yesterday, taka got a letter from the uscis (new name for ins) and the conditional status of her residency has been removed. the first 2 years were on the condition that our marriage was legit and now that they’re satisfied that it is, her residency is permanent.

the entire process was straight forward. since we did all of the paperwork at the US embassy in Japan, we didn’t have to do an interview, and other than a few sets of documents and letters from our friends and an appointment to take fingerprints, it was pretty easy. taka and i did all the documents by ourselves (f expensive lawyers) and the fees for the whole process was under $1000.

a few weeks ago there was this 60 minutes episode about horror stories of people trying to become residents, like couples where the husband died during the 2 year conditional residency and the wife was being deported, so that freaked us out a little bit. but short of me dying, i never thought there’d be any problem in our application process, and it’s now one less thing to worry about.