I’ve been getting asked a lot lately how things are going with this fiance visa and immigration process. So for those of you playing along at home, here’s an update…
We’ve submitted the fiance visa application to the Nebraska Service Center (NSC) of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (which is part of the Dept. of Homeland Security). All we can do right now is wait.
In this regard, I have the great misfortune of living in Michigan. The Vermont Service Center takes about 15-20 days to process fiance visa applications. No one really knows why the NSC takes so long, but they do, and since I live in Michigan, this is the way it is, no doing much about it. The communication from the NSC states that this type of visa application takes 150-180 days to process (about 5-6 months) but it seems that the current timeline is closer to 7-8 months. Since we submitted our application on December 17, eight months would bring us to August which would be cutting things close, but still okay. We’d prefer to get approval in June or July.
What happens once we get approval from the NSC, they send everything over to the US Embassy in London. We get notified that London has received our paperwork and they give us a list of documents that we need to gather together to present to them. Once we have that list completed, we let them know and give them the date by which we would like to have James enter the country. Based on that, they assign us an interview date.
At least that’s the process currently (as we understand it). Things can easily change.
James will be coming here mid-May and staying until the end of July. He’ll be going back to England for the month of August to do his Embassy interview and get the fiance visa, spend time with friends and family before moving over, and participate in Greenbelt. As soon as the US Embassy lets him (we’re hoping it will be by the end of the first week of September), he’ll enter the country on the fiance visa. From that point he won’t be able to leave again until he gets his green card which, if things stay as they are currenlty, will happen about 3 months after our wedding.
And just a bit of trivia. Green card holders are no longer called Resident Aliens. The new official term is Lawful Permanent Resident. No more martian jokes. Sorry.
That reminds me of a recent This American Life (www.thislife.org/pages/archives/archive03.html#253) in which one of the producers is trying to get an error on her phone bill fixed and one of the customer service people tells her to fax her stuff to a building in Iowa with no address or phone number, just a fax, but it’s full of super-geniuses who will surely fix her problem (she does, but of course nothing results).
Sounds like BCIS found the same kind of super-geniuses.
I love This American Life!
Yeah, it does seem like that sometimes. Hello?? Is anybody actually there?
They changed the name from “Resident Alien” to “Lawful Permanent Resident?”
Leave it to bureaucracy to kill a joke.