Steps to America
We got our visas.
I’ll let that sink in for a second, because when that moment arrived, it felt completely surreal. Four stamps, four approvals. We’re actually doing this.
Now, rewind five months.
When we first heard we’d be moving to the US in July, the excitement hit immediately. Then, about 48 hours later, reality did too. Someone mentioned the word visa, and suddenly the adventure had a to-do list.
We applied for an E2 visa, the investor visa for treaty countries. It’s the route that made sense for us, but it comes with a level of scrutiny that makes you feel like you’re being audited, interviewed, and gently interrogated all at once. We hired a consultant, Visa Versa, and I’ll say this upfront: without them, I genuinely don’t know where we’d be. Probably still staring at a PDF, wondering which box to fill in first. Alongside them, my colleague Eva did all the heavy lifting on the company documentation side. Financials, business plans, the works. She absolutely rocked it, and this whole thing would have looked very different without her.
The process is thorough in a way that catches you off guard. It’s not just a passport and a recent photo. They want company documentation, including structure, financials, and business plans. They want personal details. They want your social media profiles and your full online presence. At one point, I sat down and genuinely tried to remember every account I’d ever made. It felt less like a visa application and more like preparing for a background check at a spy agency.
Then came the fees. The US recently introduced a reciprocal fee of USD 2,100 per person, and that’s before the consultant costs, the filing fees, and everything else that quietly stacks up along the way. By the end, the total bill was the kind of number where you could have easily bought a decent second-hand car instead. The lady behind the counter asked very kindly, in wonderfully broken American-Dutch, whether I was ready to “empty a small-big bucket.” It is the best way anyone has ever asked me to hand over a significant sum of money.
The interview day itself was something else entirely. We drove to the US Consulate General in Amsterdam, right on the Museumplein, on a morning that felt both completely normal and extremely not normal. The girls were nervous. I was nervous. Nadine was holding it together better than the rest of us, which is on-brand for her. First, the family was screened together. Then I had a separate fifteen-minute interview about the business. The questions were straightforward, and so were the answers. It passed without drama, except for one spectacular moment of panic when I suddenly, inexplicably, could not remember the birthday of my oldest daughter. My own child. Blank. Gone. The officer looked at me. I recovered, just about.
While waiting, we picked up a rumor circulating through the room that your social media profiles need to be public for the interview. Right now. The girls nearly lost it. Phones came out, privacy settings were questioned, and teenage panic kicked in at full force. It turned out not to be true, or at least it wasn’t asked. But those ten minutes aged me slightly.
The waiting room has no privacy either. None. Conversations bleed into each other, and you can’t help but overhear. The touring crew of a well-known Dutch DJ sorting out visas for their next world tour. A family who had visited Cuba a couple of years back, nervously accounting for their timeline. People carrying small secrets they were suddenly having to explain out loud, in a room full of strangers.
And then they called our name. A few questions. Some answers. Four stamps.
The girls screamed in the car on the way home. I may have cried slightly. I’m not confirming this.
