Degrees of separation

Repeated immigration is an effective way to mark the passage of time. I know exactly where I was and what I was doing in November, 2001, September, 2003, August, 2007, and so on, and gauge everything else by those markers -- including how long it's been since I, say, watched a Eurovision Song Contest live on television. Caught up like the rest of Finland in the worldwide phenomenon that was Lordi, I had even gone so far as to break my moratorium on freelancing (copywriting is overpaid and makes you lazy) and pitch the continental explosion of unabashed nationalistic fervour and bad taste to a magazine back home (they didn't bite).

So I'm ashamed to say that what with all the recent excitement, I entirely forgot about Euroviisut (as the Finns say) until I cracked open my copy of the New Yorker (shut up) this morning to find a fucking hilarious article on this year's contest by Anthony Lane. A taste:

"A deranged Estonian pianist smacked his keyboard with one raised fist, like a butcher flattening an escalope of veal. A pair of ice-white blondes, one with a squeezebox, decided to revive the moribund tradition of oompah-pah--or presumably, because they were Finnish, oom-päa-päa [sic]. A Belgian boy came on to croon 'Me and My Guitar,' otherwise known as 'Him and His Crippling Delusion....A smirking Serb of indeterminate gender, wearing a tailcoat, sang flat, hiccupping now and then for dramatic effect. Order was at first restored by Marcin Mrozinski, from Poland, who was backed by five demure women in national dress, and then destroyed as two of the women tore the white blouse off the third, to reveal a sort of peasant boob tube. An old Eurovision trick, this: the mid-song strip, timed to coincide with musical fatigue."

I could go on. Of course, Lane is British, and states this from the outset, because while people there feel about it much like I imagine Americans feel about, say, White Castle, a disgusting yet irresistible part of their national landscape, it is absolutely verboten for anybody outside the EU to diss Eurovision. All the same, the Brits are EV snobs, and, oh, never mind. The whole point of this (just typed "pint") is to say that I'm realizing how this move to the U.S. feels like I'm one step farther away from Finland, where, by the time I left, I'd spent as much time as in my precious Toronto. Adding to the uncanny effect is the media buyout of this (June 28) issue of the New Yorker by Canadian advertisers, to draw attention north to the G8, an event that is, IMHO, even more ridiculous than Eurovision.

One of the things people ask when they learn I lived in a foreign-speaking country for that long is, How is your Finnish these days? While based in sheer interest (or politesse), surely, for me it's a humiliating question: given that I have occasion to use Finnish outside Finland approximately once a year, when addressing Christmas cards to family there, "my Finnish" is suffering. I've resorted to carrying around my Finnish-English dictionaries, each of which weighs approximately as much as a two-year-old human child, from apartment to apartment as penance, in hopes of maybe coming across a word that needs translating.

Even Mr. O is losing the Finnish fever that attacked him so near-fatally in our first years in Toronto (to be fair, he did admit he would rather have made such a move as a younger man, before he was so set in his ways). Over the last few months, with New York on the horizon, he made overtures to our future return to Toronto, or Canada in general, a permanent settlement which he once in an argument accused me of holding behind my back like a secret plot or an ace of spades. I offered to put it in writing that such plot did not exist, and that Finland was certainly a first choice should we ever have kids that needed to be educated, for instance. I mean, who could deny a child such a cultural cornucopia as the lyrics to Latvia's 2010 entry "What For?":

I've asked my Uncle Joe
But he can't speak
Why does the wind still blow?
And blood still leaks?
So many questions now
With no reply
What for do people live until they die?
...
Only Mr. God knows why
(But) His phone today is out of range.

In closing I'd like to announce that Mr. O got his SSN card yesterday, which brings with it many happy things including a paycheck and a large dose of relief that somehow motivated me to start up this blog again after thinking about it for weeks. We're going to celebrate by getting blasted on vodka and eating meatballs and herring with a good Finnish friend at a Nordic restaurant tomorrow night, in honour of Juhannus or midsummer, an unforgettable Finnish holiday. Kippis.

I heart Heather Mallick

CBC columnista extraordinaire Heather Mallick pulls a strip off the hairy back of Canadian propaganda aimed at new and prospective immigrants by equating this booklet with a national personals ad. God dammit woman, could you be more brilliant?

Case in point:

I rather adore Canada, and at times when I am at Wickaninnish in British Columbia or skiing at Lake Louise, Alta., or eating Nova Scotia oysters or drinking a Bloody Caesar (Canadian invention), I am actively in love with it. But at no time do I think we are God's gift to humanity. What arse would say it, or worse, believe it?

And again:

The booklet says Canadian values include equality (ask Muslim-Canadians now regularly referred to in newspapers as "brown-skinned"), freedom (ask a pregnant woman running the Christian-right gauntlet at a Fredericton abortion clinic), peacekeeping (ask a soldier fighting a pointless war in Afghanistan), and law and order (ask those Muslim-Canadian teenagers on trial for terrorism instead of adolescence).

And again:

For the sky is always blue as a jay in this land of moral and personable people devoted to their "parliamentary democracy," unstinting in their "environmentally sound" stewardship of the "clean and prosperous" country that their children will live in, speaking as one in their respect for "cultural differences" and their faith in "international peacekeeping."

No, seriously.

I'm not mocking the federal government's rendition of national perfection for the vulnerable immigrants most likely to fall for it. I understand the impulse. Canada needs skilled immigrants. It's the economic version of dating angst like, "Gosh, if we could just hook up with an emerging tech nation who has relatives who do plumbing on the side."

5.9 mil and counting

The chart above is from the Economist's special report on immigration. Canada ranks third in both percentage of immigrants and total number in millions, just beating out Britain by 100,000 people. Incidentally, 5.9 million is more than the entire population of Finland.

The CIC also anticipates admitting an average 250,000 new immigrants a year over the next few years, which might drive Canada up in the ratings.

National occupation

So Mr O. is, for the second time in a month, *this* close to scoring a real job. In fact, they'd like him to start next week. Trouble is, you know what the trouble is: six weeks' wait and a long detour to the CHC in London. Whether or not he could apply through a domestic office because he is already in Canada on a temporary permit is unclear.

With a bit of digging, however, it seems that there is a potential short cut: jobs listed on the "National Occupational List" are eligible for concurrent processing, which means that we can send in the visa application before receiving an LMO - which means saving around two weeks.

BUT - and there is always a but - the catch is that, in order to qualify, the application has to go through a foreign office, i.e. CHC. Which would suggest that otherwise he could go through a domestic office, or that as a temporary resident he's not eligible at all. We shall see.

On the clock

E-cas update: Mr. O's file is officially "in process" as of last Monday (although the updates don't appear till Tuesday, we discovered) - exactly 29 days later. Total count to date: 33 days and counting.

Thus spake the mighty e-cas:

"We received your application for permanent residence on October 29, 2007.

We started processing your application on November 26, 2007."

So longer than most of my peeps on immigration.ca, but still in under a month. I bite my tongue.

CIC annual report

The 2007 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration was presented on Oct 31. My favorite highlight:

The 2008 levels plan upholds Canada’s support for family reunification by planning for between 68,000 and 71,000 admissions of spouses, partners, dependants, parents and grandparents in 2008.

Doctor doctor

Mr. O went for his official government medical examination yesterday, as required by the CIC. When he booked the appointment, the clerk asked him to be sure to bring the right form (which, though it's labelled correctly, somehow doesn't seem to be the right form, but anyway), as well as ID (which nowadays means passport plus one of several official pieces of paper with address, just in case), his work visa, his glasses and/or contact lenses, and three passport photos (the CIC site says four, the clerk says three, you decide). Oh yeah, and 150 bucks.

The place was one of a list of sanctioned offices here in TO, but that didn't mean it wasn't a bit sketchy. First of all, and this is a minor thing, but speaks to the level of infrastructure in general, the place only accepts cash – no credit or debt card reader in sight. In general the overhead was a bit low, especially the X-ray lab, where he wasn't given a protective vest and the machine looked about 30 years out of date. The worst bit, though, was the lab tech who kinda missed his vein, causing his arm to swell up somewhat ominously – albeit temporarily – on the way out.

The doc keeps the form and mails it to the CIC office in Vegreville, AB, where all in-Canada spousal apps are sent. Mr. O was given a receipt, which, as we understand it, will be enough proof to include with our application, which is otherwise pretty much ready to go, except for the fees, which we'll pay just before we send it (you never know). Otherwise, we would have to wait at least three weeks, which is the time it takes for the medical exam to be processed - this from the doctor, who asked my O to call back after that period of time to get his very own case file number to confirm that the medical information had been successfully processed. Why this goes through the doctors offices, instead of directly from the CIC to the applicant, is unclear.

To CAIPS or not to CAIPS

From CAIPS FileCheck:

"What is CAIPS?

CAIPS is short for 'Computer Assisted Immigration Processing System'. It is the computer system used by Citizenship & Immigration Canada to process visa applications, and holds all the information on the current status of every immigration application being processed by overseas offices (i.e. those outside of Canada).

Why is this interesting?

If you are not applying for a Canadian visa, then caips notes are of no interest to you! If you have applied to emigrate to Canada with a PR visa - as a skilled worker, business applicant/investor or as a spouse or other family member of someone already in Canada - then, with our help, you can obtain a copy of your CAIPS report and find out what has happened to your application so far, and get an indication of what will happen next with your file, and when. For more detailed information on what is in CAIPSnotes, see our sample CAIPSfiles. The system also holds information on work permits, study permits and visitor visas, and we can also apply for these reports on your behalf

Should I get my file?

There are many situations where you may want to get your CAIPS file. If you have been asked to attend an interview, then you should definitely get your notes to find out why the interview was requested, so that you can be well prepared for the interview. Any reputable immigration consultant would request the client's notes in this circumstance.

Also, if you feel that your application is taking longer than usual, or you have not heard anything from the visa office for a surprisingly long time, then you should consider getting your CAIPS notes to check that your application is on track. We have often tracked unexplained delays down to missing letters or documents which have been highlighted as soon as the file is obtained. For example, CIC may have written to an applicant requesting additional references, educational transcripts or language tests.

Finally if you have any other worry about your application status or progress, or are just generally curious as to what has happened so far, then you can get your CAIPSnotes to put your mind at rest."

Very tempting...prices are tiered according to level of desperation and correlated to ability to decipher a print-out from an "old fashioned terminal based program...not designed for reading on paper."

Who you callin' immigrant?!

After I posted a link to this blog on Facebook (an addiction from which I am slowly recovering) I got a few short notes on my wall from friends also dwelling in foreign lands. It might sound odd to some but, having lived in Helsinki now for as long as I lived in Toronto, and not having lived in my hometown outside Edmonton for more than 10 years, it is difficult to really say where I'm "from" any more. Add that to the mountain of paperwork involved in moving home with my foreign man and I start to feel like an immigrant to my own country.

True, I could come home any time I wanted, no questions asked, if I were alone. But since I'm not, coming home is actually rather complex -- and not just bureaucratically. Anyone who's ever lived abroad for any period of time knows how it feels to find yourself wholly out of context, without the family, friends, job, language, etc. that define you -- a definition that you don't even really realize until it's gone -- and what sort of task it is to rebuild your identity from the ground up. To use a violent metaphor, it's like growing a new skin. Until it's completed, you feel uncomfortable often and sometimes intensely so. I am an invisible minority here, since I look "typically Finnish" (ie. white, blonde) but, at least in the beginning, as soon as I opened my mouth my outside-ness was revealed. (Now I can hold off for 20 mins or so before running out of words.) I still don't read Hesari (although I do use the slang name for it) and I can't follow a lot of politics because the vocabulary is still inscrutable to me. But I can follow a conversation among friends and I've lost all fear of making an ass of myself in public - one of the 12 steps for any adult language learner.

Now coming back, I expect that both Mr. O and I will go through the same process all over again; definitely for Mr. O, who has spent time in TO but never lived there, but also for me, if in a muted measure. I wonder how Toronto will feel, old and new again, what neighborhood will appeal to us now, in 2007, compared to where I liked to hang out as a 21-year-old in 2000. The last few times we visited I was flushing mad to lose my bearings in TTC stations and even on Bloor Street -- humiliating for a girl who took pride in knowing all the best bike lanes (all the way down St. George -- no lights!) and afterhours on offer in the late 90s. And I know my immigrant experience here has certainly changed my outlook on how nationality and language as well as appearance influence identity. My husband has a name mostly unpronounceable by English-speakers, and if and when we ever have kids their names will likely strike some kind of compromise between the vowel-heavy phonetics of Finnish and the wooden Anglo tongue. Does that make me an immigrant? When do you start belonging to the place where you live, and stop belonging to the place where you were born?