{"id":474,"date":"2007-11-26T15:43:06","date_gmt":"2007-11-26T23:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/guapacha.com\/2007\/a-us-citizen-in-waiting\/"},"modified":"2007-11-26T15:43:06","modified_gmt":"2007-11-26T23:43:06","slug":"a-us-citizen-in-waiting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/guapacha.com\/?p=474","title":{"rendered":"A US Citizen in Waiting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After 10.5 years of living in the USA, today I was approved for citizenship of this fair country. It&#8217;s not a done deal until I stand up with 1000 of my closest Mexican immigrant friends and swear the Oath of Allegiance but the INS today decided they don&#8217;t mind me having one of them shiny blue passports (it will look real nice next to my shiny red UK one).<\/p>\n<p>They were running behind with the interviews, or at least my officer was. The other officer was going through them real fast so my 11.45 appointment didn&#8217;t start until 1.15 and all the while people were coming in, being interviewed and leaving. Very frustrating. But the lady was super nice and when she saw I was English said that this would be the quickest one of the day and it definitely couldn&#8217;t have been more than 15 minutes. <\/p>\n<p>She verified the paperwork from my application, had me sign a bunch of photos and forms in my neatest joined-up handwriting and then gave me the civics test. I&#8217;ll give you the questions in case you want to play along:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Name the state capitol of CA<\/li>\n<li>Who nominates the Supreme Court Justices?<\/li>\n<li>Who is the governor of CA?<\/li>\n<li>What colour are the stripes on the flag?<\/li>\n<li>Where is the White House located?<\/li>\n<li>What year was the constitution written?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I then had to write the sentence &#8220;I bought a blue car today&#8221;. She said she would spare me the insult of having to read something to her.<\/p>\n<p>And that was that, she shook my hand, said I had completed the final step in becoming a citizen. In 1-2 months time I&#8217;d hear about a date for the oath ceremony. It&#8217;s too bad you can&#8217;t just take it there and then, I&#8217;ve no real interest in big pomp and ceremony but it looks like I have no choice. But, unless the approval review turns up some mistake in the paperwork, my days of dealing with the INS\/USCIS are finally over. Unless that is my father or sister wants to immigrate&#8230;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After 10.5 years of living in the USA, today I was approved for citizenship of this fair country. It&#8217;s not a done deal until I stand up with 1000 of my closest Mexican immigrant friends and swear the Oath of Allegiance but the INS today decided they don&#8217;t mind me having one of them shiny [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[50,109,197],"class_list":["post-474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-citizenship","tag-ins","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/guapacha.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/guapacha.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/guapacha.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guapacha.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guapacha.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/guapacha.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/guapacha.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guapacha.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guapacha.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}