life on the other side of the Atlantic, I do so with the knowledge that, once I qualify for citizenship, I get to muddle through the whole process again.
This piece is written from my personal, anecdotal experience of the US immigration process only and is not intended to serve as a replacement for proper research or legal advice. Please visit the appropriate government website for information about US Visas and Immigration.
Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash
