Wednesday - November 09, 2011

Pt.Two final. For now. Immigration USA Really kind folk. NOT

I have been up since 2am and so this is going to be a very short computer day.
Yesterday I started writing on a subject that I want to finish here.

We are facing a bit of an immigration problem, easily solved.  Just return to the USA but only as a three-month visitor, or say the hell with it and never return.  I am not the ‘visitor,’ but the wife is.  Never mind that my wife is married to an American and has been for 42 years.  Never mind that she worked and paid taxes in the USA before we ever met, and worked there for approx. 40 of our 42 years. And never mind that she collects Soc. Security.  She is still a foreigner and subject to the laws of the USA as such.  But wouldn’t any reasonable person, with knowledge of that and our present circumstances concede that there are times when some slack should be allowed.  The folks at immigration have no problem with my entry, no matter how long I’ve been away.  But they just can’t seem to allow for a 42 year marriage. So, I’m welcome but she isn’t except under strict guidelines.  And forget dual citizenship. Yeah, that was explored.  But in spite of having spent all those years working in the USA, the rules to qualify for DC are impossible to comply with.  They sure do not make it easy. Of course, they shouldn’t.  But in the case of someone who has already spent half a lifetime and done everything but vote, heck.  I thought (dumbly) that my natural born citizenship might cover her.  Well apparently not. But hey, shouldn’t some kind of allowance be made for someone having lived in and been married for say 25 years and with no criminal record?  Not even a parking ticket.

Yesterday, I ended this story with the following.

In 2006, we set ourselves up for the trouble that followed in 2010, and worse this year on our trip back home on Sept. 13, 2011, when she was pulled aside and taken to an interrogation room like some sort of illegal.  And technically, she may have been.

By 2006, the mil was totally bedridden and as already explained, the wife wasn’t exactly running the minute mile anymore.  Injuries from accidents and the stress and the very hard work of moving dead weight to change diapers on an aged mother, had taken its toll.

There is a rule with regard to foreigners who are out of the USA for long periods.
You must return every year just to get your passport stamped by US Immigration.  Never mind the cost, which is not small even with so called cheap flights.
The greater cost is the physical inability of doing that when you are wracked by pain and the worry of a dying parent you’re afraid to leave.  At one point in late ’05, my wife was making use of a cane for some months.  But there was nobody at the embassy or at Homeland Security who was able to offer any kind of advise or help.

The wife’s mother finally passed away in 2009 at the age of 93, thus giving us back our own lives which had been on hold for so long.  Although it was expected, as always the loved one left behind is devastated.  I of course felt relief.  The bondage was over at last.

I could not help myself and wondered if that was how the freed slaves felt after the unCivil War.
So, we went through all the usual things after a death in a family, the mortuary, the lawyer(s) the will, yadda,yadda.  And of course months of probate.  Then another disaster (for my wife) when her brother suddenly died of a brain tumor in Australia.

Finally in 2010 with some things more or less settled , we flew to the US for a three month visit.  And ran into US Immigration who pointed out that my wife’s passport had not been stamped since 2004, and here it was 2010.  Oh boy.  The guy at the booth was not interested in the wife’s story but instead had her escorted to the room where they question folks coming into the country.  Reasonable enough I guess, they wanted answers to questions which they got.  Sort of.  She spoke to a supervisor who told her that a decision had to be made as to which country she was going to live in.  As well, he gave her an extension and allowed her into the USA but with the warning that she had to return in a year.  It may look like an excuse but I can tell you for sure that my wife was in no condition to make decisions of any kind at that point in time.  We could not leave an empty house here for long; we cannot maintain two separate houses in two countries and who knows how long it will take to sell this place.  Yeah, we wanted to come home (USA) but the problem was when.  It all looks so easy and so simple on paper. 
And then her uncle died, her mom’s last sibling. 

Well, for lots of reasons I can’t explain, although we should have returned to the states by July, making it one year, we could not.
I filled out that ESTAS thingy that does not guarantee a person can get in, but must be done (at a cost btw) before you fly.
On Sept. 13th, two months later then the rule, we arrived at LAX.

Now I must make a confession here in order not to give the wrong impression.  I had warned the wife that we needed to return in July if we were going, as that month made the year.  But she was under the impression based on what she said she was told at the interrogation in 2010, that it wasn’t a calendar year.

I’m still not clear on what her thinking was, it could have been wishful thinking.  But I was not allowed into that room with her and so don’t know.  Here’s what I do know.  If you ever made an international flight and had to wait for customs and immigration, you know the wait can be an hour at a minimum at LAX. An hour? You are lucky if it’s that short.

So after an 11 hour cramped flight, another hour (at least) in a slow moving line and then taken to an interrogation room where she had another hour to wait to be interviewed, she wasn’t at her best back in 2010 and I sure don’t know what was said. But she came away thinking that coming back every year meant 2010,2011,2012 etc. You get the idea.  Add to all that, on a transatlantic flight, we’d been up and moving for a very long time. Up at 6am for a 7am pick up for the hour drive to London airport. Then three hours of waiting there, a loooong walk to the gate with carry on baggage. By the time we arrived at LAX, I don’t really know how long we’d been up. And hey, we are not spring chickens anymore. 

So naturally coming through LAX this year, going by the rule, she was two months over the limit.  We left the USA last year in July and so had to return in July of this year.  But we returned in Sept.
Big mistake.

The line to wait after deplaning was a long one. It was a full plane and there were not that many immigration booths operating. The line went at a snail’s pace, I don’t think there was any air conditioning running. Didn’t feel like it.  Two sights I will never ever forget. One was a joke.  While waiting in that line and in plain view are posters showing smiling, helpful and happy looking snappy dressed officials waiting to greet visitors with a caption that said, “The face of America.” Yeah?  Not there surely.  Not at LAX. Not one person looked anything like that poster and certainly there weren’t any smiles.  The other thing I cannot forget is the inspector with the rubber mouth.  Think I’m cracking wise?  Nope.
I’d never seen anything quite like that before. So, picture this.

A long snaking line, people being called one at a time as a booth becomes clear for the next victim.  You’re still some distance from the front of that line but have a clear view. You wait along with a couple of hundred others for your turn to clear immigration. And there at one booth sits an officer who decides to stop processing ppl and waving other ppl on to other booths, while he very,very,very
s l o o o o l y munches on a bag of potato chips.  He was very slow and very deliberate in his chewing, and his lips seemed made of rubber as they extended and retracted and twisted round and round his face.  He sat there chewing and looking at the exhausted, sweaty travellers shuffling in place, almost as if he were daring any of us to say anything.  Of course none did except to each other.

When it was finally our turn he waved us on to the next unoccupied inspector as he was still making circles with those large ugly lips.
He wasn’t finished with his chips.

We got an inspector I was hoping to avoid. None of them are exactly pleasing to the eye, but this one guy was kinda scary.
With a complete stone face he asked the wife a question she wasn’t prepared for. He looked at her passport and asked if she wanted to surrender her green card?  That threw her cos she didn’t understand why he would want it. It didn’t expire till 2014. So she (in error) said no and that’s when he asked her to step aside and she would be escorted to the interaction room.
Here we go again and it doesn’t get any better.

Once again I am not allowed in that place with her, and so grab a baggage trolley and gather all our luggage, and sit down outside the closed off area she’s in. Behind closed glass doors.  She’s about the 11th and last person in the waiting area.  We are already very late and I’m now worried about the hired car that’s supposed to pick us up and take us to Palm Desert, a three hour drive at least, depending on traffic and accidents etc.  Pretty soon, little by little a little later, the terminal empties itself of humanity as even the inspector booths are now vacant.  And still no sign of my wife.
So I push the trolley to the far end, almost to the exit and find a water fountain. I tried to empty the reservoir.  Then I made my way to the exit thinking maybe I could find our ride and let em know we’re delayed. But no such luck because if you exit, you can not go back in. What if I got stuck on the outside and the wife finally got through?  What if there was going to be a problem and they wouldn’t let her in?  All sorts of crazy things going thru my tired worn out brain. I couldn’t leave the baggage unattended in a terminal. Even if it wasn’t stolen, it would surely be seen as abandoned and a possible threat. But I had to get out to the waiting area. Not a chance.  So I wheeled the trolley back to the waiting area, stopping on the way to make another attack on LA’s water supply.  Still no sign of my wife.  But she wasn’t in the waiting room so presumably she was being interviewed.
Outside of the glass door and sitting at a desk armed with a clipboard was a small Asian woman, I thought perhaps Vietnamese.
At any rate, from that general area.  By now, there was total silence. The rumble of the baggage carousal was gone, the place was empty and quiet.  Anxious to try and find a way to alert our driver (if they were even there, I had no cell phone) I told the woman I had a problem, knew I couldn’t just leave luggage even there, and could she keep an eye on our baggage for a couple of minutes?  Her reply was,
“I’m not paid to baby sit people’s luggage.” Well heck, I was the only one there by that time, she was sitting there doing nothing that I could see.
I think I used the word “shit” and sat down to wait for my wife to exit KGB HQ. 
During her interview, the officer was she tells me polite, but aggressive at the same time.  He told her that she was told last year she had a year in which to return and that she was told she should have got an extension.  Tired and confused she thought she had used the extension in ’04 and wasn’t allowed another. She said she didn’t recall that. She says he asked her if she was saying that the officer was lying.  She said no, she wasn’t saying that at all. Only that she didn’t remember anything about another extension. That came as a surprise.  She’d been up for many hours, many more in lines, was exhausted and just didn’t know. But she accepted what he told her.  He then told her that by holding on to her green card, she was denying entry to some other immigrant who might qualify for one and do America some good.
He had a point.  My wife had her time and paid her taxes and wasn’t living in the USA and so her time is up.  Need to make way for new blood I guess.  Like the folks coming in across the borders of Tx,Az,Nm,Ca, etc. And then there are the amnesties from the dark past.

She told the inspector that we had hoped to settle in Ca. and were going to look for a home on this trip, try and sell the house in the UK and return next year.  He told her that might be a problem.

So here we are and I guess until I can sort things out, here we’ll remain.  The supermarkets are better here then those in our home state and town, plus they deliver.  And while it ain’t perfect cos nothing man made is, national health for all it’s problems isn’t as bad as has been reported in the states. I don’t drive here and that’s a bit of a handicap but … we have bus service and it’s free to those over 65.  So we’re having to play this one out one day at a time. Or in our case, one year at a time, and time sure grows short at my age.

Do miss Sun City, CA.  tho.

Posted by peiper     on 11/09/2011 at 03:07 PM   
Filed Under: • Personal •  
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