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New York Notebook

American immigration is the strictest in the world, and is notoriously heartless

It seems to be one rule for the president of the Unites States and another for everyone else, as we risk not being allowed back in if we go to the UK to visit our families, writes Holly Baxter

Tuesday 08 June 2021 21:30 BST
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<p>It’s all started to feel like we came over during the days of Ellis Island </p>

It’s all started to feel like we came over during the days of Ellis Island

This week, Joe Biden has achieved the seemingly impossible and flown into the UK from the US, which he intends to depart from fuss-free a couple of days later. Now, I don’t mean to sound all “Why is it one rule for the US president and another for me?” – although that is what I was heard shouting the last time I was removed from the Oval Office – but it is a little galling to see it. My partner and I have been stuck in the US, unable to guarantee re-entry if we leave to see our families, since March 2020. We haven’t seen a single family member since December 2019. We’re both fully vaccinated and we’re pretty sure we also already had Covid in the early days of the pandemic. And we just got informed that the American embassy in London isn’t planning to reopen and consider what to do with Brits awaiting visas until February 2022.

Back when I believed the “special relationship” was real (something, according to news reports, Boris Johnson turns his nose up at), I thought moving to America would be easy. I presumed we had a reciprocal relationship when it came to visas and that so long as you went the legal route, you wouldn’t find yourself stuck in some kind of Groundhog Day-esque hell for years. Now, I can hardly complain: I have a valid visa and a lovely life in the US, after all – but damn, I do like to. American immigration is the strictest in the world, and is notoriously heartless. We are hardly in the kind of situation young children separated from their families are in at the Mexican border. But we do know a Brit who was recently told to leave the US because he couldn’t get a visa appointment during Covid backups and so has been separated from his wife and children for two years now, while he undergoes palliative chemotherapy for terminal cancer. Because of Covid backups, election shake-ups and a bit of Brexit sprinkled in, there is very little recourse at the moment for Brits to plead individual cases to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

One question I’m asked all the time by people back in Blighty is “when I’m coming back home”. British friends and family seem to struggle with the idea that the answer might be: “Not now, and maybe not ever.” To live from visa to visa is to live uncertainly, but we love our life in New York City and the jobs we do here. On the one hand, we have to plan our lives around the idea that we might want to stay here in Brooklyn forever, with its beautifully hot summers and its brutally cold winters and its lack of Easter weekend and its Fourth of July fireworks, and everything else that makes it quintessentially Not British. On the other, we have to argue to an immigration officer every time we go over the border that we are “non-immigrant visitors”, people ready to leave at a moment’s notice and certainly prepared to hoof out the country in the next four years when our current visas experience. It requires a lot of doublethink, and you get used to building your life around those two divergent realities: not ever buying more clothes than you can fit into two suitcases each; getting furniture from the street or Craigslist or, at a push, Ikea because you never know when you might have to abandon it; signing short leases; accidentally accruing pets and then spending your days worriedly googling “pet passport after Brexit” and “how to bring a cat in-cabin for transatlantic flights”.

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