I got my 'greencard' on Friday, but the US bureaucracy is so incompetent that it will be four months before I actually receive a physical 'card'. This makes travel very awkward. Its a very strange contrast with Britain, where the government is extremely efficient, but private companies less so.
In the US, working for the government has such low prestige that it is full of African Americans and Hispanics, who unfortunately (because the way the US public education system works)have little or no education. So its a nightmare of incompetence, and just very, very slow. They hold the clerical positions, and that’s what blocks the whole admin thing.
If you can somehow get to someone educated, you can move things along. Unfortunately, the US is still very racist. Opportunities for African Americans are deteriorating rapidly, although if you have a "white" skin like Chinese it seems you can progress. Its also a dreadful place to be a women. A report today shows its one of the very few countries of the world, along with Papua New Guinea, that has no maternity benefits. Its a funny place, with so much talk about racial and gender equality, but no action. But then the whole of the Americas is dreadful in this regard - in Brazil the darker your skin, the lower you are on the social scale.
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