Ten years later, the goal is reached!

I received my Australian passport about two months ago.  Ann received hers shortly thereafter.  I see these events as the truly final steps for my goal of us becoming Australian citizens!  In fact, I travelled as an Australian for the first time last month, when I went to the USA to attend Shock Around The Clock, the 24-hour horror film marathon in Columbus, Ohio.

Both countries insist on using their passport when you enter or leave their country.  I thought that meant I should show my Australian passport to the airline when I left Australia and then show my USA passport when I entered the USA.  However, I discovered that the information taken by the airlines is sent to the US immigration officials and they get upset when you show them a different passport.  After implicitly threatening to detain me for the few hours (!) it would take to verify my citizenship (despite having my actual USA passport in their hands), they eventually just entered my information in the computer and I was on my way.  Lesson learned:  Show the airlines the passport of the country I'm going to, and show the immigration officials (incoming and outgoing) the passport of whatever country I'm actually in at the time.  Things should go more smoothly in the future (as they did for my return flight to Australia in October).

Here's a brief history of my 10-year path to Australian citizenship:

I had wanted to visit Australia since my youth.  I think I've just always been fascinated by new and different things and Australia was so far away and had so many unusual animals.  In a way, I was like James Garner's character in Support Your Local Sheriff.

I finally went in 1999, when I was 36 years old.  At that time, I was attending the World Science Fiction Convention pretty much every year.  It's an annual convention, held in a different city each year.  In 1999, it was in Melbourne (in Victoria, Australia).  I used that as my excuse for a month-long holiday that would allow me to travel around and see a bit of the country (as well as attend the convention).

I fell in love with Australia.  Cool stuff to see and do, and a laid-back style to living.  And the culture is different enough to satisfy the desire for the experience of living in a foreign country, but similar enough to the USA to make it easy to get around and get things done.  The fact that the official language is English helps a lot for people like me who seem to have limited abilities to learn additional languages.  And since my political leanings are to the left, the socialist aspects of Australia are pretty nice, too - Medicare for everyone, for example (ahem).

At the time, I was working at a New Horizons Computer Learning Center franchise in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  A New Horizons franchise had recently opened in Sydney.  So, when I was visiting that great city, I made a point of stopping in, checking the place out, and ultimately saying "Are you interested in hiring a technical instructor?"  They said, "Yes, probably."  That all worked out and made it really easy to obtain a visa that would allow me to live and work in Australia.  Those years were some great times!

However, I had reconnected with Ann just as my Australian visa was approved.  We knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, but she had to spend some time wrapping up her life in North Carolina and I was off to Sydney.  We maintained our relationship long-distance and worked to eventually apply to get Ann added to my visa as my de facto spouse (Australia's equivalent of a common-law marriage).  It took us well over a year to get to the point of submitting the application.  I thought we made a pretty good case, but the Australian Government rejected our request.

Eventually, we decided it would be easier for me to return to the USA, which I did in late 2002, after we took a 102-day car trip literally all over Australia (although Ann was only able to do the first 60-some days before flying back to America).  But I always planned to return to Australia at some point.

That opportunity came in 2005, when Ann was laid off from the veterinary practice she was working for and it turned out that to get another suitable job for her, we would have to move.  Well, as long as we were moving, I thought I should look into the possibility of moving back to Australia.  So I called New Horizons and once again asked if they were looking to hire a technical instructor.  The answer was "yes", of course, but this time the job was in Brisbane.

When I was originally living in Sydney under my extended working visa, I wanted to obtain permanent residency status and then, ultimately, Australian citizenship (dual citizenship, since I never intend to surrender my American citizenship).  I wanted to do this mainly because I thought it was "cool" - new, interesting, unusual; a "man of two countries" sort of thing.  But I also recognised that it would be practical, in that it would give me (and now, Ann, too) total freedom to live and work (or not work) in both countries as I (we) saw fit.

However, when I was in Sydney, it seemed that my best option would be to apply as an individual for skills-based migration. But that involved an extensive application process (and those who know me recognise that so much writing, etc. can take me months/years to get around to getting done!), being able to score at least 100 points on Australia's scale (with points given for speaking English, having skills or a profession Australia needs, being young, etc.), and having my computer skills verified by the Australian Computer Society.  That last item was because I did not have an university degree in Computer Science and it was going to entail another detailed application process that was also expensive and ambiguous with regards to the likely outcome.  So, in typical slacker style, I never got the application(s) submitted.

When I moved to Brisbane in late 2005, however, I was much more motivated to actually get it done.  BUT, my increased age meant that I was losing points on the immigration scale (and thus would probably not be eligible for independent skill-based migration) and things were still uncertain with the Australian Computer Society's verification process.  So things remained on hold and in limbo for months and months, as per my usual process of getting things done.

And then things turned around.  I discovered that my employer would be willing to sponsor me for permanent residency status - meaning I didn't have to score 100 points anymore - and that once I worked for them for two years, I would no longer have to go through the skills verification process.  (The idea is that if they are sponsoring you for the job you're already doing, you've clearly shown that you have the skills required to do that job.)  That just left the big hurdle of the motivation/discipline to get the application completed and all the supporting documentation together.  I resolved that issue by hiring immigration lawyers to handle the process for me.  There was still a lot I had to do, but it's amazing how motivated I get when I'm paying a lot of money to have something done!

That was all in the first half of 2008.  Like I said, it takes me a while to get to big projects... (sigh)  We got the application submitted in late June or early July and were approved within a week!  The application was for me, with Ann as my spouse.  Since she would be getting the permanent residency, too, we had to submit information about her in the application, also.  We finally surmounted the hurdle of obtaining permanent residency!

That was the hard bit.  After that, it was just a matter of continuing to live in Australia.  To apply for citizenship, you need to have lived in Australia for four of the past five years, and you need to have been a permanent resident for at least a year.  That meant I would be eligible in October 2009 and Ann, who arrived in Australia later than me, would be eligible in March 2010.

Then each of us had to pass the citizenship exam - super easy, though I'm embarrassed to say I missed one of the 20 questions (Ann got 100%) - submit the simple application and fee, and then wait for approval.  Once we got that, we still had to wait for the opportunity to attend a citizenship pledge ceremony, which are held every 1-3 months.  That finally happened in July 2010 and we were both officially citizens of Australia (and thus dual citizens with the USA)!

Like I said at the beginning, getting our passports was really the final step, as they are the tools that allow us to leave and re-enter Australians as citizens.

After ten years, it's nice to have (another) home country!