"Voting for him ruined us." FAFO and our friend the leopard says, BURP.

[meadowlander]

57. The filing fee is $760 and it's a lot of paperwork.

If she had basically all the benefits of citizenship on her green card that mattered to her and didn't envisage this scenario coming up, she might have just not bothered. People have other things to do in their lives.

I haven't gone through the US immigration system but my experience with New Zealand immigration is that they want all kinds of crap at every stage and everything has to be within the correct date range at the same time or it expires and you have to start over. I had to have police certificates from every country I had ever lived in saying I'd never committed any crimes there which couldn't be more than a year or two old. This included China which didn't have an online way to order or pay for this certificate and send it overseas, would not accept an application from an agent, and took six weeks to process the request, so I had to literally go back to China for six weeks to apply for it in person. This because my original certificate was six months out of date and New Zealand Immigration would not accept proof that I have been living in New Zealand continuously during the gap so could not physically have been committing crimes in China during that time period. Plus I had to give them up to date medical certificates, proof of employment and having enough funds to support myself, two other forms of valid ID, character witnesses, etc.

I've been a permanent resident in New Zealand for 15 years and never bothered to go for citizenship. The only things I could do with citizenship that I can't do as a permanent resident are run for elected office, compete on the New Zealand Olympic team and travel on a New Zealand passport which are all pretty remote possibilities - although the last one might tip me over eventually depending on how septic my US passport gets overseas. That or the prospect of no longer having to file tax returns in the US despite not having lived or worked there for 20 years.

I'm friends with a gay couple who adopted their babies using surrogates in the US and despite neither of the kids living in the US past the age of a few weeks old, they are are going to have to file tax returns for the rest of their lives regardless of whether they owe anything or not unless they renounce US citizenship. So who knows, it could be a tax thing.

And as an Irish American I just can't bring myself to swear an oath to bear faithful and true allegiance to the British Crown. Plus I think I may actually have a bit of PTSD, since dealing with New Zealand Immigration the first four times (for student, work, residence and then permanent residence visas) was such a hassle coinciding with one of the worst times of my life. I don't think you can discount the level of stress around those processes and the lasting impact it can have on people that may make them just not want to deal with it again if they don't have to.

You spend months if not years having completely uprooted your life and handed it over to a faceless bureaucracy and if any of the thousand of things that could go wrong does go wrong the stakes are you end up broke, homeless, unemployed and back in a country you probably had pretty good reasons for leaving in the first place.

But anyway, there's any number of reasons why someone who has achieved permanent residence in a country might never bother to take the final step. And none of them excuse deporting her for having written a bad check a decade ago.