The thing about immigration is that you kind of have to become an expert.
Who else is going to do it for you? A lawyer, if you have money, and that’s about your only other option. Isaac and I have spoken to a lawyer twice now, at some expense, to ascertain that we hadn’t done anything wrong with our petition. On the second, more recent call, I heard myself rattling off acronyms and numbers and procedures—the ones I’ve been neurotically studying during this long wait for things to move forward, because it gives me the fragile illusion of control.
I didn’t recognise myself. I didn’t know a goddamn thing about any of this seven months ago. Necessity is the mother of invention, as a wise man (Tigger from the Winnie the Pooh cartoons) once said, and it’s been a hell of a time for necessity; first Canadian tax law, and now all of this.
I lied about the illusion of control. The other week I learned about a form that can be issued to you after your interview—the point at which you’re expecting to get a definitive response one way or another, and to be able to move on with your life. This form was implemented by the Trump administration, and is intended to target ‘heightened security risks’, which is to say primarily racialised people from a very specific set of countries. It asks you to detail the past fifteen years of your travel, employment, housing, and social media usage. Once you submit it, you have to wait indefinitely. Nobody will tell you what’s going on with it or when you should expect to hear back. People have resorted to paying law firms $5,000 USD to file a highly specialised type of lawsuit, to force the government to take action either way on their immigration case. They’re not guaranteed to get a favourable decision (though most do get one). They just want an answer. Any will do.
I know about this thanks to VisaJourney. VisaJourney is a forum for immigrants to the US—a community, but primarily a resource. People group together in threads based on the date when they filed their petitions. Some members pull and analyse data from USCIS apps to determine how quickly cases are being processed. (I’ve been staring at a thread titled ‘Number of case processed hit new high!’ for at least two weeks now, watching I-129F statistics get marginally more promising, trying to decide whether I am up to the experience of ‘getting my hopes up’ yet.) Newcomers to the process can ask questions—and the answers they get will generally be a little brusque, but they will be answers, and they will usually be grounded in experience.
Right now, a group of VisaJourney members passing through the Montreal consulate on the way to the US have an 86-page thread about their experience of getting hit with this nightmare form. A disproportionate number of cases like this are coming out of Montreal. At least as far as I know right now, that’s my consulate. Illusion of control whomst?
Here’s the thing, though: I didn’t know about any of this before I started the process. Nobody else knows anything about it either. When I tell people that I’m trying to immigrate to the US on a K-1 fiancé visa, the universal response is “Oh, like 90 Day Fiancé!” For the uninitiated, 90 Day Fiancé is a show that turns the K-1 immigration process into a cool, fun will-they-or-won’t-they spectator sport. Needless to say, it’s very popular.
The K-1 process is not like 90 Day Fiancé. If 90 Day Fiancé captures anything, it captures the extremely immediate aftermath of arrival. Right now, K-1 couples have to wait around 15.5 months just to get through the first stage of the process. Some wait longer. The process is translucent at best; couples are actively discouraged from contacting USCIS until a certain date threshold has passed, and the National Visa Center and the various consulates have made it increasingly difficult to reach them, too. There is a huge amount of administrative labour involved in sourcing documentation, maintaining evidence of your ongoing relationship, and keeping track of your case once it finally starts to move along. And as I discovered last week, it’s entirely possible to get to the end, think you’ve been approved, and then learn that actually you need to file tremendous quantities of extra information—and wait indefinitely for someone to look at it once you do.
I don’t know how to be normal about this anymore. I’m just over seven months in, and that’s not even that long; there’s still so much longer to wait. Every time I cross the US border to see Isaac, I am terrified that it will be held against me later. We’ve both changed our legal names; Isaac has been divorced before. What if they hold that against us, too? I’m not Canadian; what if that throws up a flag somewhere at the consulate? Should I try to go back to England and be processed there instead? But then what about the Canadian police certificate I need to source—maybe I’ll need a different one—and where will I live if things end up delayed anyway, and how will Isaac and I manage to see each other if we have to wait? I check my estimated processing dates on VisaJourney more than once every day. I don’t even trust them to be accurate. I want someone to tell me it will all be okay, and I want to be able to trust them, and nobody I can trust would ever condescend to say such a thing with any certainty, because they know that there is absolutely no guarantee.
And that’s what you miss, when you look at immigration as anything other than a human experience. Treat it like a reality TV show or a political bugbear or whatever-the-fuck else, and you don’t see the toll it takes on the people who are actually in it. When I was reading that thread, it was a recurring refrain: we’re just people who want to be with our families, why don’t they see that, why won’t they give us back our lives. I wonder every day. No exaggeration; it is constant, and there simply isn’t an answer.
I don’t have a thesis statement here. I’m exceptionally tired, and I’m not even one of the worst off when it comes to immigration horror. Like I said, I’ve only been waiting about seven months. It can take years, at its worst.
I guess if I am inclined to ask anything of you (if you’ve read this far through what I fear is one of my less coherent newsletter posts), it’s this: pay attention, and be a human being. Watch for efforts to make this harder, as though it isn’t already hard enough, and do what you can to push them back. It won’t necessarily make a difference to me, at this point. But it could make a difference to someone else down the line, and I’ll take that. I don’t want anyone else to have to deal with any of this.
Thanks for sticking with me on this one. As you may be able to tell, it’s been a time.
Good news, sorely needed:
Isaac and I have been formally dating for a year as of February 8th. (We were informally dating for a good chunk of months before that, in the sense that we had a standing Sunday appointment to watch Mad Men and chat for hours across an eight-hour time difference, but February 8th is the official anniversary.) Earlier on the day we got together, I’d tweeted something ornery and sad about Valentine’s Day. I don’t know what to say; sometimes the universe proves you wrong.
Speaking of Isaac, his book Dead Collections is an ALA award honor book! Could not be prouder.
Speaking of books (yes, I’m committing to that segue), I finally set myself up to borrow ebooks from the Halifax library, and as a result I have read three (3) books this month already! They were No One Is Talking About This and Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood (the first was a reread, technically, but whatever) and Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. Next stop, She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan.
My employment situation is finally starting to level out!! Triumph and jubilation.
We had an insane cold snap in Halifax last week, which proved a fun excuse to break out the thermal bra-top and the sensible winter hat I bought in 2017 before visiting Canada that Christmas. I didn’t need to use them then, but their moment came eventually!!
Touch wood, but I think I am largely recovered from Covid; my lingering cough is easing up, and at this point most of my breathing hassles are psychosomatic anxiety-adjacent nonsense. Back to normal!
The day I got Covid in January was the day I was due to get my hair cut; obviously I had to cancel. I have now finally managed to obtain shorter hair, and let me tell you: I feel dramatically more human as a result.