… I became an American citizen at last. As much as I should have been excited, my mood was rather nonchalant, preceded by weeks worth of anxiety, and followed only by a sense of relief. My journey to citizenship was not particularly painful, but it was anything but pleasant. The old immigration services department was extremely inefficient, insisted on pushing paperwork around the country rather than getting data computerized. The result of which was a long and tedious application, and re-application process which was repeated more than a few times in the past few years.
The most frustrating aspect was how much time it took just to confirm that my paperwork had yet again disappeared in the abyss of bureaucracy. At some point I suspected that a team of entrepreneurial gnomes snuck into the the INS office and stole paperwork on a nightly basis, a la South Park’s underpants gnomes. They would then transport those paperwork into their secret underground headquarter, where on one side of the cave, there would be a huge poster of their business development flowchart. One huge block with “Immigration application”, eventually leading into a bubble that says “Profit”; but the step in between would be filled with just a giant-sized question mark.
In a way, it would make more sense to shred a certain number of application per year by “accident” in order to extract more application fee out of the same people over and over again. After all, there are no repeat customers in the naturalization market. You can only get naturalized once in a lifetime; well, unless you decide that Vancouver is more to your liking than United States (a conclusion with surprising number of growing supporters).
The irony of the whole thing, is that it wasn’t for 9/11, I may still be amidst the process. It was the establishment of Homeland Security that forced changes in the immigration services that moved all the paper-based processes into one that is electronic. Imagine the most important document in your life handed over to some random person without a face, being packaged & shuffled across the country multiple times. That was the situation that I, along with what has to be hundreds of thousands of immigrants per year has to deal with.
It seems very odd to me, that this, my last application went through with rapid speed. It took no more than six months before I was in an auditorium, with 1255 other newly minted Americans, to take our final oath and turn in our green card. Yet this turn of events was at least in part, made possible by the tragic event that has shaped America for the past several years. The impact of 9/11 isn’t just those people who died, but the families of those who had to carry on, and those soldiers we’re sending overseas to fight in a fictitious war.
Yet for at least one person, 9/11 was a fortunate event.
