Thursday, May 8, 2014

Fingerprinting Without Ink - USA Citizenship

This selfie represents me at a very important milestone in my 30-year journey from being a "landed immigrant" to a "naturalized citizen" of the USA.
 
On the left — my selfie — is me waiting at the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (the INS) in Lawrence, Ma, for my appointment to get my fingerprints taken for my official citizenship records. And they did it without using any ink, unless you wanna call a full-hand touchpad gizmo something like digital ink.
 
Of course this is not the long-awaited citizenship, yet. I don't know when that will clear. But I do think I have reached the point where it is inevitable. There is nothing left that I have to do that I have any big barriers around, which is way more than I can say about most of the other steps along this path. The only major thing left is the interview (which I think is the same thing as the citizenship test) so I will have to study up a bit for that.
 
So there is a chance that it could happen in time for me to vote in November... But I rather suspect more of a delay than that, even though I must admit that the INS folks did pretty good getting to the fingerprinting part already given that I didn't actually submit my citizenship application — finally — until mid-March, 2014.