Green Card Madness
I’ve been living in this country for almost eight years now! I’ve had two different visas and in order to apply for those or to extend them, I visited the American Consulate in Frankfurt , Germany three times. I had to wait in line outside the consulate, I waited inside for sometimes up to 3 hours (once with a 10-months old and a 4year old) even though you have an “appointment”. The officers there treated you rather condescending and made me feel that I might not be trustworthy enough to live in the US. Occasionally you really do feel like you’re a criminal, even though you’re not. After keeping your passport for over 2 weeks the consulate eventually approved our applications and we moved to California in May, 2008.
For various reasons relating to my husbands’ job, we could not apply for a Green Card before he entered the holy halls of Apple Inc. in 2013. During the last 8 years I re-entered the United States 12 times. I provided my finger prints 12 times, I answered to irrelevant questions 12 times and I had to wait in the “visitor line” of Homeland Security 12 times with an average wait time of at least 60 minutes (usually after an 11-hour flight from Europe!). And now after one and a half years we finally entered the “perm status” and we had to get medical exams at a shady doctor’s office where they charge you $ 200 per person for an exam that took about 8 minutes/person. They require you getting the flu shot, and when I was hesitating, the nurse told me that they had cases when the paperwork was sent back if the applicant refused to get the shot. So we went to Kaiser Permanente (4 times in total), got this Influenza immunization along with a bunch of different needle pokes for all of us. Then we had to fill out online questionnaires with ingenious questions like:
Have you ever, in or outside the U.S. knowingly committed any crime of moral turpitude or a drug-related offense for which you have not been arrested?
Have you ever within the past 10 years been a prostitute or procured anyone for prostitution, or intend to engage in such activities in the future?
Do you intend to engage in the U.S. in espionage?
Of course, you always have to answer with “NO”, with YES and NO always being in the same column. Clever! Everyone should be able to figure out, what the correct answer is!?
Now the medicals are done, the questionnaires are filled out, we each have to get 6 pictures taken and then we have to wait. Wait for the approval of our Green Cards, wait for the recognition of our “worthiness”. We can be lucky that we were randomly born in a country that’s not on America’s “black list” yet. If you would be from Iran, Afghanistan or Syria your application might get rejected and you would be sent back home after building a life here! Everyone knows that Germany is famous for its bureaucracy but I think that the United States are at least as genius in creating complicated official processes as Germany is, maybe even worse. Most of it is online though, so I assume that the Americans at least waste less paper than the Germans do.
I think the whole immigration system in the US needs to be re-evaluated badly. And I think that H-4 holders (the spouse of an H-1 holder) need to become more possibilities to apply for a work permit. I had to quit a teaching job in the middle of the school year because we switched from J to H and for the last 3 years I was doomed to be this H-4 holder which is commonly known as the housewife visa. The Americans should reconsider if they really want to miss out on so much valuable workforce. Sometimes this whole process makes me mad, makes me want to yell bad words and just want to go back to my country where people are, at least lately, more welcome. But then again, there are worse things and we have way more sunshine here in this Golden state. So hopefully we’ll be Green Card owners in a few months. Unfortunately I will have to return this tiny piece of cardboard if Donald Trump will become president.
