I’ve recently begun the process of applying for a permanent residence status for Kinga. The amount of paperwork is about what you’d imagine. One form has to be filled out not in triplicate, but in quadruplicate — by Kinga and then again by me!

What’s amazing is that in the twenty-first century, these forms are still not available in an electronic format. Sure, you can get them in the PDF version from the INS (or whatever it’s called now) website, but you still have to print them out and fill them in by hand. A few of the forms use Adobe’s “Fill-in-able” (for lack of a better term) feature on its newest version of Acrobat Reader, but that saves very little time when you have to do four examples of the same form and you can’t cut and paste. It leaves you thinking, “What’s the point?”

The ideal, it seems, would be to write a small application that gets all that data (place of residence for the last five years, employment history, etc.) and then spits out the various forms in a printable format. Or make the INS website database driven, with accounts and such, so you can at least do it online. Such a web application in CFM, PHP, JSP, ASP, PPP, NOP, QRS, or whatever scripting language would not be that difficult to write.

Until the government catches up with the rest of the world, though, we’ll just have to get writers cramps filling in all that paperwork.

(Ultimate irony: it’s easier for Kinga to get permanent residence status in the States than it is for me to get the same in Poland.)