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Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 13:03:32 -0500
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Status: RO
Getting a green card because you are married to an American citizen is a
lengthy process.
All information I needed was given to me from the international office of my
University.
I was given a list of document numbers which I then requested from the INS
office.
I filled all of them out, including documents that allowed an intermediate
status (Non J1, work permit).
Many J1 visas have a 2 year home residency requirement and you cannot get
around this by marring an American. You need to get a waiver from the Swiss
embassy which then needs to be sent to on other Immigration office (don't
remember). It seemed that the Swiss embassy does not object to such requests
and charged just an administrative fee (This is real exceptional compared to
other countries).
I got the intermediate working permit status quickly. However the green card
took forever. I think the whole process took over 1.5 years.
Since I had a working permit I also needed a traveling document to be able to
visit people in Europe. However I found out later that his document is a
travel document "for humanitarian reasons" which took at every customs about
an hour to process (e.g. I did not know that US customs for trips from
Vancouver to US is actually in Vancouver and I missed my flight).
You need to be patient and work yourself through bureaucracy. You will not be
able to call an immigration officer and sometimes you may be really worried to
receive documents in time. Lawyers specialized in this may have a phone number
at the INS to call and speed up the process.
My second last visit at INS was an hour drive and 5 minutes questioning to
find out that I should have brought my wife with me. On of the papers had a
list of things to bring in large written letters and a small written comment
at the end that people who get the green card because of an alien relative
need to bring their spouse.
The list got quickly larger during this visit requesting things such as joint
tax papers and more.
On the last trip I had everything together and showed the tax papers which the
officer collected and tried to file. It was my only copy and I had to chose
between illegal residency or to get the card that day. I took the later. It
was not worth arguing that there was no copy requested. No copy machine was
available to me there either.
Once again being smart and doing more than what is written and thinking what
else may be requested would have helped a lot.
At the end you will have a pink card and a lot of interesting stories to tell:
Like the travel document which had the picture of my wife instead of mine on
it. Or the other guys you meet in the waiting lines during this process like
the one who just came out of jail because of drug dealing...
Urs
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Received on Sun Apr 25 1999 - 11:30:00 PDT
