Legal Resident vs Legal Citizen

May 29, 2012

A clarification, because I’ve noticed there is a lot of confusion about this:

I am not an American citizen. By virtue of my marriage to an American citizen, I am a legal resident (this is what my Green Card is for). I am allowed to live in the United States, work here and I must pay my taxes to the U.S. government. I can do everything but vote or obtain a U.S. passport.

While this status leaves me vulnerable to deportation, it’s good enough for me. I did not grow up here. I still miss 99% of your pop-culture references. Unlike the overwhelming majority of Americans my age, I have known and loved the Pixies since the early 1990s. I read about U.S. History like I did the History of every country I’ve ever lived in (and there are eight of them). I am incapable of counting and calculating in a language other than French. And when I’m tired, I give up on words that have no Latin roots (goodbye “freedom,” hello “liberty”), start referring to the moon as “she,” and generally sound like a drunk Yoda: “Pass me a knife for bread clean, please, the mine he has the teeth who are used.”

I feel as American as I feel Emirati, i.e. not at all, and I was born in the Emirates. I am a French citizen, and though I am not always proud of that, I am still happy to admit that it is all I need. So nope. No U.S. passport for me, thank you very much.

— From SF, explanatorily.

8:07pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z9DOYyMN2xzT
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