The "ins and outs" of Immigration

A lot of people have expressed utter confusion upon learning that Sean and I don’t have the same benefits as any other married couple. After all, we live only 6 hours apart, speak the same language, and have basically the same culture. So, here, I’ll try to explain some of the ins and outs of immigrating to Canada.

When we first started talking about living together, we came across this concept of “permanent residency”. Permanent residency gives a non-citizen the right to work, live, and receive healthcare in Canada. There are basically 3 ways to obtain it: through family (ie marriage, or a parent who has already immigrated), as a student, or through a job. We had heard that getting a workplace to sponsor you was quite difficult, unless you could prove that you had skills that could not be found in a Canadian citizen (a tough task in a thriving city of 4.5 million people). Since I was already interested in going back to school, I then started looking around at music programs in Toronto. However, the reality hit that since I hadn’t paid my existing loans off, it really wasn’t preferential to take out more unless I was going into a highly-paid field. So we decided that wasn’t a great route. Eventually, we realized marriage would be the best way, so that’s what we did.

Once we got married, we did not have a typical honeymoon period. We both had to return to work, since we had taken off so much vacation time in the last year to visit each other. So Sean returned to Toronto to his full-time, 9 to 5 job, and I returned to working 4 days a week as a counselor at a community health agency. We knew we had a lot of work ahead of us. Basically, it works like this: the “sponsor” (Sean) is responsible for the financial well-being of the “primary applicant” (me) and I have to do a shit ton of paperwork. So, I found that my days off were quickly filled, not just with filling out the complete history of every visit we’d ever paid to each other, including dates and locations, but also obtaining information like the address of my studio apartment from 2004 and had I ever belonged to a professional or terrorist organization. 3 months, 40 pages, and a trip to a Niagara Falls clinic later, we submitted our application! And now, finally, we can relax and wait.

People ask me, and I often ask myself, why I didn’t move to Canada sooner. The truth is I didn’t know I was allowed. The immigration website makes it sound like you choose one path or the other – “inland” or “outland”. An inland application is one in which you, say, met your husband while studying, and decided to marry him and stay on in Canada. The catch is that you’re not allowed to leave the country until your application is fully processed, which could take up to two years. As an outlander (that’s me), I can travel freely between the U.S. and Canada during the application processing time, which is shorter - between 6 months and a year. That’s it – you can’t have your cake and eat it too. We heard horror stories, too, about married people being turned away from the border because the border guards thought they were using it as an excuse to steal Canadian jobs. You say you’re married, and they think you’re just going to come and live in Canada forever. I could see it happening, so I kind of get that. After a few phone calls, we got reassurance that we could cross the border safely with the appropriate paperwork proving that we were who we said we were.

However, the really good news came from the least likely source – a border guard at Niagara Falls. I was crossing the border to meet Sean for a weekend and to get my medical check done at a local clinic. I noticed the line I’d pulled into was very slow, and almost changed lanes because I was afraid I’d get questioned and possibly not allowed through. Pulling up I saw a short, stout, gray-haired woman with one of those faces that tells you not much would surprise her. “I’m coming to meet my husband in Niagara Falls,” I told her. She glanced at my passport. “Your husband, huh? Why don’t you live together?” she asked. “Well, I’m applying for my permanent residency.” She nodded. “You know, you don’t need your PR to live in Canada.” I was dumbfounded… “oh… really?” “Yeah, you just have to do a visitor record. You can’t work while you’re up here, but you can be with your husband.”  

We did a little more digging, and found that I could live with Sean for up to 6 months provided that I did not work and that I brought certain documents to prove that we were married and had the money to support ourselves. So basically, I would be a housewife until my PR went through. I had mixed feelings about this, since I had long wanted more time for my hobbies and interests, but I also have a great need for social stimulation and a certain amount of challenge. Because of those needs, and for other sentimental reasons, I originally planned to stay in my “Ohio life” until June 1. However, I slowly realized that it was kind of pointless to hang on, since I had married Sean and wanted to start my life with him. My attachments to my career and single life (which was never as profitable as I would have liked) began to loosen up, and I moved my departure date to April 26 - the earliest I could gracefully go.

One thing I will say about this move is that it has shaken up my priorities quite a bit. Ever since I was 18 I have planned to be self-sufficient, and have moved from coast to coast always with ingenuity and money in my back pocket. For the last five years, I have worked ceaselessly to get my career off the ground and build a life for myself. And now, I’m leaving it all behind for a life which, at least for now, will be all about love.