anti-social security

On my first full day in the States, we picked up this from the DMV:

I read it over the weekend, and then we popped back down to the DMV (Mark drove, obviously) and I presented my documents to the brow-beaten employee. As I'd literally just arrived and had little in the way of proof of residence, I also presented my husband and two proofs of his residence. Honestly, it was on the list of acceptable documents: spouse and two proofs of address.

The poor DMV employee, sitting in a fluoro-lit windowless building on a heady summer's day, sighed. He knew my case was not going to be straightforward. It should have been. I passed the theory test with full marks - so much easier than the UK equivalent and none of that hazard perception nonsense either. The employee checked out my visa, passport, spouse, his driving license, and his two proofs of address: All A-OK. The problem, however, was my social security card.

Social security numbers, invented by FDR in 1935 as part of his New Deal, are akin to UK National Insurance numbers (Bonus Fact: UK National Insurance was invented in 1911). The point, originally, was to provide welfare/insurance/benefits/pension to citizens suffering from poverty as a result of the Great Depression (1929, but you knew that).

FDR also allowed for SSNs to be used as 'governmental identifiers' of individuals, although this didn't become widespread until later in the 20th century. You can read all about this here if you're that interested.

The DMV requires presentation of a valid SSC as proof of identity. I actually have a valid SSC, but the problem is that it's in my maiden name. Even presentation of my passport, marriage certificate, spouse, his driving license and two proofs of his address wasn't going to be enough to get my PA driving permit. And we thought we'd gotten good at bureaucracy!

We boldly drove (well Mark did) across the county to the Social Security Administration. Another windowless building, where George Takei advertizes managing your benefits on a giant TV screen on a loop. Hilarious the first time, unsettling after a while. An employee helped me fill out an application for an updated card, but warned me it'd take a month to arrive. It only took 10 days to get my original card back in 2006, so I thought this was an exaggeration. It's not.

So I'm stuck in rural America without wheels.

Jack Kerouac wrote "On the Road" and not "On the Sidewalk"

The USA is designed for cars. In the 1950s shops even built parking lots over sidewalks/footpaths as inter-state highways cemented (sorry) the car as the leading form of US transport. The drive-thru boomed, not only in fast food, but also in coffee, banking, and postal services. I had hoped to hit the USA running, jumping and driving so I could start to build my new life here the moment I arrived. To be honest, this paper delay took the wind out of my sails a bit.

I do understand why I'm waiting. Identification fraud is a real concern. Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas found out he was an illegal immigrant when he went to the DMV to get his permit; it all rested on his SSC. There's also a slightly hilarious case where one poor secretary had her SSN wrongfully used by 40,000 other people. Meanwhile, Mark's happy to drive me to the local YMCA where I can run and jump for free, but the driving is a no-no until I get my new card and I can once again prove I'm me.

An Official Welcome

I just received a letter from USCIS. This is what it says:

 

It means that my Green Card is hopefully on its way!

But wait a minute, what? No, I don't have a Green Card.

I'm currently in the USA on a one year immigrant visa. When my Green Card arrives I can stay until 2014. By then, I will have to go through the process of removing conditions on my immigration status, and then I will receive a 10 year Green Card. 

And what are those conditions?

As we have only been married for a year, my immigration status is conditional on living "in marital union" with my husband, so in two years we will have to submit evidence of this (as well as more money, I might add). 

The letter came from Texas, and it also stated that my well-travelled life package, the one we submitted a year ago and that I brought over in the mystery brown envelope to be surrendered at the airport, had been send to the Texas Service Center. I swear these bits of paper are more worldly than me now.

Coming to America: my point of entry

It'd been a series of weeks that were rich with emotion.

I'd been in London (again) to work on another TV show, and during that time I had a pricey medical, gotten approved for my visa, been told by folks in TV that if I wasn't leaving they'd go out of their way to get me into the industry proper, said goodbye to my grandparents, said goodbye my dad and his family, packed up my things, sent boxes for shipping, visited many friends, been in a movie, and almost thought my cat was going to die (it turned out she had a blade of grass stuck up her nose for a week. No, really. I had to pull it out).

Then I had to say goodbye to my mum and get on a plane.

And not only that, but when I got to the departure gate I realized I was dressed like a hipster. That's probably not a surprise to most of my friends, but I swear it's not deliberate. Do accidental hipsters exist?

To make things worse, those tights are actually blue.

I was feeling pretty emotional for the whole seven hours of the flight: Good, bad, nostalgic, excited, petrified, eager to see my husband, sad to leave the Old World, desperately sad about saying goodbye to my mum.

When we landed, I headed to the US citizen/Permanent Resident queue for the first time. They escorted me and my mystery brown envelope (MBE) to a windowless room where I could listen to other people talking in 'interrogation rooms'. 

They took my passport and the MBE and I sat and waited.

It was a fairly casual and open set-up. A Lithuanian guy was told off for not previously declaring that he'd been arrested for committing a crime of moral turpitude. A German soapstar was queried about her travel intentions, and an older lady came to collect her passport (I think she'd left it in a bar). I thought I heard the staff refer to me as 'the immigrant lady'.

And I waited.

After an hour or so, someone at the front desk called my name, took a fingerprint and asked for my signature. I said "is that it?"

"Yes, that's it ma'am!"

And that was it. I was free to find my baggage and my husband (and that too, was rich with emotion).

I'm just an Old World girl about to hit the New World…

That's a Met Office T-shirt, by the way.

Interview at the Embassy

I was a bit casual about turning up and getting my visa interview at the embassy done. We'd frontloaded our application and been meticulous about sending originals and two copies of each document to the NVC. I've been to the US embassy before for a visa. I kept thinking 'it's just a formality'.

Then, the night before, I got worried that I would need to take copies of everything with me, or that they would point out some anomaly in the paperwork. I was staying with my gran just outside of London so I could hop on the train into the city about 6am and get there on time. I barely slept.

Appointment at 8am, I reached Bond St underground at 7:59am. I wandered down to the embassy a little late and saw a sizeable but quick-moving queue (I knew this was okay because appointment times aren't really exact, they're just staggered entry times for visa applicants). I showed my appointment letter and passport, confirmed I had no electricals on me, and was in by 8:30am. There were plenty of people who ignored or didn't know about the no electricals rule. They were directed to the pharmacy round the corner that does a nice side business in storing mobile phones for three quid a go. I heard some folks whingeing "would be handy if they told us this before we turned up" - hmm, they really do! 

Got my I-number (that's "i" for "immigrant), went to the 1970s airport style waiting room (the pictures on the wall are comedy) and got some passport photos from the booth. My appointment letter said they had them already but, well I was worried and didn't want to leave anything to chance. I didn't need to bother.

I was called to a window and a woman brought out my file. There was all of our paperwork. Everything we'd submitted since last June, in order, with notations at each question. Just how many people have read those forms in the past year? How long did they sit untouched? It was kind of funny to see our well-travelled papers again.

I waited for ages to be called again, and while I was far more relaxed, I couldn't concentrate on reading or knitting. I just sat and relaxed a bit while watching all the N-numbers and the odd Is, Es and Ds get called (I guess D is diplomatic, but E?). I watched the people attached to the numbers and tried to guess the stories that their own paper bundles would tell. Non-immigrants had blue pieces of paper, immigrants had pink. A well-dressed man with his partner looked like the kind to get a diplomatic passport (jealous!). A family with a small child. Plenty of young adults probably heading to Camp America this summer.

Eventually I was called back up to see a friendly guy. He asked a few questions, including "why the USA and not the UK?" and "when is your anniversary?" - it's next week. And no, we don't get to spend it together.

After only a couple of minutes, he said "I have no problem approving this visa."

I was out by about 10:40am.

I did get shouted at as I was leaving the Embassy because I was wandering along looking at the flags (there are fifty state flags and I was looking for my future home state!) and got told to turn back to the exit! Oops. 

I grabbed an iced coffee and headed back to my gran's. The whole thing was entirely anti-climatic.

On the Visa Journey: First base and getting touched

Sorry about the crude title, but it was too easy.

And thus concludes Act 1 Scene 1 of our petition. Nothing much will happen for about five months, as the other 100,000 or so June visa applications and petitions in California are also logged, filed, checked, approved and moved from desk to desk, person to person, until someone ticks a box and our little life story then gets sent from California to New Hampshire.

We will expect one of three things to happen in the coming months:

1. We will receive an NOA2, another I-797 form, to say that our petition has been approved and that the package is being sent to the National Visa Center in New Hampshire. Then we can officially 'apply' for the visa; or

2. We will receive an RFE, a Request for Further Evidence. If we filled out the form incorrectly, missed something, or didn't provide enough "evidence of a bonafide, ongoing marital union" then we will be asked to send particular documents to California; or

3. We will receive an NOA2 to say that our petition has been denied. This would happen if they didn't think that Mr was a US citizen; or didn't think that we'd met in person in the past two years; or if they had asked us to send more evidence to counter either of these two suspicions and we were unable to provide it.

Until then we read the scripts that let us know what to do when Act 2 comes around and we can (hopefully) apply for my visa!

There are actually some other things that we can do at this stage. Our petition is sitting like a duck in a sea of paperwork. You know, when it looks like not much is going on, but under the water surface is a frenzy of frenetic activity as the duck's webbed feet paddle frantically to get the old bird from A to B. Or California to New Hampshire. Or UK to PA. I'll explain what I'll be doing as we wait for our petition decision, in not so long a while, when the time comes.

There is one other fun little thing we can do while we wait for our petition decision. As well as being able to check our individual Visa Journey timeline to see how quickly or slowly petitions are being processed (note that link is not ours but overall current processing trends), we are also able to check the progress of our petition at the USCIS website. The USCIS website also allows us to login and check the status of our visa application, and the last date our petition file was 'touched'.

Our file is 'touched' when someone scans the file's barcode with our file number on it. To be honest, it doesn't really mean much. It could just mean that our file has been moved from one desk to another. As one person creatively described: it could mean someone spilt coffee on our file and just moved it to a clean desk. It could also mean that someone is reviewing our case, laughing at our facebook photos, making a decision on our petition, reading our Skype chat transcripts, or issuing an RFE for more Skype chats or notarized affidavits. Who knows. It's just a kinky way of describing the kind of action our package could be getting. Sorry, I don't think there's any other way to make bureaucratic processes sound fun.

But I know you're curious now, yes? When were we first touched?

The last activity on our file was 27th June. So we have a way to go yet to get past first base.

Californ I A: Visa petition hits the west coast

Our paperwork landed in Chicago and a few days later we received what is known as 'Notice of Action 1', or an I-797C, which is basically a notification to say USCIS received our inch-thick petition pack and forwarded it onto a Service Center for processing.

So now we wait.

But we can spin it rather nicely and say that the petition is on its way; it's just taking a slow, scenic roadtrip across America. USCIS has sent our little package from Chicago to California, where one of the four visa services is located (the other three are Vermont, Nebraska and Texas). As Pennsylvania is closer to Vermont we were a little surprised, so purely out of curiosity, and while our petition is rocking its Hollywood lifestyle, I tried to find out the difference between the four locations. Some Service Centers don't process petitions for all visa types (immigrant/non-immigrant/work/family/asylum/tourist and all their various subsections right to 'potential entrepreneur'), but usually petitions are distributed according to geography. Sometimes, though, they are sent elsewhere to ease the processing burden on a particular centre if they are busy or backlogged. I guess that's it.

For example late last year about 36,000 petitions were re-routed from CA to TX to clear backlogs at the CA Service Center. The measure failed when TX couldn't handle them all and they were sent back to CA. This resulted in huge delays for the poor petitioners and beneficiaries who had to wait helplessly as their paperwork was shifted from state to state with little to control its whereabouts in the system. 36,000 relationships were put on hold, while other petitions that hadn't been re-routed were processed in ordinary due course.

And another example: shortly after the Haitian earthquake in January last year the USA allowed Haitian citizens in the USA to apply for "Temporary Protected Status" (TPS). This status, while not an immigration status or a route to immigration, is a kind of visa or temporary asylum status allowing recipients to stay (and work) in the USA for a set period of time, while it's deemed unsafe for them to return to their home country. It's previously been offered to other nationalities such as to Hondurans and Nicaraguans after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and is available to Sudanese citizens as well. I have read accounts (mostly at Visa Journey) that most of the Haiti TPS applications were sent to the Vermont Service Center, though it's unclear if that resulted in an actual slow down in processing in Vermont. Regardless, there was a cut off point for TPS applications for Haitians, and most (if not all) have been processed now.

The Arab spring and the earthquake in Japan, similarly to the situation in Haiti, could also theoretically affect US visa processing times, although USCIS monitors these events and tries to pre-empt potential fluxes in visa applications.

The good news is that California is currently on target and processing petitions in about 5 months. We can even track down the approximate week when we should expect to be contacted next. Visa Journey is a clever and supremely useful site that allows immigrants to enter in their key petition/application dates and compare them to others in similar situations and at similar stages of the process. As more people enter in data the site updates the average waiting times and the likely date of our next milestone.

At this stage, according to the VJ timeline, we should hear again from USCIS in October. If all goes well in October we'll be able to put in an actual visa application and will have a new set of forms to fill out and another 5 or so months to wait (more on that later). However, things can change, and with July/August being popular wedding months I wouldn't be surprised if things slowed down again towards the end of summer, but we can only wait and see.

According to USCIS, 1 million people become US permanent residents every year. That's a simple average of 83,333 a month. If, theoretically, each Service Center had an equal part in processing 1 million petitions (and I know the number of petitions will be higher than the number of approvals/visa applications), then mine would have been joined by 19,999 other petitions sent to California in June. Obviously these numbers are flawed. That 1 million is only those who have been approved, so there will be many more petitions to account for, as well as peaks and troughs within a yearly cycle. I can only presume July/August/September is busy post weddings, but this isn't even to mention the visa burdens experienced by Service Centers for any of the many other visa types available. My very rough uneducated guess is that mine could be one of almost 100,000 envelopes that landed on a desk in California in June. And with that in mind, a 5 month wait for an email would not seem unreasonable at all, really.

And so we wait.