Rishta in San Diego

How to read a San Diego profile properly

Marrying into the military: deployments, orders and what a spouse actually gets

San Diego is the one American city on this site where a serving member of the armed forces is a normal profile rather than an unusual one, and Pakistani families have almost no shared knowledge of what that marriage looks like. It is an honourable life with real advantages and real demands, and both should be understood plainly before anything is agreed.

Start with the demands, because they are the part nobody describes. Deployment means being away — commonly six to nine months at a time for a sailor, with the ship at sea, limited contact, and no possibility of coming home for a family emergency. A bride who has not had that explained will not understand why her husband cannot answer a telephone for a week. Then there are orders: the military decides where a serving member lives, and moves them every two to four years, including overseas. A family that agrees a marriage expecting the couple to stay near them in San Diego has misunderstood the arrangement — the couple will go where the orders go, and the wife will be the one who has to rebuild a life in Virginia or Japan or Bahrain. Training cycles, sea trials and duty rotations also mean irregular hours long before any deployment.

Now the advantages, which are substantial and which Pakistani families systematically underestimate because they read the rank and not the package. A military spouse is issued a dependent identity card and has access to the base, its commissary and its facilities. Health coverage for the family under the military system is comprehensive and costs a fraction of what an ordinary American family pays — in a country where health insurance is most households’ second largest expense, that is worth a great deal. Housing allowance increases on marriage. There is a pension after a set number of years of service, which almost no private employer offers. And there are family support and relocation services on every base whose entire purpose is helping a new spouse settle. The one condition is administrative: the marriage must be reported to the personnel office with the certificate promptly, because none of it starts until the spouse is formally enrolled.

For a spouse arriving from Pakistan there is a further and genuinely valuable point. United States immigration law contains provisions that favour military families, including faster routes to naturalisation for the spouse of a serving member and accommodations where orders move the family mid-process. The base legal assistance office can advise on it at no cost. Do not rely on what a relative heard — ask the base legal office, which exists for this. And if the role is one requiring a security clearance, read what we say about that on our Los Angeles page, because marrying a foreign national brings declarations that the serving member needs to make properly rather than quietly.

One warning belongs here and nowhere else, because it is the most common fraud script in the world. Impersonating a deployed American serviceman is the standard method of international romance fraud: the account cannot video call because of operational security, the photographs are taken from a real soldier’s social media, and in time there is a request for money — for leave papers, a satellite phone, a transfer fee, a medical bill. No actual member of the United States military ever needs a civilian to pay for leave, transport, equipment or communications. A genuine serving member can video call, can be verified through his family and his base community, and will not object to either. Never send money to anybody you have not met, in uniform or out of it.

A pending application and a border twenty minutes away

San Diego sits against the busiest land border on earth, and for most families that is simply a convenience. For a couple with immigration paperwork in progress it is a hazard, and the way it goes wrong is almost always innocent: a day trip, a dental appointment, a family wedding across the line, and a pending application damaged.

The rule in general terms is this. If a person is inside the United States waiting on an application to adjust their status to permanent residence, leaving the country without the correct advance travel permission can cause that application to be treated as abandoned. The permission exists, it is applied for separately, and it takes time to be granted. Nobody in that position should cross the border — not for an afternoon, not for a dental appointment, not for a day in Tijuana with cousins — until they have checked their own position with an accredited immigration adviser or a legal clinic and, if needed, have the document in hand. The same caution applies to a person on a temporary status whose visa stamp has expired, and to anyone with an unresolved immigration history. This is the single most avoidable way a good case is damaged, and in this city it is damaged more often than anywhere else in America purely because the border is so close.

Two related practicalities. Customs and Border Protection operate checkpoints on the highways some distance inland, not only at the line itself, so anyone travelling north out of the county should carry their genuine immigration documents with them as a matter of routine. And on the cross-border medical and dental trade, which a great many San Diego families use quite sensibly: the saving is real, but check the practitioner properly, keep the records, understand that American insurance generally will not cover it, and do not let the price tempt a person with pending paperwork into a crossing they should not make.

None of this is a reason for alarm. It is a reason to ask one question before the first trip — am I allowed to leave and return — and to get the answer from someone qualified rather than from a cousin.

Defence and biotech look alike on a profile and are not alike at all

Two of this city’s three big sectors produce engineers and scientists on comparable salaries, and families reading profiles cannot tell them apart. They should, because the risk profile is opposite.

Defence and government contracting is slow, stable and heavily regulated. Programmes run for years, dismissals are uncommon, the work is tied to government appropriations rather than to a market, and progression is steady rather than spectacular. A cleared engineer in this sector is about as secure as an American private-sector employee gets. The constraints are the clearance process and the fact that the work cannot usually be done remotely or taken to another city easily.

Biotechnology in San Diego is the reverse. Pay can be excellent, the science is serious, and a great many of the companies are clinical-stage — which means the whole enterprise is waiting on the result of a trial. When a trial reads out badly, a company can cut most of its staff within weeks, and that is a normal event in this industry rather than a scandal. It is still a good career; it is simply one that requires savings and a tolerance for discontinuity.

So ask which it is, and then ask the three questions that follow. Is the employer a large established company, a government contractor, or a venture-funded company still working towards an approval. Is part of the pay in shares or options rather than salary, because a figure quoted as total compensation may include something that is currently worth nothing. And how many months could the household manage with no income. A family that has savings and a clear answer is a better match than one with a bigger number and no plan.

Her first Ramadan and her first Eid in a new country

This is on this page because San Diego’s Pakistani community is small and spread out, so a newly arrived wife here is more likely than in Chicago or Queens to find herself facing the year’s two most emotional months without anybody around her. It is worth preparing for deliberately, and the preparation is simple and almost free.

Understand what she is losing. Ramadan in Pakistan is a street, a household and a city doing the same thing at the same time: the shops open late, the azan carries, somebody is always cooking, and iftar is twenty people. Ramadan in an American suburb can be a woman alone in a kitchen at six in the evening, breaking her fast with a husband who got home at seven, in a neighbourhood where nobody knows it is Ramadan at all. The first Eid is worse, because Eid in Pakistan is her mother and her sisters, and Eid in America can be a prayer at a hall full of strangers and then an ordinary Tuesday.

What to arrange, before she arrives rather than after. Find out which masjid or Islamic centre runs taraweeh and community iftars and how far it is, and take her in the first week rather than the third. Make sure she is invited to somebody’s house for iftar in the first few days, even if it has to be asked for. Let her call her mother at iftar time, which is the middle of the night in Pakistan and worth the disruption. And on Eid: Eid is not a public holiday in the United States, which astonishes people — leave has to be requested from an employer in advance, and a family that does not plan it ends up with a husband at work on Eid morning. Ask for the day, early, in writing.

For the family receiving her, one further thought. The second year is far easier than the first, and the difference is almost entirely whether she found two or three women in that first Ramadan. Time spent on that is not hospitality. It is the most useful thing anybody will do for the marriage all year.

Southern California is the pool, and the drive north is normal

The Pakistani community in San Diego County is genuinely small — a few thousand households spread over a very large county — so searching only within it is the main error made here. The county itself is bigger than people realise: Oceanside to Chula Vista is sixty miles and well over an hour, so read the area on a profile before assuming proximity.

Then widen north, which families here do without a second thought. Los Angeles and Orange County are two to two and a half hours up the I-5 and hold one of the largest Pakistani populations in the country; the Inland Empire — Corona, Riverside, Eastvale, Rancho Cucamonga — is the same distance inland and is full of families who moved there for houses. The Bay Area is an hour and a quarter by air from a convenient airport and Southern Californian families treat that flight as ordinary for a serious meeting. Beyond California, Phoenix and Las Vegas are five to six hours by road or an hour by air, and Texas is a two-hour flight.

If you are searching back into Pakistan from here, note the practical points that apply across the west coast: the time difference is twelve hours for most of the year, so fix a workable hour for calls and keep to it, and the one-stop routes to Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi generally run through Los Angeles or San Francisco and the Gulf carriers, which is worth factoring into both the cost and the length of any journey.