Iyow - in your own words

Part three of ‘A Long Way Home,’ a “series on immigration we began in April 2006”:/fpseries#fp_immigration.

As a native of a country that often appears in the top ranks in measures of development, wealth, education and well being, my choices have been full of opportunity. At school I could choose the sports I played, subjects I studied and people I hung out with. I could go to college, or not, and at a time when it was only a few hundred dollars per year. I could choose a career that interests me and choose where to live.

My first experience as a resident in a different country was almost automatic and unthinking. I’d guess that half the people my age went to the ‘mother country’ where we were welcomed as sons and daughters, if a little estranged. Many return home to tell stories for years to come of their OE (Overseas Experience). Others, like me, move on further — in search of adventure, further opportunity, some other fulfillment. Or, as in my case, realizing the influence of an adventurous and traveling grandmother who turned up on the shores of her new home country New Zealand in the early 1940s with a five year old daughter, no plans, and no husband, winging it.

My choice to move to the USA was sparked by a call to share a new experience — California — to dispel career stagnation and avoid traveling a standard path. It was assisted by personal connections, timing, care in maneuvering the immigration system, and, finally, luck in winning the lottery for a permanent resident visa.

I was technically never an illegal immigrant, where much focus is leveled currently, my encounters with “the system” showed me how this could both easily occur and can easily be hidden. Factors like obtaining an official alien number and permanent residency, and being college-educated and a native English speaker, meant I did not have to worry terribly about how I would support myself. I was not a fringe employee in the ranks of the barely legal. My choice of career was not in high competition with the rising number of unemployed technology workers in San Francisco/Bay Area at the time.

After seven years in the country, now in New York cheek by jowl with a whole new set of immigrants, I face a new choice of becoming a US Citizen. Again I am fortunate. I have the option of retaining my native citizenship, and so some of the emotional element associated with the choice — the feeling of somehow giving up a core part of my identity — is avoided. That citizenship would make me immune to eviction, incarceration or other actions from the government based on any change or whim of immigration policy (recently a very real concern). And it would enable me to more feely enter and leave the country.

I weigh all this against my sometime wavering but generally rising level of commitment to the country I have chosen, and that has chosen to have me.