'Churches are now supposed to check the immigration status of parishioners before helping them.'

Helen Angove looks at the battle America is having about its immigrant workers.

Two-and-a-half years into our life in Southern California and I am strenuously resisting Americanisation. I refuse to refer to my trousers as 'pants', I cannot bring myself to call a tap a 'faucet', and, if I accidentally bump against someone in the supermarket, I still say 'sorry', rather than 'oops! My bad!'

But the language has other, more insidious ways of encroaching upon your consciousness.

I am a diehard fan of the English-style cryptic crossword, and my addiction is fuelled by kind friends who send over crossword books for me. I was puzzling over a clue on one occasion, and the recognition suddenly came to me that the answer was 'odour'.

I wrote it down. I looked at it. Something was not quite right. I puzzled for a few moments, then finally asked my friend how she would spell the word. 'O-D-O-R', she replied. Realisation dawned - I had been wanting to use the American spelling.

So, despite my best efforts, some part of me is being influenced by living here in the States, and I don’t mourn the fact too greatly, because I would not like to think of myself as too rigid ever to be influenced by my environment.

Identity

I don’t think I’ll ever think of myself as anything other than British, but we seem fairly settled here now, and this country has become part of my identity. Besides, as I begin to feel less like a visitor and more like a resident, the status of being a married dependant - not even allowed to have a job - begins to grate.

As I am here on my husband’s visa I don’t even have a Social Security number, and everything in the States runs on Social Security numbers. Without one you are an un-person - you are likely to be refused credit, or even a bank account.

All of this raises the issue of making our stay here more permanent. Time, perhaps, to begin the dreaded application process for the much-coveted Green Card.

Get any two or three US immigrants together and the conversation will rapidly turn to visas, citizenship exams, and Green Cards - and the stories come flooding out.

There are some bizarre quirks in the system. If, for example, your Green Card application takes too long - and in California it can take three years or more - you may be summoned to the INS (Immigration and Naturalisation Service) to re-submit your fingerprints.

No-one knows why they do this - surely they can‘t be expecting your fingerprints to change? And a friend of mine - an Irish woman - found that on her Green Card application she had somehow been designated as a Mexican male.

Tax bill

Our own personal horror story is that - despite seeking professional advice - we were never warned that on our particular visa my husband could not claim tax credit for being married and having a child. So at the end of the tax year we were walloped with a tax bill of $6,000 more than we had expected.

The visa and immigration system is so Machiavellian that even those designated 'experts' are frequently floundering in the dark.

But being literate English speakers, here legally, and usually with the backing of a conscientious employer, I and my other immigrant friends are the lucky ones. Those who really suffer are the illegal immigrants.

There are, of course, two sides to every coin. I am largely convinced that California’s economy would collapse without the thousands of immigrant labourers who work for low wages doing the jobs that Americans don’t want to do. On the other hand, many argue that their presence bumps up car insurance, depresses wages and puts an extra strain on public resources like the police, schools and America’s already woefully inadequate social welfare programmes.

The House of Representatives has recently passed a bill making it a felony to be in the US without correct paperwork, and (this is the bit that horrifies me) even making it a felony to give aid to an illegal immigrant.

Status

Churches, for example, are now supposed to check the immigration status of parishioners before helping them. Even before this legislation was passed there were situations in which giving aid to immigrants were made cause for prosecution.

Last year, two humanitarian workers faced charges (with the possibility of substantial jail terms) after having rescued some dehydrated Mexican immigrants in the desert and taken them to hospital. Their case is yet to be heard.

The legislation has sparked a number of mass demonstrations in American cities. Some 500,000 people peacefully marched in LA a couple of weekends ago to add their voices to the protests.

To do justice to the complexities of the rights and wrongs of illegal immigration is impossible in this limited space. But personally I find it difficult to see what the government hopes to achieve by making life harder for the immigrants already here. It calls to mind King Cnut bawling at the tide with the water already over his ankles.

Helen Angove is a former Anglican priest from the UK who moved to California in July 2003.

• Read other Emails from America