Got my US temporary work permit, but-

Okay, so my wife and I were on our way somewhere and we stopped off at the mailbox to see if we’d got any parcels or correspondence and there was a letter from the USCIS in there.  I must admit that I was a little worried.  I got my 2 year green card in August, which should be all I need for working and travel and should have meant that I was free from any immigration concerns, at least for now - so why were the US authorities writing to me?

I consider myself to be pretty scrupulous when going through all the bureaucracy that officialdom throws at me, but there is so much of it, it crossed my mind that I’d missed sending in a form, or neglected to provide some crucial piece of evidence, or even worse, I’d let something expire, and the USCIS were writing to tell me of the terrible consequences.

But no, when I opened the letter, I found a plastic card inside and a letter saying that here was my temporary work permit.  It was completely useless of course, given that I already had my green card.  The temporary work permit is something that you are supposed to get whilst you are waiting for your green card.  When I checked the dates on the card I couldn’t help but be wryly amused – it was valid from May 2011 until April 2012!

That made it approximately 9 months late!

Oh well, I guess that gives me 3 months to use it before it expires.

Blowing my own trumpet (and 10 other peoples!)

In the second and final part of my reflective expat blog posts, I thought it would be a good time to recap some history of my British expat blog and give some of the positives that have occurred over this time.  Despite having blogged extensively in the past on sites such as Myspace, I wasn’t actually sure what or where I would go with this blog when I started out.  I did want it to have some sort of definite theme that I could hang my experiences around, rather than just writing a general blog about whatever random thoughts came into my head.  I flapped around in some of the early posts, looking for a style and plan.  

For instance, I tried writing about my experience of the K1 fiance visa process as posts, but after a while I decided that they were too dry for a general consumption (unless you have gone through, or are going through the process, you really don’t want to know about the relationship proof requirements for the I-129 Petition, or the financial support documents needed to support an I-485 Green Card application).  In the end, I put my visa experiences in in their own separate blog which I imaginatively named: My K1 Fiance Visa Experience.

Titles were also something that I toyed around with.  The “From Sheep to Alligators” name was actually the third title I tried, but I felt happy with it enough to make up a unique banner header using an old alligator picture and Adobe Photoshop.

Features and Blog Award

My expat blog about living in Florida has featured online in various websites and online publications, including 'The smart-insegors Daily', the online publication of the expat website for professionals, Insego, which I would heartily recommend as a friendly place to visit if you want an intelligent debate, information and advice or just a place to fraternize with other expats.

Australian blogger, Robynne from Robynne's Nest gave me a versatile blogger award, which I will display here below (I guess the term ‘versatile’ maybe fits, as I tend to mix up my blog with humour, trivia and serious discussions).  I am not quite sure what I am supposed to do with the award, but I do appreciate it.  Do I award it to someone else after I’ve finished with it, or just leave it to gather dust on my virtual mantelpiece?

Reddit

Early on, I got into putting links to some of my posts on the Social Bookmarking site, Reddit.  Two of my humorous posts got voted up the rankings and each received over 3,000 straight after they were posted.  I enjoyed the rush of 4 digit viewing figures, but I must admit that I felt a pang of relief when the party was over and my blog stats returned to their normal 15-50 visitors per day!

Google Traffic

I must admit that, unlike blogs that I have written in the past, I have deliberately courted Google traffic with this one, picking my keywords and tags carefully.  The nice thing about Google traffic is that people come to your blog even when you haven’t written anything new for a while (if I was ever to cease writing, I would probably continue to get 20-30 views a day from Googlers). 

The Blogger stats tell me how people have reached me.  It is amazing how many people want to know about Lake Alice, brown sauce and bacon butties!  There are also some strange ones.  Because I have written about the different names for underwear in Britain and the USA and my blog is called From Sheep to Alligators, I get visitors coming to my blog who have typed in Google searches for “sheep knickers” and “alligator underpants”, which strikes me as a little, urm, unusual.

The Google searchers are usually casual strangers, however.  So they crop up in viewer stats, but don’t tend to write comments.  I still like my loyal followers, the ones who like to comment and make some online banter, some of whom I know or have known in person, but many of whom have come from cyberspace and the blogosphere.

Pimping: Top 10 Best British Expat Blogs in USA

Last but not least, I pimped some of the other British expat bloggers in my Hubpages article: Top 10 Best BritishExpat Blogs in USA.  Keep on writing folks!

3 big British and American differences (funny)

Okay, this is just for fun, so nobody get upset or anything, here are my 3 big British and American differences (funny):

1.  Us Brits love to moan.  If it is raining, we moan because it is too wet.  If the sun comes out, we moan because it is too hot.  In short, we carp about everything.  We don’t expect any solutions, we just like to whine on about how crap everything is.  Moan in the presence an American, however, and they will immediately attempt to find a solution to the perceived problem.  In the can-do, optimistic culture of the US, problems are there to be solved.  They really don’t grasp that in the UK, complaining for the sake of it is accepted as a subtle art form and the idea of all our troubles being solved actually slightly horrifies us.

2.  Customer service is highly developed in the US, but almost non-existent in the UK, where supermarket checkout assistants will usually only smile at Christmas time and adopt miserable expressions for the rest of the year.   Although it is great to have such a friendly and attentive service in the US, American customers do take advantage sometimes (at least by British standards) especially in restaurants where they sometimes request so many changes to the dish that’s being offered on the menu, you do wonder whether it’s worth having a menu at all?  I mean if you ask for a chicken dish without the chicken, or that the chef substitutes blue cheese for bacon, it does kind of make it into a completely different meal, doesn’t it?  If you did that in the UK, they’d probably tell you to eff off!

3.  Brits love to swear, or “cuss” as they call it in the US.  It is tough for a Brit to utter an entire paragraph without at least one f-word in it.  Women, children and older people will all participate, given half a chance.  Swearwords/cuss words are treated more seriously in the USA and censored from most TV programmes, this means that watching Gordon Ramsay in the US is just a series of bleeping sounds.  Sex is another thing that Americans are generally uptight about (though not so much down here in Florida where everyone walks around half naked).  As Brits, we are used to being castigated for our “sexual repression” by our more adventureful neighbours, the French and Dutch, but over here in the US, Brit culture seems relatively liberated.  Americans are much more tolerant of violence and guns however and you are free to watch people being shot to death on TV at any time of night or day.  Unless the gunman or victim happens to be making love or uttering an f-word at the time of the shooting, in which case the scene will be censored.

Seeking permanent residence - my adjustment of status application and other epic tales of woe

You might have thought that getting my K-1 finance visa was the end of the story, as far as my entanglement with bureaucracy goes, but you’d be wrong.  Now that I’m here in the USA, I’ve got to apply for a status adjustment in order to get permanent residence and my green card.  Seeking permanent residence means filing an adjustment of status application, booking a USCIS biometrics appointment and possibly having to attend an adjustment of status interview too!

It’s actually the collection of evidence that’s the major pain, however rather than the adjustment of status application itself.  As well as the proof that we were are married, Abby has to present proof that she is financially solvent and can support me.  That means piles of tax returns that have to be sorted through and copied, as well as letters from her boss and months and months of bank statements, amongst other things.  As well as the green card application, I’ve also had to apply for temporary travel documents and temporary employment permission, so that I have the option of traveling and working while we wait for the adjustment of status application to be processed.  The whole package of five application forms and status adjustment evidence that I needed for seeking permanent residence was so big and heavy it cost $14 for the postage!  (That’s on top of the $980 we had to pay for the processing of the application!)

As we were married in February, we could have applied for my permanent residence earlier, in theory, but getting a joint bank account to use as evidence of our partnership turned out to be more trouble than we anticipated and stalled us.  Plus, it’s especially tough for Abby having to spend what little spare time that she has in the evenings and weekends on collecting and sorting all the financial documents for my status adjustment.

Anyway, the forms are all in and we’re there now hopefully.  I will have to go for a USCIS biometrics appointment at some point, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem hopefully (though I wish they could just use the existing collection of iris scans and fingerprints that have been collected from me at customs on my regular trips to the USA, rather than me going through it all again).  The USCIS adjustment of status interview is discretionary, so I hope they won’t call us in for one of those.

It will be such a relief when my permanent residence is finally granted (assuming it is!) and I get my green card!

Gator and snake update

I am still seeing the gator in the pond on my daily runs.  No snakes in the past week, though.  I wonder how long it will take before I stop finding the idea of having large, dangerous reptiles living in the neighbourhood surreal?

All I want is a non US citizen bank account!

You’d think it would be easy!  Having jumped through all the hoops presented to me by the USCIS in order to get my immigration visa, I rather naively expected it wouldn’t be too much of a problem getting a non US citizen bank account.  Especially as all I wanted was to be added to my wife, Abby’s account as a joint account holder.  But when Abby rang up her branch’s information hotline to ask them what I.D. we should take along to our local branch, the people at the other end seemed bewildered.  Yes, I was a resident but not a citizen, she told them.  No, I didn’t have a social security number, but I could prove my identity and legal entry to the country with my passport and visa stamp.  Yes, we had a marriage licence to prove that we had recently been married in the US (Florida).

After a conversation that went on for nearly thirty minutes, with Abby being passed around five different departments, she was finally told that provided we took along my passport and visa, plus our marriage certificate and my wife’s social security card, the branch would add me to her bank account.  As Abby works fulltime, the only time we could make it to the bank was Saturday morning.  We got there, with all our documents and information not foreseeing any problems, but the young woman who served us seemed completely confused and uncomfortable.  We went through the same questions that my wife had answered during her 30 minute phone call with our young server getting more and more uneasy.  You’ve heard of the expression, “rabbit in the headlamps”?  Anyway, eventually she disappeared for ten minutes.  When she came back she told us that she’d spoken to the deputy manager and I couldn’t have a bank account unless I had both a US Social Security Card and a US green card, because of the Patriot Act.  That was it.

I looked it up when I got home, using the expats.com website, which is my bible on immigration matters.  Rather than going into the ins and outs of the Patriot Act, I’ll quote from britishexpats.com: “Under the Patriot Act, banks are required to 'know their customers' as part of anti-money laundering provisions. Most banks have adopted policies that require at least a Social Security Number before you can open a bank account IF YOU ARE A US CITIZEN, along with some other forms of identification and proof of residence. Citizens of other countries have different procedures, such as passport numbers or drivers licenses or other things to prove they are who they are.”  According to Britishexpats.com the problem of immigrants wrongly being turned down for accounts is really common, with lots of American bank workers not knowing their own rules!

Me with my British bank card.  I naively expected that getting an American one wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

There is no direct equivalent of a social security number in the UK (where I’m from).  The nearest equivalent is probably our National Insurance number, but we only really use that for when we get a job, pay tax, or claim benefits.  The US social security number (SSN) is used much more extensively.  As well as being used for jobs and benefits and tax, the US Social Security Card is also used as proof of ID for many, many things, including opening a bank account, if you’re an American citizen.  I decided to go about getting one.

The Social Security office was pretty similar to a British one in most respects, with an atmosphere of dowdiness, boredom and despair hanging over it.  The only two differences were that firstly you are checked over for guns before you entered (I am beginning to realise that this is a regular occurrence in USA, they even made us go through airport-style security before we were married!) and secondly, the overwhelming proportion of claimants were Afro-Americans (which maybe says something about the general structure of the US socio-economically?).  Anyway, after a long wait, they called my number and all went well.  I received my social security card 10 days later.  Yippee.  But what I really wanted was a bank account!

Three weeks after our first attempt to get a joint account and armed with the same I.D. as last time plus my brand new social security card, we set off to Abby’s bank.  Following our treatment the last time, however, we elected to go to a different branch on this occasion.  The difference in our experience was remarkable.  Our server this time was a friendly chap called Marcus.  He was relaxed and seemed to know what he was doing.  He photocopied our forms, got us to sign some printouts and that was it.  Apparently, I will be sent a bank card very soon.  I won’t believe it until I’m holding it in my hands though!