Have you ever tried to navigate the immigration process? I have, twice now. It's a Kafka-esque nightmare of Orwellian bureaucracy, and I wish I could think of a third famous writer to reference to finish this sentence.
The first time, years ago, they "lost" a packet of information we had to reconstruct at great pains, and then had to get a second physical because they lost the report from the first one. We only found that out after getting our state's federal senator's office involved.
The second time, we ran into both rapidly-changing immigration requirements[0] and a pandemic, which made it super-unclear which issue was more relevant to the seemingly-interminable wait of years.
The instructions are vague in the best of times, and even immigration lawyers have no idea what a given USCIS staffer will care about on any given day. A rejection can mean anything from another year or two in the queue to a demand to leave the country and the life you've built within 30 days, so the stakes are high.
In my most recent application packet, I did include a photo I wouldn't publish online. While it featured no nudity, it was taken in bed. The same photo rotates through a digital frame on my desk in a house with a child in it, so it's by no means risque, but that is why people send in photos you might consider unwise.
0. I can't think about this without offering my best wishes and condolences to Mrs. Miller, who married the architect of that immigration nonsense the same year I married my partner.
> I was pulled aside into the "big glass room" for additional questioning. After reviewing my application, as my new bride looked on from afar, the Immigration officer was yelling at me, turning red, and waving his arms. He was very upset and animated, and from her vantage point it was clear that we were being denied entry and that my Microsoft dreams were crashing down around us right then and there. What she didn't know, because she couldn't hear, was that he had already long since approved my work Visa!
> He was actually upset because their copy of Microsoft Word printed a blank page at the end of every one of their documents and it was wasting paper and he wanted it fixed. I did my best to help configure their page margins before we were released to our new life in America!
Reminds me of a Douglas Adams novel where the protagonist tells the police officer that the computer they are trying to use never worked and it's not their fault. The police officer is very happy and tells him they have been using the machine to bludgeon suspects with.
As someone who has been through this bureaucracy — DHS, consulate, TRIP, etc. — I can tell you that it's a huge pain.
It's a completely opaque system. There's no way to talk to anyone directly. You can only send letters, and hope for a reply. Even seasoned immigration lawyers will have to go through this infuriatingly slow and obtuse system of sending letters and then waiting a long time to get a vague, unhelpful reply in return for some nameless functionary.
In my case, there was an error in my records, and we tried to get them to expunge the offending information. But every time we clarified to them what had happened, we got a reply back basically summarizing the issue, with no solution. My lawyers had to keep doing this until they finally got a redress number and a notification that something may be happening. Meanwhile, the various government databases are not unified or even talking to each other, so all the information about the error was apparently held by the immigration office at JFK (or something like that), not centrally at DHS, which made everything a lot harder. Eventually we received a confirmation that something had been done to rectify the problem, but — in a kafkaesque twist — they refused to say what, and they could not guarantee that there would be no further problems.
To this day I am still being pulled into the immigrations office for some light interrogation every time I enter the US. Which is whenever I come back, since I now live in the US.
The visa application process is similarly kafkaesque and characteristically unfriendly. For example, while applying for a visa, there's absolutely no way to contact the consulate (or at least there wasn't in my home country). Forget about calling or visiting, there's no way to talk to anyone except by appointment, and appointments are only for getting an interview to submit your visa application. And what's hilarious about both the visa system and ESTA is that they don't even guarantee entry. Visas are issued by the consulate, but you can get a visa from them and still be denied entry by DHS. As a European used to my government being quite friendly and approachable, the cold-heartedness of the whole thing was quite shocking.
Immigration application for my spouse. Because our application got binned as low-risk, I don’t think they read any of the stuff we put together before taking their time to rubber stamp it.
>"my current work visa application had been complicated due to a filing mistake"
Making a mistake is not an acceptable excuse for these people (even Brad Feld experienced this [1]).
Having been in the "backroom" twice I can attest how stressful it is and like many other stories, the lack of information is quite scary indeed. In my case, it was just a secondary screening triggered by me having had a student visa in 2006, a similar type of visa that the Boston bomber had had [2]. The officer told me that anyone who had held a student visa in the past 10 years had to go through this, so I'd imagine a fair few people here must have had the same experience.
This makes me wonder how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in similar USCIS/USCBP purgatories regardless of the type of visa application they're waiting to receive a response about.
> The stakes are high — real families can be separated and lives ruined by a denial. It is understandable, then, that some people throw everything they have at the wall during the green card process. The system tells them that marriage, and the sex that consummates it, “is compulsory if you want access to the circuits of movement across borders,” Schaeffer said.
What a stupid system. Why are we still doing this in 2023?
FWIW, I suspect that this tactic works far more often than the article implies. If your desk has piles of these applications, and they all claim to be based on the legal requirement of a consummated marriage, and half of them have photos as described in the article (of the happy couple making love under a waterfall), aren't you going to give those more credence (even if you aren't supposed to)? Of course you are.
Took me more than a year and a letter from my congressmen to get a fiancée visa for my wife.
- Even when we finally got an interview the visa was rejected at first because I was living there, with her, instead of back in the USA, alone. They said I had not maintained 'domicile' in the USA and therefore did not intend to return home.
- When we finally received the visa it listed my father as the sponsor instead of me. We had to get a new one.
- Somewhere on the USCIS website it actually stated that applicants were 'guilty until proven innocent'
- In the waiting room, waiting for the final, correct visa there were a group of Americans waiting to adopt. They were given a nice instruction session on what to do, how to fill out the forms, how to deal with the Chinese adoption policies. I, however, felt I had been actively refused help at every turn in a deliberately opaque bureaucracy.
I'm in the middle of my application for a visa/permit to immigrate there with my wife. Reading the article and the conversation here makes me stress now :(
My wife is an immigrant. Her path to citizenship took about 8 years and an extraordinary amount of time filling out paperwork, refilling it out, submitting it, waiting months at a time while "something" happened with it (of course with no way of status checking the progress of it). At the time, there was almost no "instruction manual" you could use. You simply went to www.ins.gov and started downloading PDF files and filling them out. You filled out anything that seemed even remotely relevant because you didn't want to show up missing something (more on that later).
Here's some of my recollection of it:
I remember spending many 5am mornings standing in a line outside the immigration office with my wife, only for the daily quota of people allowed in to max out and not be able to get in the building. More infuriating is that people who made it in the previous day were given paperwork to let them jump the line.
If you made it in, you simply stood in another line, so long that it wrapped around the lobby, and then up into the emergency exit stairs, then wrapped around the next floor then back into the stairs until you made it into the waiting area -- this was usually around noon.
If you left the line for any reason (since 5am!) for food, bathroom, anything, you lost your place.
Here you were met bruskly by a security guard who spoke rapid slang to all of the immigrants and she spot checked the paperwork. If anything seemed incorrect or they couldn't answer her questions (which even I had a hard time understanding) they were kicked out of line). A second desk of immigration officers then fielded complaints in the 20 or 30 languages of the people who were kicked out after waiting 7 hours but it mostly served as a place the officers could take a break and watch TV.
If you made it past that gauntlet you took a number and had to sit on the floor since the waiting area had at least 2 times as many people in it as it was designed to hold. Every 20 or 30 minutes a security guard would walk around and force people to stand up yelling "no sitting on the floor!". But after 7-8 hours of standing there weren't many people who followed that.
Most likely, after watching the call numbers for a few hours (and seeing only one or two windows actually providing service), they'd shut down for the day and you'd get a raincheck with a day to come back (where you could then jump the morning line and get directly into the waiting room).
After returning on your raincheck, and waiting a few hours more, you finally get up to a window, only to find out that either:
a) you brought the wrong, but incredibly similar, documentation (you filled out the relative sponsorship rather than the spousal or some such)
b) you brought the correct documentation, but they no longer accept that revision of the form. There is, in fact, an older version of the form that you didn't fill out because you figured the newer one would be more correct, but that's the only one they accept (and later when you return you find out that either they've reverted back to the new form, or you didn't fill out the addendum PDF you didn't know about that makes up for the gap in information that the new form was supposed to remedy
c) they simply don't like how you filled it out, you could return on another day, see a different immigration officer and have them accept the paperwork right off the bat
d) some of the required documents simply don't exist in the immigrants country of origin and they won't accept the equivalent (for example, my wife's native country doesn't use birth certificates)
d) you did everything well enough for the person working the window that day that they accept it. If you are lucky you are at the part of the process where you get a verification serial number of some sort that you are supposed to be able to use for them to look up your case for status checks etc.
Bear in mind that quite often the pile of papers you just gave the officer has the only existing copy of some of the legal documents, many of which are irreplaceable or extremely expensive and time consuming to replace. You are supposed to get these back at some point. In the meantime these documents are now unavailable for anything else that might require them. In our case this mean lost jobs and tens of thousands of dollars in lost wages.
The receiving officer unceremoniously dumps this precious cargo into a bin with a huge mishmash of other odds and ends. It could be a trash can or it could be the proper receiving bin, who knows? They assure you that by law processing this step must take n-days.
At n+180 days you start to panic. Calls to the number they gave you result in several hours of on hold time only to be told that they can't provide you with a status update.
At n+270 days they call you back because of a problem with your documentation. You go through the drill described above, usually taking one to two days of waiting in line to be told that
a) they can't find your file so you'll have to redo all of the documentation again (but those original one of a kind documents!). Don't worry, they assure you, they'll turn up.
b) they couldn't verify the address for her sister or some such nonsense, who of course has moved sometime in the previous 11 months, or god forbid a relative drop dead and you have to figure out how to get a death certificate into your file.
Either way, you'll have to spend yet another day or two standing in line.
Eventually...and this is back when they did work permits for green card applicants...you'll get a flimsy hand glued id card for whatever it was you were applying for. My wife had to go through the process 3 times on work permits, each time with the INS missing their legal response date by months, before finally getting called in for our green card interview.
Here, because up to this point you've received virtually no communication whatsoever from immigration, you do what everybody does, pile various artifacts from your life together, and memorize each other's toothbrush colors, where you then go and wait in line, only now with a box of stuff that'll have trouble making it through security, for a day or two. At the end you find you that it's not actually the interview day, this is the day they need you there to schedule the interview.
You return months later. In the meantime you get a letter that the medical checkup has expired since the process is taking so long, and your wife needs to go get another expensive checkup from one of two carefully selected doctors that the INS uses. This results in a multi-week position on a waiting list, only now you find out that your green card interview is happening before the doctor's appointment. In a blind panic you make dozens of phone calls trying to sort this out to no avail - but it doesn't matter anyhow, because what nobody tells you is that it doesn't matter, after the interview you can just submit the new checkup with an addendum form they won't tell you about. But you find this out much later.
There's no appeals process too which makes all this fun, so when immigration screws something up (they will) you have effectively no resort. You just hope they don't fuck anything up too badly.
Finally, after waiting in line for another few hours, you make the interview, where the officer looks at you and your wife says, "I believe you're married" (so you didn't have to bring anything at all anyways, you've just been lugging around 40 pounds of mementos for 4 days for no reason).
Now repeat the above nightmare for the citizenship application and you can see why it's so hard to legally immigrate.
Oh, and suppose my wife's friend wants to immigrate, but has no current job applying for her visa status and no relatives (she'll be the first generation ever in the U.S.). How does she get in? She doesn't! There simply is no path to immigration for this person. Sure she has a Ph.D. in Pharmacology or some such, but immigrating here and then looking for a job is simply not possible.
edit this was in 2001, I've heard the process has been improved greatly since then, our finally few visits for citizenship were smooth sailing in comparison to our early experiences
> “You know what my problem is! We’ve already spoken about it, you told me to come back with more information and I did. I’ve come back four times with the correct documentation and you’re still telling me I won’t be approved?!”
He was asking the wrong kind of questions. I figured out the right question when I was made told "the officer is busy at the moment", and asked to wait in an empty room. After sitting idly for about half an hour, I realized that the right question was "is there a fee that I could pay to make things go faster?" My task was accomplished in the next five minutes.
Of course, I'm Indian, and this was not at a visa office.
I don't mean this as advice to "Alex", but the rusty machine runs on greased palms.
When I got my visa, I went with my mom and brother. Since we have very similar names, the lady who took our fingerprints mixed up the fingerprints. She noticed her mistake and fixed my brothers. But she forgot mine.
End result: when I actually got to the USA and went on the scanner, I got a "fingerprint mismatch". I was directed to a room to sort it out. The immigration officer was extremely polite about it tho, way friendlier than what I expected.
After waiting in line for some guy who was accused of drug dealing but was found not guilty (they were waiting for the courthouse to open to verify), and for a girl who consistently spent as much time as she could in the US (and last time had overstayed the visa), it was my turn. The conversation was as follows:
agent: (...) 5 minute wait while he was apparently typing something, while glancing at me from time to time
agent: - Who is this individual? (turns the monitor)
me: uhhh... oh, that's my brother!
agent: - And where's he now?
me: - Just over there! (points)
agent: - Oh, ok. Welcome to America.
me: - Thank you.
I went to the door and turned back.
agent: - The exit is over there.
me: - I know. I just wanted to ask you something: did you manage to fix my file?
agent: - No. You'll always have this problem.
me: - ... okay then.
I have no idea if that's the typical experience - I hope it is and, if true, I have no qualms about it. There was nothing inherently humiliating, there was no disrespect at any time.
Now, I considered writing to the DHS asking about it, but I am pretty sure that they'll ask me to get another visa. Which I won't until mine expires or if I'm required to change my status for some reason. See below.
By the way, paying $12 for a form is nothing, try having to travel 800km and stand in line under the sun for an hour, after paying $150 (plus travel and accommodation expenses), with no guarantees you'll actually have the damn thing issued. Oh, and that's to be done during workdays - you'll have to use vacation or sick days. Also, it must be scheduled months in advance. And you still have to file the landing papers, which ask you the same sort of questions the article was complaining about.
All that, for a country with a visa rejection rate of less than 5%.
So yeah, I agree that the US needs to be more welcoming. But it is not always that bad. It does need more consistency, though. I guess many of the "rules" are made up by whoever is in charge at that moment.
US immigration law is so draconian with so many gotchas, it's impossible for any person to keep track of all the actions they need to take.
This linkedin post is an example of one of those gotchas.
Does anyone know that employers need to reverify I-9 docs for visa hires everytime they get a new ead card or a new I-797? Does anyone know that drivers license needs to be renewed every single time? Whoch means taking an appointment, standing there for a day and showing the same shit documents all over again? Only to receive the drivers license after 2 months by snail mail?
Does anyone know that this has to be done even if they change jobs?
Does anyone know that if they move from one location to another they not only have to refile paperwork with USCIS, they also have to update every change in their address?
Oh btw, god forbid the USCIS cannot process documents in time (six months). They will then straggle along for 180 days or 240 days or god knows what number of days apply to what cases. What happens to I-9 in these cases? What happens to drivers license in these cases? Is the employee supposed to continue working or what?
What happens if the employer forgets a step? What happens if a lawyer makes a tiny mistake? What happens if the arrogant jerk of border control makes a mistake during reentry in the US? Why does the US consulate need to have everyone give an appointment with ALL documents again and again just to stamp a visa? What happens when they delay the process?
And I haven't even started talking about green card yet. Imagine doing all of the above for 10 years, 20 years and then being trapped for a gotcha in some paperwork somewhere? A mistake by a lawyer, by some employer. Wtf!!! Are they supposed to abandon their family, kids, friends and leave the country for this gotcha?
Are they saying that USCIS never makes mistakes?
I could go on and on. The process is incredibly bureaucratic and nightmarish. People lose their mental and physical health dealing with this shit. Families get separated routinely because of bureaucratic anarchy.
And this is all for EDUCATED workers and immigrants. This does not even scratch it for refugees, daca and others.
My serious advice to anyone who likes their life is to not come to the US. If you are already in the US, exit now. Take your job and projects with you. Go to another country where you can focus on your family, kids and maybe a business.
I might not have read it correctly, but I didn't spot the point where they said their J-1 was not approved - just that it was in progress (and from what I hear, months-long approval processes seem pretty common in the States).
The two countries whose visa process I'm most familiar with in this situation are Singapore and Australia. I've hired many foreigners into Singapore on Employment Passes (the H1-B equivalent) and in some cases, they came in on a tourist visa whilst their EP was in progress (testimony of our hiring speed rather than the Singaporean administration, which delivers the thing in 7 working days).
Similarly, when I applied for Australian PR, which takes quite a bit longer than Singapore, the embassy specifically told me it was fine to travel in and out of the country during the application, and I did so on the usual visa waiver whatever it is called.
I once was cornered - in a polite and friendly manner - by an Australian immigration agent in Singapore on my way to Perth, who for all intents and purposes looked like a perfectly normal, unarmed civil servant in a suit, and who was wondering why I kept popping in and out of his country. Satisfied with the explanation he let me continue after 2 minutes. And if you think immigration is a hot topic in the US, you should see Australian news at the moment...
I've also held two work visas in Switzerland despite owning an "inferior, work-stealing frontalier" (not my words, those of the more right wing protectionists) French passport and I regularly fly in and out of the country without any issues.
Therefore, this story strikes me as an illustration of how bad the backend/IT/processes for immigration are in the US. The main failure point was a lack of communication, with the airline as well as with the travelers. All airlines flying to Singapore and Australia check your visa situation (as in, ask to see the visa and scan it) before you check in precisely to avoid these problems. One also has to wonder the wisdom of not allowing visa types to overlap conditionally, since other countries seem more than able to cope; and whether failing to obtain a work visa really ought to be grounds for exclusion from tourism travel.
A few years ago, a US border official didn't even know about my visa type (O1) and put me through secondary because he didn't know that the visa existed.
This also happened on the US/CA border to me - the official told me I had the wrong visa to which I responded I had the correct visa. We went round 15 times in a row back and forth, with me stating it was the correct visa until he gave up and let me go.
A close friend of mine also had a gun put on the table to intimidate him in a secondary screening when coming from the UK to the US.
So much for wanting to be an "immigration magnet" like the Google hangout tomorrow with the CTO of the US.
I can understand what he's feeling as i'm in a very similar situation.
I was offered a job by a San Francisco-based startup in January. I applied for a visa at the local US embassy, the interview went fine and the consular officer said she was happy to approve it but that I had been flagged for an additional background check which should take about two weeks.
Five months later and i'm still stuck in "Administrative Processing". All enquiries have come back with a blanket "matter of national security, we can't give any more information" cover. It's extremely frustrating. What makes it even worse is just the incompetence of it all. I have been going back and forth to the US for nearly ten years to see family pretty much every summer without a problem, why am I only now subject to an extremely lengthy background check?
My wife quit her job and we gave up our house in anticipation of our move and we've effectively been in limbo since.
If anything, the way we've been treated has made me never want to step foot in the US again.
2004 - I applied to do my Master's in the United States, I had great financial aid in a good school and great GRE scores.
Student Visa? Neither approved nor Denied : Placed in indefinite limbo because I have a muslim name which brought up some flag in their database. Btw. my surname is the 'John Smith' of muslim names.
I gave up and went to Canada to pursue my education at McGill. Fantastic experience. Eventually landed a job in US and got my H1B this time. Thought the visa issues were behind me. I was wrong.
2007 - My mom applied for a US visa to come visit me. Neither approved/nor denied (Section 221(g) - name check).
2008 - My dad and mom both applied for a US visa to come visit me.
Neither approved/nor denied - same reason.
2011 - After living in working in US for about 5 years and having gotten multiple visa stamps, I got to Vancouver to get my visa renewed. Placed under limbo again! Stayed in Vancouver for weeks before they 'cleared me'.
2012 - My mom applies again. Result? you guessed the answer. Visa limbo.
I'm facing another visa renewal soon and I'm prepared for another night-marish episode.
Oh yeah, forget about green card - the queue for my country has ensured that I'll be lucky to get it in this lifetime, pretty much screwing up my ability to take chances with starting my own start-up in the US.
The thing is that I really like living in this country, the work opportunities and its people. But the more I deal with the immigration system, the more un-welcomed and temporary I feel here.
The first time, years ago, they "lost" a packet of information we had to reconstruct at great pains, and then had to get a second physical because they lost the report from the first one. We only found that out after getting our state's federal senator's office involved.
The second time, we ran into both rapidly-changing immigration requirements[0] and a pandemic, which made it super-unclear which issue was more relevant to the seemingly-interminable wait of years.
The instructions are vague in the best of times, and even immigration lawyers have no idea what a given USCIS staffer will care about on any given day. A rejection can mean anything from another year or two in the queue to a demand to leave the country and the life you've built within 30 days, so the stakes are high.
In my most recent application packet, I did include a photo I wouldn't publish online. While it featured no nudity, it was taken in bed. The same photo rotates through a digital frame on my desk in a house with a child in it, so it's by no means risque, but that is why people send in photos you might consider unwise.
0. I can't think about this without offering my best wishes and condolences to Mrs. Miller, who married the architect of that immigration nonsense the same year I married my partner.
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