homeiswhere #5 — Interview: Applying for emigration from outside the US
By now you’ve read me talk about my personal immigration process for status adjustment a lot. But what about the other ways to get immigrate into the US? This is just what we’re going to see today with friend and recent US immigrant, all-around great guy Michael Fox, an Irish citizen who applied for immigration to the US from the United Kingdom.
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Hi Mike! So how did you decide to move to the US, and how did you start your immigration process?
Mike : We started the whole process from England after an offer from work. It was a very simple question: “D’you fancy moving to the US?”. I asked my wife Steph what she thought of it and she didn’t really want to go back to the United States then. Then there was a perfect storm of awfulness — including getting kicked out of our house — that made us say “let’s just go”: it had become clear that that good job was the best thing available to us. My workplace didn’t have to help with the immigration process, although they offered to in case things went South but instead, Steph and I applied through the “petition for a relative of a US citizen” process from the United States embassy in London.
Did you find the emigration process from your country of residency complicated?
Mike : It’s not a difficult thing to do, but it’s lots of confusing paperwork that took far too long to work out — it’s just something that kept taking time. Assuming you’ve got everything done correctly, everything worked out, the right people supporting you AND the finances to do it all, it’s a relatively simple process — that just takes so bloody long.
Looking back, you wonder “why does it take so long?” and you can’t really figure out why: we thought it would be “a few months”, and in the end, it took a whole year. The immigration system anywhere is super slow anyway, but my medical issues made things more difficult : I needed to not be on morphine as a painkiller to be able to immigrate to the United States, which added time and worry.
The London Embassy for the United States detailed all the information and forms we needed. It’s a ludicrous amount of stuff — sponsors, financial records for the last three years, for the immigration services to be satisfied that you’re not going to be a drain on society — but I don’t get how you could be a drain on society, since there is so much legislation against even being able to be in that position…I don’t know what would happen if I were an illegal immigrant; I don’t know if you could even go to the US on vacation and decide to stay.
The US embassy in London from Grosvenor Square — US embassy in London Flickr account
What happened after filing from the embassy?
Mike : Well, after we filed from the embassy there was no number to check up on things. The thing online which gives you a record number says that “your form is being processed” or “your form has been processed” and that’s it. You just don’t know anything in between the steps, sitting there.
Basically I felt like I was playing “the immigrant game”, hoping that all I was doing was correct, that all the forms I filled out were right, but there’s so little assistance in the process. If you send something in to the embassy, you don’t even know if it arrived or anything. You wonder “Have I fucked up ?”. The whole process is like mushroom farming: you’re very much kept in the dark, and you find the occasional nugget. The rest of the time, you sit there waiting and hoping a lot, wondering “Have I done this right, have I done it OK?”
How did things wrap up for you?
Mike : When everything came through, it was in the space of 10 days. We went to London for a final interview, with my passport and paperwork, sat there 30 minutes before getting called, the embassy personnel stamp your documents, and that’s it. You go to this next window and pay to get, leaving your passport behind to get sorted out: they’ll send it back to you in the mail.
Once my passport came back in the mail, I actually had a Visa allowing me to work from day 1 and I had a job I could already walk into as well. Starting all the paperwork from the United States has never been an option for me. If that option had been available, I don’t think it would have worked: it would have been something to be very careful about. I still could have gone to the office and still essentially be paid as a freelancer, though. But if I had been waiting for authorization and didn’t have a job lined up once we got there, I have no idea of how we would have fed ourselves.
Were you able to do any kind of financial preparation before emigrating?
Mike : We didn’t really have time to prepare for it because everything went real fast. We only had one wage coming in as we were staying with friends. We had to borrow some money from family to be able to live in our own; finances were very tight for the first few weeks, the first few months. We also had to hit the ground running: we arrived in the States one day, and three days later we were in Indianapolis at a giant games convention…Fun thing. Steph’s also working now, so we are a bit more financially stable now I suppose — it was just pretty rough and pretty hard to save anything.
Was it much of a culture shock moving to the US?
Mike : There was no real culture shock for me. It’s not like I haven’t been there or in New Hampshire before, so it was all OK. As far as culture goes, most of the UK is basically America-centric — something that’s very different from Australia for example. It still doesn’t feel like I’m properly living here yet though — it’s the way things sort of progress with your feelings of living in a place. It’s not like the whole “Hey, you get your first cheeseburgers!” because we have cheeseburgers pretty much everywhere now. When my green card arrived in the mail, that felt a little more like a “You live here now” — or when I passed my driving test.
What’s next on your immigration agenda now?
Mike : Well the next thing I need to do is reapply in 10 years, but that’s it — I’m pretty much done! Now it’s a matter of getting all the stuff, buying a house of our own and getting used to Halloween, because apparently here it’s actually a thing!
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Mike is the Support Officer for Ship Naked, a company that focuses on helping games companies ship their games around the world. He’s also the producer and host of tabletop games show The Score on The Little Metal Television. Check the first episode below!
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Originally published at www.tommaillioux.net on December 9, 2015.
