With some nervousness on my part, my wife and I today headed to Manchester, NH, for a visit to the Citizenship and Immigration Services office, where we had been summoned in order to be interviewed. The initial green card that I was issued after our marriage expired well over a year ago, and the CIS had evidently decided that it was time to take action. It was about time, since I was publicly hassled in a rather accusing way the last time I had to renew my drivers’ license — an annual ritual that will now be behind me. The DMV official who declined to renew my license had been sure that something must be wrong with my case if the CIS was so late in updating my visa. Given that these were the same people that issued visas to some of the 9/11 hijackers a year after they had destroyed the Twin Towers and part of the Pentagon I doubted the grounds of his suspicion, but I guess these guys are paid to be suspicious.

Shrijnana wasn’t at all anxious about the meeting; in her view the whole thing was a cut-and-dried case. We have a bona fide marriage, we own a house, we have joint banking, our names are jointly on the numerous bills we receive, and we’re in the process of adopting a child. I know all that, of course, but then I was reading a article in Wired just this morning about the National No-Fly List, which, it turn out, has prevented government officials with high-ranking security clearance, military personnel, and even flight-crew from boarding airplanes (see Feds’ Watch List Eats Its Own). If the US government can bungle background investigations to this extent then what are the chances that investigations of mere immigrants are carried out accurately?

We took along a bulging bag of documentation, ranging from electricity bills to photograph albums (I was surprised by how photographs we have of the two of us together — further cause for nervousness). In the event, virtually none of that was needed. The very friendly officer who went over the paperwork with us made a copy of one sheet of adoption-related material, made sure that our current contact data were up to date, and said a new green card would reach me in a month or so. The only hitch was that the photographs I had brought were in the wrong format. I’d scrupulously followed the instructions on the letter I’d been sent, but unfortunately while the requirements for the photographs had been changed the instructions I’d received had not. But a short walk along Elm Street found me a photographer where I obtained some correctly-formatted pictures.

So I’m good for the next ten years, and I’ve already downloaded the forms for my citizenship application. With luck I’ll be able to help vote the Republicans out of office in November, 2008.