Immigration: Step Three. Almost There!

My precarious days as a non-resident alien in this country are almost over. My beloved, who flew from the sunny and warm Tel Aviv, and I had our immigration interview last week. Even though our marriage is completely bona fide, as they call it in the legal lingo, I was nonetheless worried about having to prove it to the immigration authorities, especially since the two of us, because of the nature of academic job market, live together only 4-5 months a year. As far as I know, immigration is the only part of the US legal system that is not governed by the presumption of innocence (well, there’s also Guantanamo Bay detention camp for suspected terrorists, but that’s a completely different story). When I applied for visitor and student visas in the past, I had to prove that I had no intention to remain in the US; I also witnessed several harsh and unpleasant interrogations of foreigners on the US-Canadian border. The system also does not seem entirely rational: even though there is an immigration office in Manhattan, our interview was scheduled in Long Island, 30 miles away.

At the advice of our lawyer, I put together all of the proof of our seven-year relationship I could possibly think of and find: phone records, correspondence, travel itineraries between NYC and Midwest, apartment leases, joint bank statements, a bag of photo albums etc etc etc. I had also found a sample of questions married couples might be asked about each other and we practiced the night before the interview. The questions ranged from completely innocent – “How did the two of you meet?” (in graduate school) and “What did you have for dinner the night before the interview?” (black bean chili) – to quite intrusive, “What is your favorite sex position?” (we couldn’t pick just one).

The Long Island Homeland Security office is in a nondescript, boxy two-story building in the back of a shopping mall. Here, even the security guards were not very friendly, and the intake personnel were outright rude. In all, we spent three hours in the building, but most of it was lining up to a window, sitting to be called up, lining up to a door, sitting to be called up again. We met with our lawyer who prepped us once again for the interview. Actually, he wasn’t our regular lawyer, but some sort of an independent contractor specializing in representing other lawyers’ clients during interviews. My beloved, used to informality of academia that has been recently reinforced by even more informal Israeli academia, made a faux pas of calling our counselor by his first name. As a result, we got a somewhat stern lecture from him about the formal etiquette of the interview. The gist: don’t call the interviewing officer or the counsel by their first names, but instead Officer So-and-so, Mister So-and-so. I wasn’t surprised by such expectations, after all it was a government office and we were there on an official business. What did surprise me, was how informally most other petitioners were dressed. The two of us were the most dressed-up people – we both wore suits and my sweetheart even had a tie on. In fact, he was better dressed that our lawyer (tweed jacket, slacks, and some stubble); most other applicants wore jeans, t-shirts, baseball hats. There were a couple of other couples wearing “smart” clothes; not coincidentally they also had lawyers by their side, while most others did not. Of course, those, like us, who could afford legal representation, could also afford nicer clothes. After the last year fee increase for all immigration-related applications (now, “green card” is almost $1,400, and citizenship is another $700), it is remarkable that people who don’t have well-paying middle-class jobs can file for immigration at all.

An hour and a half after the scheduled time, we were finally called in. The adjudications officer was soft-spoken, smiley, and generally nice to us. But our lawyer had warned me that nice immigration officers might be the most dangerous ones and I kept my guard up. Although in this case she probably was a genuinely nice person and did not intend to entrap us by her congeniality. She swore the two of us in; I almost felt as if I was on “Law and Order” testifying in court. But this was pretty much the only similarity. For most of the time, the officer was checking out application materials, demanding more paperwork and generating some of her own. She sympathized with my efforts to recycle paper: some of the documents I brought were printed/copied on my students’ final papers from the last semester. The only substantive question she asked was about how we met and started dating. But she didn’t seem to be very interested in the answer. In truth, it seemed to me that our case had been decided before she ever saw us and the interview was a mere formality, even when she asked me whether I had a criminal record or had been involved in illegal gambling, prostitution, or abetting illegal immigrants (I don’t and I haven’t). However, she looked through all five of our photo albums with great interest and even made a few comments but nothing pertaining to our case.

Even though the interview was “successful,” I don’t have my green card yet. The FBI is still doing background checks on me and if my fingerprints don’t turn up on some old crime scene (see my post from February 11, 2008, on fingerprinting) I should be cleared within a few weeks.

The morning of that day was dreadfully gray and rainy. And to ease my anxiety about the interview CAG kept promising that when we leave the immigration office after the interview, the sun would be shining bright and the road back to the train station would be paved with gold. Neither happened, but the rain let up and the taxi drive didn’t seem as long as on the way to the interview.

The security guards might have been terse, the building dreary, the wait long and nerve-raking, but all in all this part of the immigration processes, much like the previous ones, wasn’t so bad, not to mention that the interview was actually scheduled four months earlier than I had expected. I keep wondering whether we were lucky or, as our lawyer suggested, positively “profiled:” young (well, relatively); (overly) educated; quite good-looking (especially the husband); and, according to official classifications, white. What country would pass up on such opportunity! Seriously though, I do wonder whether all those factors played a more important role than they should in a “rational” bureaucratic system.

When we got back to the city, we went to our favorite kosher deli to celebrate. Their pastrami is so good that had we lived any closer to it, we each would be a hundred pounds heavier; but we only go there for special occasions like this one. But who do we see as we walk into the deli! Our lawyer to whom we said goodbye an hour earlier and thought we never ever see again. I guess roads of many New York Jews lead to pastrami sandwiches and kosher dills! Welcome to post-Ellis Island America, dear!

Famous by Association!

I’m married to a published author! CAG’s first book is finally out, in the bookstores and on Amazon.com! Last weekend, while I was presenting at a conference, he stopped by our neighborhood bookstore, and there it was both in the “new releases” and in the regular sociology section. We went back the next day – I wanted to see it for myself. My imagination ran wild and I was picturing dozens of copies laid out on the most prominent displays and selling like hotcakes. Of course, it wasn’t quite the case. The store only carried four copies, although it seemed to have sold at least one already. In the regular sociology section, the two copies were quite appropriately (albeit merely by alphabetical chance) placed between Erving Goffman, the father of the symbolic interaction school, and John Goldthorpe, the British scholar of class and inequality. I was a lot less happy with the book’s placement in the new releases section – it was hard to see on a lower shelf and was dwarfed by something a lot taller but with a lot less tasteful and interesting cover – so I placed one of the copies on a display table, right next to the most recent book by French sociologist Luc Boltanski. But my marketing effort was in vain: on a subsequent visit to the store a few days later, the book was back on the shelf.

Since that weekend, CAG and I have been quite obsessed with the book’s sales ranking on Amazon. It experienced a meteoric but short-lived success: overnight the ranking shot from below 1,000,000 to mid-80,000; it was in the top 10 of new releases in non-fiction/social sciences/poverty category. As of today, the book’s ranking is in 500,000, but it is a respectable number 20 in Poverty category and 44 in Civil Rights and Liberties.

It will probably be a while, if ever, till his book becomes a New York Times bestseller or be chosen by Oprah for her Book Club, but it is sure to win a couple of professional awards, and the publisher is already thinking about a second print run. We’ll have a book party, but not until CAG is back from the Promised Land in August, so y’all have plenty of time to get your own copies for the esteemed author to autograph!