Raised a denizen of the Internet, I don’t have a lot of hard-copy photographs. I only own one photo album and it’s tucked away in a box file on a shelf that I can’t even reach. I’ve rarely looked at the crimson binder of amateur snapshots — my wedding album — lovingly compiled for the perusing eyes of a federal agent.
I don’t have a green card marriage. I do have a marriage green card. The process to get it, as anyone who has gone through it might attest, was a dizzying, panic-inducing bureaucratic obstacle course; a strange lesson in state determinations of love and partnership.
A New York Daily News article last year about the officials who interrogate couples applying for green cards noted, “The green-card gumshoes use old-fashioned sleuthing to ferret out marriages of convenience from cases of true love.” But in my experience, “true love” as recognized by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is an uncomfortable act to perform.
