Prints Charming

When we started the process of immi­grat­ing to Canada, I knew we’d prob­a­bly be lucky in some ways, and unlucky in oth­ers. Our expe­ri­ences so far have been mostly lucky. We found a beau­ti­ful place to live, both of us have had suc­cesses with employ­ment, we got a good lawyer, and of course, we speak the lan­guage and brought enough funds to begin with. We’ve filled out the forms, got­ten a clean bill of health and have gen­er­ally been able to jump through all of the hoops that the bureau­cra­cies of the US and Canada have put before us.

Until now.

The prob­lem is my wife’s fin­ger­prints, or rather, lack of them. It seems that a small per­cent­age of the world’s pop­u­la­tion can’t pro­duce a read­able fin­ger­print. Besides the obvi­ous ones with­out hands or arms, there are oth­ers, like my wife, who sim­ply have dry skin and don’t have much in the way of ridges on their fin­ger­tips. While this char­ac­ter­is­tic might come in handy if you were a mur­derer or bur­glar, it does pose a sig­nif­i­cant obsta­cle if you want to immi­grate. After three con­sec­u­tive sets of prints sent to the FBI and three sets sub­se­quently rejected, the FBI has finally flat-out refused to say that she isn’t in their data­base. Reach­ing this dead end has taken about 4 months and a cou­ple hun­dred dol­lars in fees and postage.

All is not lost, though. Our lawyer was able to deter­mine that we could in fact get around this seem­ingly impass­able obsta­cle to ever get­ting Landed Immi­grant sta­tus by obtain­ing a Police Cer­tifi­cate (like the one I got from Cam­bridge, Eng­land) from every state that my wife has lived in since she was 16. For­tu­nately, she only lived in 3 of them. If she had moved around a lot, we would really have been out of luck. So we now have yet another obsta­cle, but after another few months, we may finally see the day where we’ll get Landed Immi­grant sta­tus (and hence Per­ma­nent Res­i­dency). That Holy Grail of Per­ma­nent Res­i­dency means that either of us can work where we wish, put down roots and plan for the future far more than day to day. I’m not hold­ing my breath, though. There have been so many times when we thought were were near­ing the fin­ish line, only to have it moved fur­ther into the future again.

I have learned that the one thing that you need to immi­grate, more than money, influ­ence, tal­ent, friends, fam­ily, or any­thing else is patience.