A United States Citizen

A couple of weeks ago I got a letter from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) instructing me to appear at their New Orleans office the following Friday to have my biometrics recorded. Getting a letter like that from the government agency that controls immigration into the country might have been intimidating were I not in the process of applying for naturalization as a United States citizen. But that’s what’s happening, so being photographed, fingerprinted, and iris-scanned comes with the territory. It’s taken me a while to work up to this. To be eligible for naturalization the minimum time that one needs to spend as a permanent resident of the US is five years—or three years if you are married to a citizen. Observant readers will note that I’ve been around longer than that. Nineteen years longer actually, which is a world-class example of procrastination if ever I saw one.

I have a bit of an allergy to paperwork. And when it comes to the process of applying for naturalization as a citizen of the United States—on which I’ve finally begun (about fifteen years late)—no one does paperwork quite like the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) does. Officially, the application that sits at the heart of the naturalization process is called the n-400. Every foreign national applying for citizenship must complete the n-400, and it’s a beast. The process starts innocuously enough, with name, address, date and place of birth, spouse’s details, etc. There are lots of document requirements—birth certificates, marriage certificates, employment history, proof of residency for every place you’ve lived, proof of children’s births, details of property owned—that are reasonably easy to gather. But after that the n-400 gets weirder. Police records? Fair enough. Date, destination, and duration of each trip outside of the US? After twenty years that’s a bit of a puzzle. Then: any hereditary titles or orders of nobility to renounce? Habitual drunkard? Polygamist? Prostitute? Deportee? Fugitive? Guerilla? Member of a paramilitary unit, the Communist or Nazi parties? Arms dealer? Run a forced labor camp? I don’t suppose making the kids muck out the chicken coop counts although they might disagree. Ever committed murder, torture, or genocide? Have you answered “no” to all the above? Good; proceed to Section 3. Answering these questions feels surreal—as if I’ve stumbled into a process that applies to someone else entirely. That’s because like most folks who’ve grown up calling the United States—or the U.K., Australia, or most other stable, modern, democratic countries—home, all of these things are utterly distant from my day-to-day reality. 

I’m married to an American citizen, have a clean record, pay my taxes, run a thriving business, and come from a country that maintains good relations with the United States. So long as the examiners don’t consider procrastination a deal-breaker, I’ll probably get in. But making my way through the naturalization application is a stark reminder that, for many in the world, the day-to-day reality can be very different indeed. Really, I don’t think that the n-400 was designed for people like me, the shoo-ins, but rather to provide an opportunity so that anyone described by the inscription on the Statue of Liberty—the tired, the poor, the tempest-tossed—might have a pathway to follow towards the goal of living in a place where pluralism, majority rule, and the rule of law make personal advancement a viable possibility. That’s what everybody wants, and fractious politics aside, supporting the idea of a country that espouses these tenets as the inalienable rights of all people, feels like a very valuable thing indeed. 

One last thought about this immigration thing, then I’ll shut up. No matter how rich the opportunities offered by one’s adopted country, no one who departs their childhood home ever leaves it behind completely. As much as I love the life my family and I have built here, I’ll always look back on aspects of my earlier life in England and Australia with a blend of nostalgia and regret. That varied, bittersweet experience has lent a richness to my life that I count among my dearest possessions and leads me to believe that diversity of origin has been—and continues to be—one of the United States’ greatest sources of strength. As an immigrant and, I hope, soon-to-be citizen, I’m incredibly proud to finally be making a conscious decision to become a full-fledged member of this society. Our family has always said that, when my naturalization is ultimately granted, we’ll mark the occasion with a trip to Washington, D.C. for the citizenship ceremony. From start to finish, the whole naturalization process is said to take about six months. That would have me becoming official around late March—cherry blossom time in our nation’s capital. For the newly-minted American husband of the endlessly patient, garden-loving, American woman who invited me to share her home, this seems like an appropriate way to begin a new chapter.