Immigration

We go in for our residence permit renewal interview later this week. I filled out our five applications today and wrote out our address (among other things) literally 13 times, by hand. Finland does many/most of its immigration stuff electronically but there are certain applications you can only do on paper and ours is one of them. Yay us.

This not at all a post about illegal immigration, but it is a post about immigration. People who have never lived overseas, who have never trusted that submitting the right paperwork and the right forms and the right appendices and the right passport photos and the right supporting documents would convince a faceless government employee to let me stay in your country, have never felt that particular kind of terror that said employee might say no. I have no expectations that anything will go wrong this week, but the point is that you never know. Theoretically, you could do everything right and still get rejected.

We have been guests of the societies of Russia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, and now Finland. We have been allowed by them to live in their countries. It has been a privilege every time.

And yet, I worry. I worry, even though I know I am blessed to have a Plan Z - a stable, safe country that will accept me no matter what, no questions asked (well, not literally - no questions asked that I can't favorably answer, I suppose). How lucky am I to have my magic US passport? How lucky am I to have had legal, above-board work in all these countries that lets me walk around with confidence that, for a year at a time, at least, I have the right to be there? How lucky am I to be educated and internet/book-literate and bureaucracy-savvy enough to find the forms and fill them out and track down all the attachments? (Sometimes I feel like that process uses every bit of the MA-level education that I have.) The particular kind of terror I mentioned above is mostly passing; to have it present at every moment due to lacking proper documentation would be overwhelming.

But I'll be feeling that terror at its strongest this week. I can't wait until it's over and we have another green light for another year or more!