Rants of an Immigrant

I haven’t got over the shock I experience when I constantly relearn how little Americans think about their legal existence. Or visas. Or bureaucracy. I mean sure, the DMV is sometimes annoying (that’s honestly not been my experience in two different states), but have you ever experienced high-stakes bureaucracy where your ability to come back into the country that is currently your home is jeopardized based on the mood of an overworked, underpaid and annoyed person behind a pane of glass? This isn’t something that has happened to me yet, but that hardly takes away from both the stress and annoyance each potential visa denial brings with it.

Let me paint you a picture - it’s Sunday night. You just reached the end of a 24 hour journey across the Atlantic, and are delirious to the point of finding random things joyous (sleep deprivation is an effective anti-depressant after all). You calm down enough to nap for a few hours, but now have to take another train to a different city with a stoic white building whose inhabitants will determine your fate come to work every day. You did get to nap some more on the train, and after reaching your accommodation for the night, you decide to do one last check of the documents that prove you are who you say you are.

Now these are documents you prepared months in advance. You actually started the whole application process over a year ago. Of course, you couldn’t do all the prep months in advance because you have to get things like employment verification letters that are no older than a few weeks before your appointment. Anyway, looking through the documents you see a tiny line that looks suspiciously like something you don’t have — “Prior visa in any visa class which is still valid or expired”. You suddenly remember a tourist visa you had from 10 years ago that you never used, but there is still a reasonable chance someone asks you to produce it.

This whole ordeal reminds me of paying taxes:

There is nothing the US government doesn’t know about me. 20 pieces of paper going 10 years back to prove my identity today is practically useless in a world where you have complete digital records for every person, especially legal immigrants who file the same paperwork reassuring you of their identity every couple years. In fact, there is a public website you can go to and retrieve records of every single time I’ve entered or left the US - the only piece of information that’s maybe a bit hard to retrieve is my passport number. I’d hardly consider my passport number secret information though - I’ve sent a PDF of my passport to more emails than I can count with two hands and two feet (no fingers or toes missing).

I don’t really care about the privacy implications of this though, it’s quite similar to the shitty privacy contract you accept using a social security number. Any notion of movement through the physical world requires you to sacrifice a lot of privacy to weasel your way through the system (for us plebs anyway).

What I do care about is sitting around on a Sunday night after 30 hours of travel, finishing up dinner, and suddenly sitting up to realize that I might have left one document proving some obscure part of my identity from a decade ago that is information you already have. I’m lucky enough that my family springs into action for me in these situations and helps me deal with the whole thing - I’m probably in one of the most privileged situations an immigrant who’s dealing with these issues can be.

I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of this is my fault - both for stressing myself out for every little thing and for being a poor planner. I do have a reputation within my family of forgetting important details before the last minute, and scrambling the troops to help me get this last minute work done. What is annoying to me is not the fact that some bureaucracy exists - I chose that for myself when I decided to immigrate. The problem is that the structure of the system is so inexplicably complex, and that there are no incentives to improve this process (e.g. making it easier to get a visa is rarely good PR, and alienates more voters than is usually worth, immigrants who do become citizens no longer have to care about fixing the problems their past selves faced etc.).

I don’t think this is the best we can do for a system like this in a digital age. It is improvable on a structural level, and there are improvements in the works, but it just feels frustrating on a personal level to deal with the current system until we have a better one. There isn’t really a point of this article - writing is sometimes a vent for me (you should see my journal), and this seemed like a vent that could be more.. public.