At the party, I struck up a conversation with an attractive young man I hadn't seen before. He turned out to be a French university student doing an internship in the Bay Area. He had only been in the U.S. for two weeks, but spoke excellent English. He had met friends of mine in a bar, and they invited him to this party. His introduction to my country had been less gracious; he had been strip-searched at the airport and detained for two hours, despite the fact that all his papers were in order. Customs officials also stole the bottle of wine he had brought as a gift for his new boss.
We chatted for a while, then I prepared to leave; I didn't want to miss the fireworks. The hostess pulled me aside and encouraged me to stay a little while longer. "Don't you like my little French friend? You two look good together." I lingered and missed the fireworks, while romance blossomed with the stranger from France.
Sept. 11, 2001 — It was a Tuesday. I was taking the day off work to go camping with my dad up north. My French boyfriend's visa had expired five months after we had met and he had had to leave the country; but, after a full six months of effort, Alex had managed to obtain a second internship and a renewal on his visa. Now he was living with me.
I turned on the morning news while gathering my camping gear together and was greeted with the sight of the local news guy telling me that the Twin Towers had fallen down. Both of them. I was in shock, like the rest of America. But I got little sympathy from the Frenchman; he clearly didn't grasp the enormity of the situation. To be honest, I'm not sure he even knew what I meant by "Twin Towers." I wasn't sure it was appropriate to go ahead on vacation. But my dad, a native of New York City and rattled by very little, saw no point in not going.
I think now it was the best thing we could have done. We spent the next three days in the woods and the fog, not glued to a television set watching destruction like everyone else.
As shocked and horrified as I was by the terrorist act 3,000 miles away, I had no idea how much it would affect my own life. My boyfriend worked at a hotel in downtown San Francisco that catered to an international clientele. After Sept. 11, the hotel's business plummeted. The employees sat around bored and depressed, with little to do but process cancellations. Two weeks later, the hotel laid Alex off.
It's bad enough to lose your job but, without his internship, Alex no longer had any legal excuse to be in this country. We had to make a choice and make it fast: go our separate ways or get married in order to stay together. We decided to get married. Two weeks later, we took our vows at San Francisco City Hall. We were surrounded by my local family and a lot of strangers, but not my grandparents from the East Coast nor any of his family from France.
If you think it's straightforward to get a green card for your spouse, you have never lived the adventure of marrying a foreigner. Or an alien as the U.S. government calls them. We had to gather together about an inch of documentation to prove that our marriage was bona fide. I had to submit my tax returns for the previous three years. I had to prove that I made a certain amount of money, so that I could support my husband financially if necessary. I was making well over the financial minimum; I was a 31-year-old college graduate working in a high-tech industry. If I'd been a few years younger, I would have needed to get my parents to sponsor my husband financially, which would have required them to provide three years' worth of tax returns, records of all their financial assets, etc. Most disturbing of all, I had to swear to the U.S. government, in writing and before a notary public, that I would be financially responsible for my husband for no
less than 10 years . . . even if we split up! Oh yeah, and I had to pay the feds around $400 to process my paperwork.
Speaking of paperwork: I gained a new appreciation for Robert DeNiro in his final scene in the movie "Brazil," where he's enveloped in flying sheets of paper and disappears beneath them. The green card application required vital statistics on me, Alex, my parents, and his parents. I was very concerned about the fact that his father was born in Algeria, one of the pieds-noirs ("black feet") who moved back to the motherland as part of the mass exodus of 1962 when Algeria regained its independence from France. Considering that Algeria is now a terrorist breeding ground, I shuddered to think what sort of red flags his family history may have placed on Alex's green card application.
The paperwork had to be submitted in triplicate. I made a couple extra copies, one for my own records and one to allow for the possibility of the feds losing one. Laying the stacks out on the living room floor to compare and collate left little room to walk. I had read that it's recommended to include photos, so we included glossies of our wedding ceremony. We labeled each person in the photos: my mom, my dad, my brother, his wife, my best friend . . . by the time I was finished, I felt guilty for having invited them!
I took time off from work so that we could drop off the paperwork together at the local Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) center. Standing in line and watching those in front of us being served, I was pained to see the impatient and disrespectful tone the government employees took with the hapless applicants whose only crime was not having been born on U.S. soil. However, Alex and I had no trouble. We were treated courteously and our application was reviewed and stamped without a hitch. I'm sure it helped that he's Caucasian and fluent in English and I'm the kind of anal-retentive who has every possible receipt and ticket stub neatly filed away for later retrieval. Nolo Press' "Immigrate to the U.S. through Marriage" had been my bible. That application must have been perfect. If there was an Academy Award for Best Performance in a Submission of Bureaucratic Paperwork, I definitely would have been a contender.
Once the paperwork was submitted, there was nothing to do but wait, agonizingly, for months. The green card became the stick with which I'd beat my husband about the head for any bit of bad behavior. "Don't drive so fast . . . you might not get a green card!"
The day of our interview arrived. May you never have to spend a day in an INS regional service center; they must be architecturally designed to instill a feeling of nausea, fear, and humiliation. As we waited in the lobby, another couple was called in for their interview; when they emerged a few minutes later, the woman was weeping. I had a Russian-born coworker who had married an American and had had her interview a few weeks before. She had told me it was a terrible experience and that the INS agent seemed unfriendly and suspicious — despite the fact that my coworker was pregnant with her husband's child! I was concerned because I am several years older than my husband; would this be viewed with suspicion? Luckily, I was relatively young and fit-looking, while my husband inherited male-pattern baldness and maintained the timeworn French tradition of smoking hand-rolled cigarettes since pre-school. So I think it worked out. Our interview seemed to go fairly smoothly.
Months and months of more waiting passed. Finally, the magic card arrived in the mail . . . and it had a two-year expiration date. It was my understanding of immigration law that this should not have been the case, based upon the rapidity with which we had filed the initial application after our marriage. But what were we supposed to do, argue with the U.S. government?
We resigned ourselves to submitting another application two years after the first one. You are required to submit it 18 to 24 months after the issue date of the temporary green card — no more, no less. And woe betide you should you forget. This arrangement must be designed to trip applicants up, because the government sends you no reminders. You simply must write yourself a note along the lines of "Don't let spouse be deported" and send off the necessary stack of documents, and money, at the appropriate time. It's also helpful to retain all of your utility bills (to prove that you have continued to live where you claim you do) and to take photos of yourselves on vacations together.
As we did make a trip to France during this period, Alex and I were able to submit fresh photos of family members, duly labeled ("uncle," "grandmother," "lake at Villefranche-sur-Saone"). Regrettably, there was no sign in front of the lake underscoring the fact that it was, in fact, in France and the people in the photos were blood relatives and not homeless people we'd paid to pose with us. We had better luck on a romantic getaway to Seattle, though; we asked a stranger to photograph us with the sign that says "SEATTLE PIER" in clear view behind us. The experience was sullied in my mind, though, because I knew full well I was doing it more for the green card than to create a souvenir of the trip.
Nov. 11, 2004 — It had been almost five years since the night I met my husband. We'd been married for over three years. And I still didn't know whether or not the U.S. government would allow us to stay together. I wouldn't know for certain for two more years.
It's difficult to make any sort of long-term plans with your partner when you're not quite certain that he won't be evicted from the continent. I mailed the second green card application that day, and had to write another check, for only $200 this time, and no longer made out to the "Immigration and Naturalization Service"; now it was the "U.S. Department of Homeland Security." I guess the government needed to make sure that my gainfully employed, highly educated, multilingual spouse from one of our oldest ally nations wasn't a terrorist. I knew it was hard to find a good man; but I had no idea it would be so hard to keep one.
Six years ago, I was a fairly typical politically alienated American who voted each election for whichever candidate turned my stomach less. I had never been a Democrat or a Republican, although I had flirted with the Greens briefly in my youth. But this experience opened my eyes. Perhaps more importantly, it pissed me off!
Aside from the sheer idiocy and waste of making it so difficult for American businesses to hire my husband, there is something deeply offensive and embarrassing to me about having to jump through so many hoops and expose so many details of my personal life in order to be with the man of my choice. How dare Uncle Sam push me into a marriage! And then remain entangled in it for years, like a mother-in-law from hell who insisted on examining my bank statements, my utility bills, my tax return and demanded to see a paper trail of where her son and I were living, working, and going on vacation.
I've been a good girl all my life, with not even so much as a speeding ticket. But, over the past six years, I've joined the Libertarian Party, the Free State Project, started reading various books and magazines that I wouldn't have touched in the past, marched in my first antiwar protest, learned to shoot a gun, and "threw away" my vote on a third party candidate for president. I'm tired of my dirty, old peeping tom of an Uncle; I want him off my back.
