Immigration Alienation

Dealing with French immigration is enough to make you want to pack up and move back to your own country. Perhaps this is there subversive intent when creating their nightmarish bureaucratic obstacle courses.

My wife and I have spent the past two months in Raleigh for my work, as I have mentioned previously. We aren't living there permanently, I am simply there on assignment to directly support one of my development teams. However, we still have to keep up all of our French legal paperwork, VISAs being chief among them.

As such we have recently returned to Paris, mid-assignment, strictly to deal with the renewal process of our VISAs. This is an important detail to attend to as it means we can continue to collect income and see our things we keep here when desired.

That said, jumping timezones is never easy, and this trip has been no exception. We are pretty badly jet lagged and not sleeping normal hours. This means that yesterday ,before going to our VISA renewal meeting, we awoke at 2am. Two in the morning is never a good time to wake up at, it's awkward, dark and disorienting.

We proceed to our meeting as scheduled at 9am. We were lucky enough to have our HR contact from work meet us there to help make sure everything goes smoothly given our lack of French language skills. She has instructed us on all the paperwork we need to bring and we have done our due diligence and come prepared.

Having never done this before we don't know what to expect. Our last encounter with Immigration Services (OFII) was in the form of a medical examination, 3 or 4 months previous, where they took x-rays of our lungs. This was an unusual but fairly efficient process, which kicked off with specific appointment periods. This detail, the once about appointment times, may not sound like something worth mentioning, but I assure you it is.

Fast forward to yesterday, we arrive and meet our HR contact our front of a different OFII office than the one for our medical exam. A line half a kilometer long, of which we are at the back of, is prominent. I wonder why the ling is so long, and why everyone is so anxious. As it turns out, there are no appointments allowed for this process. It is a first come, first served process with no guarantee of even being assigned a "ticket" (which allows you to meet with an immigration official and do your business). It is apparently very common for the tickets to run out and for people to be turned away only to return the next day and begin again.

We do not have the luxury of simply coming back should the tickets run out, as we have plane tickets waiting to shuttle us back to North Carolina once this work is sorted out. As I stand at the back of this very long and very slow line on a frigid October morning, things do not look good. Yet, even then I cannot begin to imagine how poorly the day was going to unfold.

The line continues at a snail's pace, and the three of us stood silently on the concrete. Each of us secretly assumed this would be an annoyance, but an annoyance that would be wrapped up in time to get a bite to eat for lunch.

Our first annoyance came in the form of the man in line behind us. A man who came from a country with absolutely no concept of personal space. At first it was strange that he would stand close, then after a while it became funny. It lost it's humor shortly after, and were it not for a complete language barrier between us it would have likely devolved into shouting and, likely, blows.

The line picked up it's pace and we suddenly found ourselves mercifully hustling into the immigration building itself and out of the chill autumn wind. Almost as quickly as the pace increased it came to a near halt. Where moments before we covered 10 meters in a minute, we were instead taking little more than a step every few minutes.

Minutes turned into hours and lunch began to pass us by. It was at this point, given our new interior position, that we were able to see that most of the immigration officials closed their windows and went to lunch, leaving only 2 or 3 our of the 20 windows open. The hundreds of people still standing with us in line were left with little recourse but to stand and wait.

Mr. "No Personal Space" continued to press himself against anyone within arms reach. I stood between Aja, my HR contact and him and created a wall so he could not harass them directly. He would occasionally manufacture a reason to leave the line and return a short time later, inevitably attempting to stand between myself and the women I was with.

This continued to the very moment we finally made it to the front of the line. At one point I looked down, then pointed out to Aja to look at my right foot. Beside it was his right foot. Not nearby, not right behind: BESIDE it, like two right shoes in a window display of a shoe store.

Think about how close you would need to stand behind someone to accomplish this. Now, for extra credit, go line up somewhere like the bank or the grocery store and perform this maneuver. I dare you. Why do I dare you? because it's likely you live in a country where you speak the language as everyone else, and you know you, at best will get told off loudly for it. I however did not have that ability, and did not want to drag my HR representative into translating a shouting match and/or fist fight. (**Note: for those of you who know me, you would likely know that I am not one who is quick to anger, let alone violence. But my unwanted ability to measure this guy's inseam with my buttocks was WAY more stress than I needed on a day like that. I almost hit him a number of times)

The line continues to crawl along, and never seems to fully recover from the lunch break. At 3:30 we finally make it to the front of the line, a scant 6+ hours later. We speak with the man behind the glass and discover that the process for renewals has changed, and all our paperwork must now be mailed in, along with a few forms he provided us with.

30 seconds after having walked up to our window we were dispatched with the realization that we had stood in line for nearly an entire working day to pick up forms that COULD have been provided via the internet or snail mail if anyone had bothered to think things through.

It turns out that our physical presence in this matter was completely unwarranted, much like the heavy petting and 6 hours in line. In fact, we will have to mail away all of our paperwork, wait for a reply by mail, then return to Paris once again to submit these new forms at a new location.

I can only assume that this new location will also fail to provide basic organization like previously scheduled appointment time.

Foreign Familiarity

I'm back in Paris after a couple months living in the USA. Despite being gone for a while, it is nice to experience a degree of familiarity upon my return.

Of course it helps that we continue to maintain our apartment in the suburbs, so coming home is literally like coming home. But beyond that there is still a degree of familiarity here in Paris that I do not associate with my US accommodations, despite the similarities in people in culture.

We have been living in Paris for about 8 months before we left for the states, and it has been a mixed bag of experiences. I love the age and culture in the city. I love the amazing things I have seen, but in that time we have yet to really develop a real sense of belonging.

It is one thing to feel familiar and comfortable, but it is entiely another to feel as though you belong. My work goes a long way to creating that sense for me, since it gives me daily direction and a built in community among my co-workers. The same cannot be said for Aja, who has suffered far more from the isolation.

We are only back in Paris for a few days to do various VISA/Immigration paperwork, then we return to the states for a few more months. We will change up our clothes, sleep in a comfortable bed, then hop back on a plane before we have managed to shake off the jet lag.

Before coming I had a phone conference with my boss and we discussed what comes next for me, as my contract expires in the next couple months. The conversation was framed poorly, due to the language barrier, and I felt it was a "should we renew your contract" discussion. This gave me trepidation going into the conversation, but it was short lived once it was made clear that it was more of a discussion around the options we have when renewing it.

Long story short, I opted to take a 6 month extention to my current contract type, which has a lot more legal flexibility under French law regarding changing positions or locations within the company.

I love my job, it is unlike any I have had before, but I know that no matter how great it is, if it does not serve to benefit both myself and Aja, it must be re-examined. The extension buys us the time we need to complete my mission in the US and return to Paris and really ask ourselves if this is where we want to be.

Paris is wonderful, but maybe it is just not somewhere wonderful for us. This time in the states helps give contrast, and really find out if our issues are ones with Paris, or just living abroad in general.