The Wait

I've heard from many of you out there who are either surprised or not about the move. I'm sure some of you are shocked, which is understandable given how much I love Canada. The question I've been hearing the most, "So when are you going?" is the same question I have.

A long time ago, it was easy to cross the border. You didn't even need photo ID. You just needed some sort of card thing with your name on it and off you went. If you wanted to stay, you could stay. You filed papers, you stayed. No big deal.

But, like all good things, someone has to ruin it. Whether it's the person who first threw litter on the ground, or the first criminal who hid under a fake name, the rules had to change.

You may or may not be aware that, unlike Canada, the USA is closed to new immigrants. That does not mean the borders are closed to all immigrants. (Yet.) It means that, unlike Canada, if one day you decide you want to move to the USA, you can't. The only immigrants allowed are people who are hired by companies to work there because their special set of skills are unavailable in the entire country, or foreign resident spouses/families of US Citizens and Permanent Residents.

(Yes, there is an "immigration lottery" but given how often anyone wins an actual lottery, we're not counting that here.)

There's a lot of paperwork involved in immigrating to any country, and especially so as the spouse immigrant of a US Citizen. Nevertheless, there are tens of thousands of spouses and families waiting to be (re)united with their US Resident families. So the wait is long - depending on the type of immigration you do, your processing time could be anywhere from 7 months to 2 years or longer. And it's all red tape.

So I don't know when I will be moving. We just have to wait for my turn in line, and make sure everything we submitted was correct. Because if you  miss one thing, you forget to submit one thing, you make one mistake on a piece of paper, the government holds the entire application waiting for you to resubmit,  and then you pick up the queue from there - not from your previous place in line, but from wherever you end up in line after you give them what they want.

That's why these things are unpredictable. Especially when you're filing from outside of the country. They aren't in a big hurry to get you there. The process is much faster when you are living with your spouse and file from inside of the US, but we can't take that route for obvious reasons.

So...we wait.