What 2020 Was Like For The Wife Of A Non-Citizen
We’re a young couple with big dreams and goals. However, we are being held back by a haphazard and confused organization.
My husband and I met in October 2018 and were wedded in September of the following year.
Our daughter was born in January of 2020.
We began meeting with a lawyer to start our immigration process to get my husband's legal residency in the United States in February of 2020.
COVID-19 swept through the country beginning in March 2020.
I was 21 when my husband and I got married, and neither of us knew in the slightest what we would be getting into with the USCIS — the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. We were young, dumb, and happily married. I guess we still are now. Beginning the immigration process didn't occur to us until months later when we realized that the amount and type of jobs available to non-citizens were limited.
I always thought that marriage would automatically mean that we were “safe” — safe from deportation back to his native Colombia, that is. This, however, is certainly not the case. We were both naive to think so.
I can vaguely recount the day when my own mother took her exam to receive American citizenship. All I remember is waiting a long time and having to congratulate her when she finally came out of the building. I didn't understand what I was congratulating her for. She was always just my mother. I didn’t know how citizenship made her any different.
That was nearly 20 years ago. Becoming a US citizen today is far different than it was then. My Taiwanese mother doesn't understand what the hold-up is because apparently, it was far easier for her than it was for us. My husband and my mother immigrated to the States on student visas and then shortly got married afterward. She doesn’t understand why we need a lawyer. After an entire year of working with a lawyer, she doesn't understand how we can't even get my husband a work permit, let alone a green card.
It's hard to say whether or not our experience is typical for those in our situation or if the repercussions of COVID-19 are also at play.
I remember driving my husband to work every day because he didn't have a license or was eligible for one due to not having the required documentation requested by the DMV. We would wake up at 5 am together every morning and make the 45-min commute to Atlanta. I would then make the even longer drive back, often having painful contractions all along the way. I was nearing the end of my pregnancy at the time. Hours later, I would make the same drive.
Later on, we had a little baby in tow. Being pulled over was a risk we couldn’t take. The days were long for all, but our options were limited.
Two months after our daughter was born, we had saved up enough money to pay for a lawyer and begin our immigration process. To be real and upfront, here are the total costs we had to pay:
$1700 for the lawyer
$1200 for USCIS
$600 for an immigration physical exam
I don’t know how much others are paying. However, $3500 for a young, newly married couple with a baby was a large sum of money. A month later, my husband lost his job when COVID-19 shut everything down. To make matters worse, I didn’t qualify for the stimulus check for being married to a non-citizen. To this day, it’s difficult for me to understand why I didn’t qualify, having been born and raised in this country. We were left with almost nothing.
So, where are we at today?
It has been a year since we officially began our journey to gaining legal residency for my husband and nearly a year when the pandemic took the world by storm. To be transparent, hardly anything has happened in this entire year. Instead, we received letter after letter from the USCIS with incorrect information regarding our case, letters with entirely different case numbers than our own, letters saying that we hadn’t paid when in reality we had, etc. It was tiring and frustrating. We’re a young couple with big dreams and goals. However, we are being held back by a haphazard and confused organization. It seems as if we will have to wait indefinitely.
My husband has entered the country legally and has a visa that is still in good standing. We got lawfully married. We have a little 1-year old now. I am disappointed with how we have been “serviced”. We scrounged up everything we had for nothing to happen — besides receiving a handful of misdirected letters. I think that the United States immigration system can do better to help its people. Rescuing families like ours grants a better future for my daughter. I know that aiding individuals like us in our quest for citizenship will undoubtedly contribute to a better America.
