An exiled journalist’s ordeal with the abbys of immigration services
When I had to flee my home country Turkey in March 2016 after the increasingly oppressive government brutally took over our newspaper, I thought the problems I would encounter in the Western world would be much less frustrating and challenging. The year I spent in Belgium’s highly divided, bilingual and decentralized bureaucracy made me think the U.S. would be a better place to live for an exiled journalist like myself. After coming here for a journalism related project, I decided to stay. After all, the US is a country of immigrants as the famous expression goes. Given my graduate school experience in the US, I was able to safely argue that becoming an immigrant in the US would still be easier than anywhere in Europe. Little did I know about the dark abyss of the United States Center for Immmigration Services (USCIS)! Let me try to simplify and oversummarize (I know there is no such word, but I had to coin it) my ordeal with the USCIS in the last three years. Through my lawye