Our U.S. Immigration tales from the beginning found here.
The last stage in the permanent resident process (aka Green Card) is the interview. The big scary interview, which as it turns out, is not that big and scary if you haven't done anything wrong! At any rate, we received our (SECOND for goodness sake) interview date through last month in a letter. Our interview date was 10 days from the day we received the letter. Thankfully, we'd both alerted our employers to things like this before we took the jobs, so that was immediately and easily taken care of.
We called our attorney to make sure she got notice - she didn't.* See, your immigration attorney is supposed to go with you to your interview. It's part of their job. Because of the short notice - usually they give 30 - 45 days notice - our attorney said she couldn't make it and would we like to reschedule our interview? HELL NO. We would go without her and take whatever came our way.
We hurried to Staples to make all the copies that our letter told us we needed. Spent about $10.00 on copies. We had two folders, one of copies and one of originals -- just in case. We put them in the order they were listed in the letter. We checked them. Twice. Okay, maybe more like four times. We picked out which outfits we were going to wear - dressy, but conservative. We are going to exude honesty. We put the address in the sat nav. We Mapquested as well -- just in case.
Day of, we got moving on time and arrived at the large, but nice looking, government building early. Do we wait in the truck for a while or go in right away? Maybe they can see us early if we show up early. Deep breath.
If Royal doesn't get approved for permanent residency in the United States then the last TWO years of stress and money and time and paperwork and stress and personal information and the attorney (and more money!) are for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not only that, but I guess I am moving back to Britain - leaving my family again, neither of us will have jobs, no place to live, not going back to school... Another deep breath.
We walk inside.
* I can't tell you how many times our attorney has received paperwork we haven't and vice versa. We are both supposed to receive copies of everything. Freakin' government agencies.
I've got everything crossed for you.
Posted by: Pat | May 01, 2009 at 09:15 AM
Hope everything goes the way you want! Sending you tons of good luck from across the pond.
Posted by: Marci | May 02, 2009 at 11:23 AM
Thank you Pat and Marci!
Posted by: Kath | May 07, 2009 at 02:02 PM