Naturalization interview this morning and client, an intercountry adoptee, has been approved and recommended for citizenship. It’s a good day.

The phrase “approved and recommended for citizenship” is so dissonant to me in the context of intercountry adoptees.

My clients have been here for decades—some since 1960. Most do not discover they are not citizens until they are in their 30s or 40s. Then the process begins.

Usually it means renewing a long-expired green card, one that has a baby picture on it. Then requesting all of your documents. Yes, documents, as in “documented.”

And often needed adoption related documents are sealed and we have to convince courts to release them or beg adoption agencies to provide them, if the agency is even still in existence.

Then tracking down all criminal records, and a good practice is to send your fingerprints in to get a copy of your FBI “rap sheet” just so you know what the government knows, no matter how minor the offense.

(or the offense may be so old you have no memory of it and you better not say you have no prior offense when in fact you do, even if it’s minor)

If male, you need to show you registered for the draft when you were of age.

If you remember voting at anytime, believing you were a citizen (and this is very common and was often encouraged by local officials who also assumed you were a citizen), then you need to track down your voting record and cancel registration.

You’ll need to be prepared later to explain why you voted, when you voted, and what you did when you found out were you not a citizen. And document that. Document everything.

Then you apply for naturalization after gathering up all the documentation and paying the current $725 filing fee (on top of paying a lawyer).

You wait. For months. Your first appointment is to go to the field office or a “support center” for “biometrics” —fingerprints and photos. Then you wait again.

If it goes quickly you’ll have an interview within about a year, depending largely on where you live.

And at that interview you will be tested on your English language skills and quizzed on civics to prove you know the general history of the US; e.g. “name a right in the Constitution that only citizens enjoy.”

The USCIS officer will go through your application question by question, again asking if you’ve ever been arrested or ever committed a crime for which you were not arrested. Any prior record will be examined.

You’ll be asked again about voting, and the hows and whys and wheres of that voting. While there is an exemption in the law for mistakenly voting as an intercountry adoptee, you have the burden to show you “reasonably believed” you could have voted

If it all works out and the interview goes well, as it did today, the officer will say you are approved and recommended for citizenship.

“Approved and recommended for citizenship.” The dissonance in that phrase, at least for me as the lawyer, is having witnessed all the pieces of a process that are marked almost entirely by anxiety and the need to prove worthiness.

I can only watch that process, can move it along, can intervene if necessary. I don’t live the experience of being adopted by US citizen parents yet being required to prove you are worthy of that citizenship yourself. That’s the real dissonance.

I’m glad—thrilled even—that my client will become a US citizen, will have a Certificate of Naturalization in his hands in a few weeks. But it shouldn’t be this way. It has to change for intercountry adoptees like him, thousands of whom must still prove that they belong.