In which it all falls to bits.

Well, a super shitty few weeks on the immigration front, and I don’t mean in Arizona or Utah.

No, no – we’re gone from the US, but we still get to live the US immigration experience every day.

First, I’ve been struggling with the possibility of having to apply for “the waiver.” For me, the waiver of inadmissibility is my last resort, because I am philosophically opposed to the government dictating whether or not my marriage rises to the level of what they consider significant enough to honor. I know that everyone has different views on this, but for my own situation, my marriage is between my husband and me. Not between my husband, me, and some guy at USCIS.

But I recognize that there might be some situations in which I would have no choice but to apply. If my health or life were on the line, I would very seriously consider it.

Cut to the constant, gnawing abdominal pain I’ve had for the last 5 months – almost since I arrived in Brazil – with a number of delightful accompanying symptoms (none of which are fit for polite conversation, so I will spare you). I managed to brush it off for the first few weeks (months), telling myself it was the water or the food or my seriously augmented bean intake, but when you’ve been sick for 4 months, you have to accept the fact that you’re not going to get better on your own. So no matter how much you just don’t want to know, how horrid your health insurance is to you when you plead for their assistance, and how much more you prefer teasing a grizzly bear while dressed as a ribeye to going to the doctor’s office, you also accept that your only recourse is an MD.

Leo, of course, has been trying to drag me to the doctor since it started. I am, however, a very stubborn person. Cabeçuda! he calls me.

Of course, when I finally went to the doctor (a whole post in and of itself), he showed an unnerving amount of concern and requested more than US$2000 in exams – from blood tests to abdominal ct scans to (gulp) a colonoscopy. He then proceeded to list off a half dozen potential ailments that could kill me dead with terrifying efficiency.

Oh my God, I thought. I’m going to die. I proceeded to tell almost no one about my death sentence, and swallow my massive anxiety and mental images of my impending funeral over the course of several weeks, several thousand dollars, and several heebie jeebie-inducing tests.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the doctor’s conclusion was stomach ulcers.

So, for the time being, no waiver and no death – thank goodness. But it made for a really nerve-wracking couple of weeks. Although, I highly recommend general anesthesia; I want to always never remember my doctor’s visits.

The day that I got the good news (that death was not, in fact, imminent) I was ecstatic. But I didn’t feel better. I had a different gnawing sensation in my gut.

Guilt.

We’re going to actually do it, I thought. While most exiles watch their dreams crumble, their bank accounts dwindle, and their families pop and stretch at the seams, it looked like we’d get to go to Canada – healthy, well-funded, on our way to achieving our goals, and, above all, together.

I realized that I’d been so convinced that there was something seriously wrong with me because, well, no one gets this lucky!

With an (almost) clean bill of health and only a month to go, I couldn’t help celebrating a little, too; we just needed Leo’s FBI clearance on time, and we’d be as good as Vancouverites!

Well, you heard it here first: no one gets this lucky.

There’s a very good chance that Canada may not happen for the exact same reason that countless border-crossed lovers find themselves facing exile in the first place: with all of the good intentions in the world, we checked the wrong box.

The story starts 3 years before I even met Leo.

For undocumented immigrants in America, getting pulled over (and harassed for driving without a license) is par for the course. Everyone drives because essentially all of the jobs that undocumented immigrants do – from house cleaning to construction to, in Leo’s case, auto detailing – require that they drive from job site to job site. At least in Massachusetts, immigrants can buy insurance (indeed they are required to do so) and register their cars, but they are not legally allowed to drive because they can’t get a US license (which isn’t to say that they don’t have legitimate licenses from their own countries).

That they drive (in Leo’s case, around 200 to 300 miles per day) also means that they’re pulled over, like we all are from time to time. But for undocumented immigrants, a routine traffic stop can be the beginning of a family frayed, the beginning of a long journey hundreds of miles away, and, it seems, a routine traffic stop can also be the end of my dreams of professorhood, a middle class developed world lifestyle, and Canadian residency.

In 2005, Leo got pulled over, showed his Brazilian license, and was taken to the police station, where he paid a fine and left.

“Were you arrested?” I asked in 2009 as when we sorted out our options at our dining room table in Medford, Massachusetts, “Were you actually convicted of anything?”

“I have no idea!” he told me, “I didn’t speak English. I didn’t know what was happening; I just paid them and left.”

So before leaving the US, Leo and I solicited our Massachusetts criminal background checks, assuming both that we’d need them for our Canadian visas and that it would answer the question of whether Leo had been actually “arrested” or “charged” in 2005.

His Massachusetts record came back clean.

So, when we were filling out our Canadian visa applications, we checked “NO” next to the criminal record question.

Fast forward to tonight, when my mom received Leo’s FBI record letter in the mail stating that he had been “arrested for operating a motor vehicle without a license” in 2005.

Even before I met Leo or thought of going to Canada myself, I’d heard that surest way to get a Canadian visa denied is a criminal record. I’ve received anecdotal evidence to the same effect just this evening from a dear friend. No doubt, looking like you weren’t telling the truth probably just increases the swiftness and weight of the “DENIED” stamp.

It’s pretty humbling to watch your whole world and all of your prospects lurch and tumble on the foundation of a paper square occupying not more than a few millimeters on a bureaucratic form.

But there it goes: goodbye Canada. Goodbye grad school. Goodbye academia and water governance. Goodbye to my dishes waiting for me in the back of my Subaru. Goodbye living an hour from my mom’s cabin in Washington State. Goodbye to a lot of very comforting numbers, odds, and daydreams.

With no other ideas on the table, we’re just going to turn everything in and hope for the best, but a visa would be a miracle.