me and cic: a tale of failed plans

Terribly sorry about the lack of posting recently. I started a new job and there is less free time during the day now. I would explain more about the job if I thought anyone would actually care, because it's one of those jobs you ask a person about and get bored with their answer 5 seconds later. Suffice it to say I work at the same company in a different department. There, now I feel better about my lack of posting.

I don't know if I ever made it into much detail on this blog about my boyfriend and I, but here is a brief summary. This is relevant, I swear.

He is 20, Canadian. I am 22 (almost 23, guh), American. We met online, on World of Warcraft (WoW), and have been together for 2 years. We are very happily in love and try to see each other as much as possible, but oftentimes that only works out to a week-long visit every other month, if we're lucky. The fact that we play WoW is great because it gives us the opportunity to play together online every night and spend "quality time" together. Nothing says loving like zombie killing, right? ^_^

When we met, I was in the beginning of my junior year of college and he was starting his freshman year. He quit school not too far into it because he just wasn't interested in being there and he figure he might as well not waste the money. Smart, in my opinion, as I was never interested in being at school and I now have about $100,000 in student loans to pay back. Hooray. >_>

After being together for about a year, we decided that the easiest way for us to put an end to the long-distance crap (it IS crap, don't let anyone tell you long distance is easy) was for me to move there after I graduated school. This seemed to be the easiest way because I was seen as a more qualified individual in the eyes of immigration officers because I had a college degree. We planned to do this for a long while, until I spent a month with him in January 2008 and just sort of freaked out. I was far from home, the apartment was a total bachelor pad (he lived with a not-so-clean friend of his), I spent my days pretty alone because he had to work, and I think I was just homesick. So we changed our plans.

Now he was going to come to the US and probably have to work under-the-table at a terrible job because he didn't qualify for any of the immigration or visa categories. The unskilled worker category can take YEARS to get a visa, and we weren't willing to wait that long. My family was really helpful, and my uncle offered to help get him a job at the skating rink he works at, but in the end, this plan failed too. My mom was worried that somehow he'd get caught working illegally and get deported, and that would REALLY suck, because we want to both eventually get dual citizenship so that we can move back and forth and be allowed to work in both countries and getting deported doesn't really recommend you to the immigration people all that much.

So, lo and behold! Another plan! After much talking and tears, and a comment from my mother to the effect of "why don't you just go there?" (which I'm pretty sure she regrets horribly because she really doesn't want me to move away), we decided I would move there and probably stay for a few years in order to apply for citizenship. The easiest route now available to us was for me to get a visa (notice I said "easiest", not "easy"). His mother's friend owns a business and she agreed to let me come work there for a week over the summer (late August 2008) and sort of see if we could work together. We also assumed that my return flight would be paid for either by her or by Kyle's mother, just because I was going to be training for the job while I was there. Long story short, the visa idea ended up falling through because somewhere in the application, the employer was supposed to submit evidence of their previous attempts to hire Canadians (because the only reason you're supposed to hire someone on a visa, really, is because they have skills that no available worker in your country does...). Clearly, this wasn't going to work, since they essentially made up the job for me, and they couldn't fabricate this info, so no visa. Also, no pay for the whole week I worked there, and no compensation for the $300 flight.

While I was there, Kyle and I went to IKEA (*happy dance*) and bought all this furniture and started to set up our apartment (which is really more his apartment, since I don't live there, nor do I make contributions to it...) because we thought I'd be moving up there around October 2008. Clearly, that didn't happen.

So there we were, stuck wondering what the hell to do, when suddenly (and I'm pretty sure simultaneously) we remembered having seen an option for immigration called sponsorship, and under that there being a category for "conjugal partners". Essentially, the website (www.cic.gc.ca, if you're truly bored) tells you that the conjugal partners category applies to those people who are not married (spousal partnership) or who are unable to live together (common-law partnership) due to a number of reasons, one of which is an "immigration barrier". Of course, we were thrilled. I had failed at getting a visa, so we thought that was a perfect example of an immigration barrier. So, we set to getting all the information together and filling out the forms, which were about 99% completed when he came to visit in October 2008 for Columbus Day weekend. All I had to do was get a police certificate, a copy of my birth certificate, get a medical exam by one of the doctors approved to do the exams for immigration to Canada, and write some letters about why we wanted to do this. The processing time was about 8 months, which was kind of sucky, but better than nothing. So we did all that, and then the new WoW expansion came out, and we got a little slacker-y.

About two days ago, Kyle suddenly realized that while the forms were processing, he wasn't going to be working anymore. He's going back to school in January and his current full-time job ends in mid-December. There was a minimum income requirement for the sponsor (him) and now we're back in panic mode. I scavenge the web and find out that the income requirement only applies to any of the sponsorship categories if the sponsoree (me) has dependent children (I don't), so phew, we're a-ok.

Until I get an overwhelming amount of posts and info tossed at me on Immigration.ca and I find out that actually, we don't even qualify for the conjugal partner sponsorship, since we don't really have an immigration barrier. We are both legally allowed to visit the other's country. We CAN get married, even if we don't want to right now. We CAN live together for a year, even if it means 6 months there and 6 months here and one of us has to quit a job or school. Immigration Canada doesn't see these things as barriers, but rather inconveniences that, if we aren't willing to deal with, make us not truly committed to one another. I can't actually tell you how angry that makes me. I won't try. I'm sure you can imagine.

So of course, there is a new plan. The new plan requires me to come up with about $16,000 and to go live with Kyle. I can legally visit Canada for 6 months just on my passport, and then I can apply for a visit extension (and I'm assuming it gives me another 6 months, but I do actually have to check on that) and boom, there's a year of living together, and we can apply under common-law sponsorship. HOPEFULLY, we can submit the application before we've actually hit the one-year mark, because they don't start processing your application the day that they receive it, that's for sure. It takes about 40 days for his sponsorship application to process, and then if that passes, they send my permanent residence application to the appropriate visa office, and that takes about 5-6 months to process. So I need to be able to pay for my student loans, a cell phone, and WoW for about 18 months.

When we finally sell my granpa's house, I'm supposed to get between $8000 and $12,000, so I would like to think that I could save between $4000 - $8000 by the summer, and be moving around then.

p.s. I hope it's clear that I really do love him, despite what some people may think or feel.

edited to add: sorry this post was so extremely long! I needed to get that all off my chest and into coherent thought. also, as further proof of my love for the boy, here are the socks I knit him for christmas:

and the stitches picked up for the gusset, which I am inordinately proud of:

better quality photos tonight, as these were taken with my phone at work. yeah, I get to knit socks at work, what of it? ^_^