The documents to protect from day one

In your first months you will be asked to prove who you are, when you arrived, and where you live — over and over, by different offices that do not talk to each other. The people who find this easy are the ones who organised their paperwork in week one.

Do this

Week one, before anything else needs it

Cost

Nothing, beyond translations

Two copies

One cloud, one encrypted drive

Most asked for

Two proofs of address

Keep the originals

Store these together, somewhere fireproof if possible, and never carry all of them at once:

• Passport with the visa page
• I-94 printout — see checking your I-94
• Birth certificate and, if you are married, your marriage certificate
• Green card or employment authorization document, once issued
• Educational diplomas and transcripts
• Driving record from your home country — some U.S. insurers will use it to lower your premium, and some states shorten the licensing process with it
• Vaccination records, especially for children enrolling in school
• Medical records for anyone with an ongoing condition, with the drug names written in their generic form rather than the brand used in your country

Get certified translations early

Any document not in English will need a certified translation for most official uses. A certified translation is not a notarised one: it is a translation accompanied by a signed statement from the translator that it is complete and accurate. You can arrange this before you move, usually far more cheaply than in the U.S.

Birth and marriage certificates are the two you will almost certainly need. Diplomas and transcripts are the next most likely, and are also the ones that take longest to obtain from an institution abroad once you have left the country.

Names must match, and often will not

Naming conventions differ, and U.S. systems assume one given name and one family name. Where your passport, your visa and your birth certificate order the same names differently, or where a maiden name appears on one and not another, expect to be asked to explain it — often by a clerk with no authority to accept your explanation.

Decide early on the exact form of your name you will use everywhere, use it consistently from your first application onward, and keep whatever document links the variants. Correcting a mismatch later means amending records at several agencies at once.

Make digital copies

Scan everything and store it in two places — a cloud account and an encrypted drive or phone. Photograph the front and back of every card. Include the receipt numbers from any USCIS notice, which are how every future enquiry identifies your case.

Build an address file

From your first month, keep everything that shows your name at your U.S. address: the lease, utility bills, bank statements, official letters. The DMV, schools and benefit offices all ask for two proofs of address, and they are surprisingly particular — a phone bill may be refused where an electricity bill is accepted, and a document in a housemate's name will not do at all. Putting a utility in your own name early is worth it for this reason alone.

What never to hand over

No government agency will ask you to send original documents to a private individual, pay a fee by gift card or wire transfer, or confirm your Social Security number by phone. Those are the signatures of the scams that target new arrivals most often — see how to avoid scams and fees.

One more: an employer may confirm that you are authorised to work, but may not demand a particular document or refuse the valid ones you choose to present. That is unlawful, and it is common enough to be worth knowing before your first day.