Illegal Immigration

Shhhh!!! Don't tell the Bush Administration, but I'm in the country illegally.

At about two-thirty in the morning before my flight, I was in the process of checking in online when I realized that my US passport had expired two weeks earlier. Not to worry, I thought at first; I'll just use my French passport to get back to the US. Then I remembered that my French passport doesn't have the necessary biometric information (thumbprint, retinal scan, stool sample) required by US customs. Also, the Americans hate the French and will use any excuse to keep them out of the country. Panic, naturally, ensued.

If you've never faced this situation before, let me tell you that three o'clock in the morning with a flight in less than ten hours is not the time when one is best prepared mentally to deal with an expired passport. I immediately called Pegs, who I hoped would have a cooler head and would be in a better position to reason through the situation than I. When I called, however, Pegs' first reaction was to ask why I hadn't called earlier and then to warn me that I had better not be up playing video games at three o'clock in the morning. Helpful as this advice would be for a myriad of other situations, it failed to address my particular dilemma. After I told her the reason for my call, Pegs thought about it for a second and then calmly recommended that I should have checked my passport earlier and pay more attention to these sorts of things in the future, advice that also failed to dramatically improve my predicament.

My next call was to Air France, where the customer service representative seemed to fully grasp the gravitas of the situation by promptly putting me on hold. When she came back after what felt like several hours, she told me that I should still be able to get into the country using my American passport, although she seemed unable to explain precisely how I was supposed to do so. I imagine that she envisioned a scenario in which I would pose as an Air France flight officer, secretly stow away in a passenger compartment, garrote an unsuspecting customs agent and set off a well-placed incendiary device to cover my escape as I made off in a waiting car, but the only advice that she actually gave was for me to remember to call before noon to change my reservation in the likely event that I wasn't able to get on board.

In the end, I managed to check in at around 7:15 a.m. for my 1:15 p.m. flight, and neither the lady at the Paris check-in or the guy at US immigration noticed that my passport had expired. There's no sign that the 5-0 are on my tail, but whenever I hear a siren in the distance or see someone in uniform giving me a cool lookover, I can't help but feel that they're on to me. As nerve-wracking as the experience was, though, in at least one way I'm glad I had to go through it; after all, now I have at least one more thing in common with my in-laws.