I got my green card on Saturday. It’s fairly nondescript as far as appearances go. There’s a computer-readable strip on the back, and my face on the front. My hair looks wet in the photo, because when I went to get my picture taken it was raining outside the office. I have been living here for over five months, but my residency here officially began on June 17th, 2014. Next to my face on the card is the now-oppressive head of the Statue of Liberty, staring into the distance, aloof and uncaring.
On the day my residency was approved, Arden and I came home and watched the latest episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, which included an extended segment on immigration reform in the USA, or the lack thereof. It was funny, but it was only really funny because I now have a two-year respite period before my green card is up for renewal. I’d cleared another milestone, so that sort of subject matter felt okay.
When Papers, Please - a game where you play an increasingly overwhelmed and easily corruptible border guard in a generic Eastern European nation - came out in August last year, I quickly bought it and then didn’t play it until Christmas, after my interview at the US embassy in London. Even when I did, I was far too lax, allowing anyone and everyone through the gate. There were terrorist attacks, humbling inspections by supervisors, and I found myself arrested within a few weeks. Granted, I’ll likely never be a refugee, but I’m too sympathetic towards immigrants to get the delicate balance right in a game like that.
There are many circles of hell. I’m never going to reach the lower depths, because I’m white and British and not poor and have no criminal or otherwise socially problematic past, but going through the immigration process has definitely placed me somewhere in the outer rim. All told, by the time I’ve applied to become a citizen in this country, I’ll have spent close to $4,000 on forms alone and endured four separate grilling sessions where I prove that I’m a halfway decent human being. My experience has been comparatively okay, but there have been plenty of opportunities for things to go badly, and so many conditions to meet. At the government building in Boston, the immigration officer pulled out a stack of papers that I quickly surmised was everything related to my application up to this point. It’s longer than my last book manuscript.
Part of me wants to excuse the USA for such an absurdly terrible bureaucratic system, especially as it likely matches up fairly closely to other liberal democracies around the world, but I can’t. So much of this seems calculated to keep people out. If you can’t afford an attorney, simply gathering the emotional and mental strength to comply with every single ridiculous requirement can be soul-crushing. Finding the money to cover the application and all the related costs is far from straightforward (unless, like me, you’re lucky). Bearing up under the scrutiny of immigration officials who are employed with the sole task of hating anyone they speak to is incredibly depressing. There are so many small things that could be done to make such a stressful experience less difficult, but the whole thing seems to be propped up on a decades-old system that still thinks it appropriate to ask if you’re HIV-positive before they let you in.
The difficulty in talking about something like this is that you begin to feel like you’re being ungrateful. The core truth, quite aside from questions of immigration, is that I’m writing this in bed while my wife lies next to me engrossed in her 3DS. That’s wonderful, and I don’t want to pretend that it isn’t. But for people who don’t live across sovereign divides, long-distance relationships tend find their resolution by one person taking a trip and staying for good. There are no demands to prove their affection through photos and flight itineraries and letters of intent. We’ve come through this process battle-hardened and solid in our resolve to love one another, but a process like this would easily brutalise anyone without such strong convictions. That’s kind of disgusting, to me. To fall in love with someone outside your country should be allowed to be an organic, sometimes hesitant, often tumultuous process, without artificial stop signs every ten meters. An entirely broken bureaucratic regime is not excused just because Arden and I were so sure of ourselves.
I never used to support politicians who tried to turn immigration into an issue on their manifestos - the whole thing smacked of racism more than anything else. But now, it seems even more insidious. It’s a wider, us-versus-them mentality that politicians capitalise on, where the people representing “us” are also the people who have the utterly random honour of being born with citizenship and the right to vote. It’s baseless. It’s stupid. Pretty much every negative perception of immigrants, even the supposedly bad ones, is an unfounded stereotype that persists because there’s some sputtering political mileage left to burn through.
So. Here I am. I might be starting a new job soon, and I’ll be formalising my driving education in the coming weeks. After a year and a half of dithering around, thinking about my future has never been so sweet.