So here's an awkward story. I worked in a hotel for a year. It was a roughly 50/50 mix of housekeeping & handyman. Not exactly the 'american dream', but it was

So here's an awkward story. I worked in a hotel for a year. It was a roughly 50/50 mix of housekeeping & handyman. Not exactly the 'american dream', but it was smalltown-nowhere, and I'd rather work than hold my nose high. I'd been working there a while, when my greencard happened to come up in conversation. It did happen from time to time, mostly because I found it (and still do) to be a complete novelty. It's an interesting bit of kit, with a whole bunch of different things in one big kinda hologram on the back. From one angle you can see my face, from another angle, madame Liberty, etc. (It also came up when a gas station wouldn't accept it as proof of age for smokes. They wanted An American ID. How do you argue with that?) At the end of said conversation, my boss turned around and said .. well I guess you'll have to pay tax then. It seems they'd just assumed up until that point. That was an interested realization that the world of "under the table" labour is a whole lot less clandestine than you might like to think. Which kinda goes back to my original point - That was not an intentional act on my part. The way other people approach the subject has a huge impact. (The forms you mentioned, I took a google - I don't recognise the I-9 at all. The W-9 looks familiar, but that might be because of its striking resemblance to my stack of W-2's, which I dragged back to europe with me for some unknown reason. This isn't to say no to either of them, just that this was 10 years back - I remember human interactions much better than paperwork.)