Another Immigration Horror Story

A couple of days ago I wrote a rant about how painful it was to deal with the Massachusetts and the federal government. In contrast, civil servants in the Quebec and Canadian governments have often gone out of their way to help me out ... and boy did I ever need their help (maybe someday I'll write about it). T. Price, an American Postdoc living in Montreal, then left his own story in the comment section. It got labeled as junk by TypePad and I just "unjunked it". It illustrates much of my rant and I would like to share it with you:

Your rant is spot on. I don't even speak the language of the Quebecois bureaucracy and I have found them to be helpful, polite and expeditious, which was almost never the case back home in Texas. Moreover, bureaucrats here seem to have a keen understanding that people's lives do not fit into neat little checkboxes and when problems arise they need to be taken care of and not allowed to fester into a tailspin through the maze of redtape that these offices almost always become behind the front desk.

If I might just offer an example, which will be somewhat lengthy, but perhaps will prove a point. I am American, my wife is Mexican. We were married 4 years ago in Texas and my wife became a conditional permanent resident of the US one year following our marriage, hence a conditional resident for the 2 years following that date. The next year, I applied for, and recieved an NIH NRSA Fellowship for postdoctoral work at McGill University where we are now (Montreal, Canada, for those who don't know). This created a problem for my wife since we would be living outside the US, however, we were assured by a Congressperson and Immigration (USCIS) officials that it was okay because I was a Fellow of the NIH. We eventually applied to have the conditional status of her residency removed and we were placed on over-seas hold, as is customary for anyone living outside the US as a permanent resident of conditional status. The catch is, if you are on official government business, you do your interview and have the conditional residency change to permanent at the end of your service, if you are not on official government business you must return within one year of the end of the conditional residence.

We assumed that everything was okay as we had sent all of my NIH documents to USCIS and been told, by a congressional liaison that our paperwork was in order. However, as the deadline approached for the conditional residence extension to end, we recieved a letter from USCIS that my wife's permanent residency has been terminated unless we can prove we were living in the US prior to July 2006. Since my NRSA runs from March 2005 to March 2008 and we are living in Montreal, we obviously cannot do that. Hence, I am a Fellow of the NIH doing work on an NIH grant at a foreign institution (mind you it wasn't easy to pull that one off in the first place) and the government does not consider me to be on official government business and has in effect kicked my wife out of the country. We have tried to go through as many channels as we know and no one seems to have even the slightest idea what to do for us or even who to contact at USCIS. Ironically, we applied for a reentry permit (temporary passport) for my wife because she is tired of getting harassed by border officials (it really is tough being Mexican in the face of an immigration officer) and even though they have stripped her residency, we were asked by that office (USCIS but in a different state) for additional documents so they could go ahead and approve the reentry permit. Does that make any sense?!? We had intended to return to the US following my postdoctoral work but now we are seriously reconsidering that proposition.

As I said before, I don't think that this necessarily illustrates anything about Canadian superiority. I think that the problem is a type of ideology found in the US, that government is bad. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. To deal with American governmental agencies, you must withstand many obstacles and crazy rules ... these were designed to make things purposely inefficient. Why? Why? Government is bad, they say. Let's dissuade them from using it. Arrrgggghhhh!

(Then we wonder why the US government made a horrible event in New Orleans that much worse ... )

We, in the US, should rid ourselves of this ideology. Government isn't bad or good ... it is a necessity. It can be efficient. It can work. And to believe that government can be efficient does not mean that I'm advocating communism or socialism. Government should be there to help the citizens of a free market society get certain services. To help the free market. Here is news for you ... according to many experts NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) has benefited Canadian citizens more than Americans. Let me rephrase this. By lowering tariffs and increasing head to head competition, Canadian "shackled by their big government" have done on the whole BETTER than their American "government is bad" cousins.

And there is a word for a society with no government ... anarchy. (Somalia anyone?)