Licenfe for to Import ye Weazelle
Okay, here’s what I had to scrape up for visa number one.
- ■ A letter from Uncle B saying he’s cool with this
■ His passport
■ Six months of bank statements
■ Deed to Badger House
■ Two years of his tax returns
■ My old passport
■ My current passport
■ Six months of my bank statements
■ A list of all the times we’ve been together, where and for how long
■ Pictures of us together
■ A few postcards covering the widest spread of time
■ Screencaps of our email traffic for a few months
■ Screencaps of our Skype history for a few days
■ A passport-sized photo of me not smiling, looking like a sad, elderly, half-deflated balloon
■ A Xerox copy of all this shit (and another one to keep in case they lose all this shit)
■ $940
Bear in mind this is originals only — no photocopies. And you can’t start early, the bank documents have to be farm fresh.
Wednesday noon I take me and my passport and my appointment sheet to Hartford, CT, where I get fingerprinted, rephotographed — and possibly put into the DHS database. They don’t tell you when they do this or what triggers it. The biometrics step is all new. Lucky moi.
Then I go to the nearest FedEx/Kinko’s, have the biometrics thingie Xeroxed, put it together with the other stuff and a return FedEx envelope, and FedEx it all to the Visa Expediter. Three hundred bucks to them, they drop it off at the embassy, it goes to the top of the pile (which, incidentally, sounds like a very dubious racket to me) and if the papers are in perfect order, they pick up my Import License next day and FedEx it back to me.
But, of course, papers are never in perfect order. He’s missing June on his bank statements. I’ve carried my birth certificate in my wallet my whole life, but it wasn’t there when I looked today (it’s unclear if I’m from a country that requires this, or if my passport is enough). And on and on. I’m told that individual immigration officers have tremendous personal authority about what to accept and what to reject. So basically, I only have to hope I get dropped on the desk of a British civil servant living in New York City in November who doesn’t have a hair across his ass.
I am SO screwed.
November 10, 2008 — 6:47 pm
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