A 5,000 Mile Love Affair - Part Two

So we meet Foofer in this lovely Thai restaurant on Rainbow Blvd.

Siege says "Happy Birthday, I've bought you a present..." and then points to me, "...A new friend".

"Ooooh," flirts Foof, "can I take him home with me?" (Which surprised her as this isn't how she usually acts around strangers).

Me? I was taken by her eyes. She's a good-looking lady but those eyes are awesome.

"Nope," I thought to myself, "we live 5,000 miles apart, there's no way that I can fall in love with this girl," which is a strange thing to think when you first meet someone. I don't normally evaluate whether or not it's suitable to fall in love with people I've just met, especially when I know nothing about them.

Correction

The picture used in the previous entry was supposed to display romance.

I now notice that there are three prairie dogs in the picture, not two.

Our story isn't going to wander into tales of threesomes. Sorry.

A 5,000 Mile Love Affair - Part One

Considering that we're coming up to St. Valentine's Day (and we're basically treading water until the NOA2) I thought that maybe a little background was in order.

So what do you already know?
We're married, one of us is American, the other English.

So, as this is a week for romance (if you have any brains guys, every week is a week for romance), I thought that I'd share an edited history of "Foofer & Vlad - A 5,000 Mile Love Affair" with you...

I'm an Englishman, aged forty-two, who happens to have a number of friends in the USA. Most of these friends are based in and around Las Vegas and most of them are in the entertainment business. As I only really knew them via the internet, I flew out in 2007 to meet them in person. I had what was (up until then) the best time of my life and vowed to return the next year.

My friends Siege and JazzDemon offered to let me crash at their place, an offer I happily accepted and I flew out to stay with them for two weeks in April 2008. Once I had gotten used to the time difference we had a great time going to shows and doing touristy stuff. Unfortunately I got food poisoning that knocked me off my feet for a few days - I was left dehydrated, woozy and as weak as a kitten.

I only just felt well enough to go with Siege when she went to have dinner with her friend "Foofer" [note - I found out later that Siege had postponed the dinner date to wait until I was well enough to attend - sneaky move] to celebrate Foofer's birthday a few days before...

It's quiet . . too quiet

Yes it's been quiet. We knew that this would be the longest, (and hopefully the) most frustrating part of the process. The period between NOA1 and NOA2 seems to be the longest period of inaction in the entire CR-1 journey. Foofer has been ill for the past few days and is only just getting her voice back, so contact over the weekend was minimal.

Still, I'm going over to see her in less than sixty days for a quick visit so that keeps me cheerful. I've decided, as I explained how I'm calculating the expected processing date in the previous post, to add "estimated NOA2 date" to the timeline to the right - I'll keep it updated whenever I can. Hopefully it'll keep getting closer (and I mean a lot faster than "one day closer every day").

Update (the times they are a changin')

Okay, here's a quick update of where we are. We're still waiting for the I-130 to be processed by the CSC. Fortunately visajourney.com has good news here, over on the right, under the line "I-130 for IR1/CR1 & K-3 visas" is the date of the I-130s that the CSC are currently processing (go see, I'll wait). This date is currently quite a way into the past (i.e. there is a backlog) but is skipping forward at an impressive rate. If you take the number of days between that date and today you have the current waiting time. Add that onto your NOA1 date and you have a pretty good idea of when your I-130 will be processed.

Or you would if the CSC weren't clearing the backlog so fast :-)

So I'm keeping myself busy, watching that figure change daily, getting closer and closer...

As for my choice of POE, as I've stated before I have two candidates: Las Vegas or Dublin.

• Las Vegas because that's where I'm heading, it's where Foofer is and it's where I'll apply to have my green card extended and, eventually, where I'll apply for citizenship. If I give them my paperwork there, not only will my paperwork already be in the right place but I can also step straight out of immigration/customs into my wife's arms and not worry about making a connecting flight.
• Dublin because the immigration part is done in Dublin (customs is still done in the US) so I can get everything sorted before the flight takes off. This makes catching a connection in Chicago or New York a lot easier too.
  

I've got plenty of time to make my decision but happily, looking at visajourney, it's not as much time as I thought I had...

The best border?

This cool picture of the US border doesn't really have anything to do with this post. I was just looking at POE reviews on visajourney, trying to decide where to enter the US on my "one-way" flight to the US (yes, yes I'm still getting ahead of myself). They don't have any reviews for Vegas so I checked out the others.

POE stands for Port of Entry and it's where you officially enter the United States. My POE will be an airport and not a dusty road in California, Arizona or Texas. It's tricky to find the best POE as the reviews are mixed, though I do like the idea of entering via Dublin and having the immigration done at Dublin (yes, US immigration happens at Dublin - isn't that excellent?)

As to when I'll be entering the US, there's good news: The CSC are processing I-130s at an incredible rate - racing through the backlog. They seem to be processing a week's worth of I-130s in three working days. This is encouraging.

Word Cloud for January

How big the I-130 is in our lives!

Counting my Chickens

This is a disgustingly self indulgent exercise but, please, humour me.

I've been considering my "one way" flight to the US, many many months from now.

Manchester (my airport of choice) will stop doing direct flights to Las Vegas (my airport of Foof) at the end of April. BMI have decided that their flights (which rarely have an empty seat on them) are not profitable enough.

This leaves me with a slight conundrum: How do I get to Las Vegas on that fantastic final flight?

I'll be carrying my visa plus other assorted documents (I hear an A3 sized x-ray of my chest may be part of the package) to hand to the lucky people at immigration. So, as I'll have to fly via somewhere, which airport do I choose to enter "The land of the free"?

I've been warned against Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia*, so I was considering New York (as it used to be the tradition to arrive there a century ago). The only thing concerning me was the connection time. The US is notorious for immigration delays for Visa Waiver folk so what would happen to a proper immigrant? Would a three-hour stopover be enough?

So I decided that I might want to travel to a UK airport that flies directly to Las Vegas. I found that Virgin Atlantic flies from London Gatwick every day. Yay!

Knowing my interview date well in advance could work to my advantage. As I'd be travelling a week or two after my interview, booking a train ticket early enough and I could get to Gatwick for £10. A hotel would cost me £50. Depending on the time of year I could get a good deal on the actual ticket too.

Of course, this is all far far in the future, but it's nice to think about it.


*Note - These are probably very lovely POE (Ports Of Entry) but bad experiences from friends and acquaintances have given then a nightmarish quality in my imagination. Sorry guys.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Some small changes to the site.

Added some useful links (two so far) and an "about us" section.

Enjoy!

About time too!

The Cheque was cashed yesterday.

Yay!!

NOA1

YAY

We have an NOA1!!!!
It's from the CSC.

(The cheque has NOT been cashed yet)

Checking

The first clue that your case is progressing (the second being the NOA1), is that the cheque you lovingly paper-clip to your I-130 gets cashed. Your case number should be written on the back of it. As we have had a three-day weekend and an inauguration since our paperwork was received at Chicago, this seems to be taking a little longer than I'd calculated. Gah!!

Also, the date of the NOA1 will be important to us as visajourney.com holds information here (on the right hand side) as to what is being currently processed. As you can see, things do not look that good at the moment. (We will (probably) be a CR-1 at the CSC (California Service Center))

Averages...

I can't recommend the website visajourney.com enough, we've linked to it a few times before in this blog but I wanted to point out what a great resource it is. There you'll find advice, useful checklists and even shortcuts. One of the things that you get drawn to are the timelines.

• Out of 483 "CR-1"s, the average time to get an interview is 400 days.
• The average number of days to get your NOA1 is 37 days
• The average processing time between the NOA1 and NOA2 is 135 days
• The average time between your NOA2 and your interview is 208 days
  (as of the 23rd of January 2009)
  

Pretty grim reading at first, but I decided to try to look on the sunny side.

These stats are for the last few years, for both the Vermont and California centres and include all attempts at visas - the ones where the forms were botched, the ones where people have "special circumstances", the ones that got lost in the mail etc...

They have a huge amount of data that you can just wander through: I looked at all of the people processed via California who are having CR-1 interviews next month - the numbers vary (with no obvious correlation to country) from a 493 day process (from I-130 to interview) down to a less scary 233 days.

None were from the UK so I checked out my fellow Brits. The most recent wait times were: 363, 157, 281, 388, 252, 193, 201, 425, 489 and 342 days from posting the I-130 to getting an interview. The ones in italics have yet to receive a visa. The average of the other eight is 309 days (which would put my interview twelve days after Bonfire Night). Of course, checking the facts behind the numbers show that one of these applications was lost for four and a half months so, hopefully, my interview will be sooner.

Of course, playing with numbers on this site only gives you a rough idea of what's in store - and we have no real idea what's going to happen in our particular case but looking at these numbers makes me feel like I'm doing something and not just sitting waiting...

Processing Aliens Faster, Better?

While we're on the subject of improving US immigration (and, yes, I'll be trying not to use the word "maybe" as much as in my previous post), workpermit.com has an article which indicates that Mr. Obama's reforms may not be such an uphill struggle (which is good news as he will be watched closely on this subject).

In the final year of the Bush administration, a record one million Americans were naturalised. If you also take into consideration that the USCIS is clearing its backlog of cases at an impressive rate (from 3.6 million cases in 2004 to 1.1 million last November (and, they say, 0 by October 2009)), maybe the new guy's job won't be quite so tough in this area at least.

Hope

Now that there's a new administration in power, maybe the long, daunting task of joining a loved one in the United States will be made shorter and easier...

On the new White House website is a page about immigration that includes the following line:

Improve Our Immigration System: Fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill.

Maybe this will help my wife and I or maybe we'll be the last to trawl through this current, frustrating, procedure. I'm just glad that someone in Washington is concerned about the thousands of people who have to live apart from their loved ones for months (maybe even years in some cases), kept apart by large amounts of paperwork and small numbers of immigration workers. Maybe I'm being naive, maybe I'm wrong - but for now I'm happy to hope...

Checks, balances and waits

Of course, as this was a long weekend in the US, Foof has been unable to check whether the cheque she sent to Chicago has been cashed yet. And I doubt that much will happen today as Mr. Obama is being sworn in - I guess that a lot of public servants will be glued to their televisions.

So is this a mini-taste of the frustrations to come? Probably. So I'll give you something pretty to look at while we're waiting: a cartoon from Reason Magazine about legal ways to become a US citizen. This was meant (I guess) to show why so many people try to get into the US illegally. Enjoy!

Should it Stay or Should it Go?

One of the nicer things about the whole process of moving to the United States is that I'm allowed to bring in my personal belongings, duty and tax free. Of course it's not that easy, it never is.

There is, as always, paperwork and everything has to be accounted for. Fortunately there are many removal companies who are experienced in this.

Still, I have managed to collect a huge amount of junk in my many many years on the planet, a fair amount of which are at my parents' old house. I have started to sort through it but am staggered at the sheer amount of stuff I'd like to keep. Foof's place in the States isn't big enough for her belonging so, even if I find a good job and we get a bigger place, merging our possessions will (in the short term at least) be impossible.

I have got to be (fairly) brutal with my selection - Though, hopefully, I can put some (most?) of my things into storage once they reach the US. The duty-free time period lasts from six-months before I travel to one year after so I have plenty of time (though I guess it will seem to run out quite quickly, especially because I don't know my arrival date yet...).

ACROvation

I thought I'd take a little break here, grab a soda (see, I'm picking up the lingo already), and address something that's caught my attention.

We know that the main I-130 processing may take a long time but we're trying to be patient and prepare for what's to come.

Most things can be prepared in advance and there are various certificates to get ready for the upcoming forms but at least one is only valid for six months.

This is the "Police Certificate". As this is are a paper certificate to state that you have no criminal record it is, by definition, out of date the moment it's issued. In other countries, this doesn't seem to be an issue - in the UK, surprise surprise, it's different. This quote from the ACRO (ACPO* Criminal Records Office) form itself makes a great point: "Embassies or High Commissions will usually require you to produce a Police Certificate, which has been issued less than six (6) months before your visa interview."

This is actually quite tricky. The average waiting time for the interview (in London) from the moment you get your NOA2 (The second Notice of Approval that your I-130 generates) is currently 200 days (according to this site). But I have to send the police certificate to the NVC (National Visa Center (in the US)) as evidence with my DS-230 form. This means that my certificate stands a chance of being out of date by the time I go for my interview.

Which is why I can't get one now - I'm just going to have to play a waiting game...

(as they're only £35 I really don't mind shelling out for a second one just before the interview if that's all that's needed to get me to my wife...)



*Yes, the "A" in ACRO is, itself, an acronym. It stands for the "Association of Chief Police Officers". I know, I know...

The Windy City

The I-130 has arrived at the USCIS in Chicago.

YAY!!!

I feel a timer coming on.

Yes, yes it's totally unfair to do that, I know - but I'm gonna do it anyway...
(I updated the timeline too)

Timeline

So the timeline has now appeared on the right of the page. I'd like to say that it will grow pretty quickly but I'm more realistic than that. This may take a ridiculously long time.

Fortunately my wife is worth waiting for. (And I'll be seeing her in the spring, anyway)

Dates will be whatever they say on various documents, receipts, appointments. I'm not going to get anal about global time differences.

Speaking of which - Note that the times on this page are all US Pacific times. Just in case you thought that I was keeping really wacky hours in the UK (or doing this at work).

Oh, and I'll arrange a timer once the USPS has confirmed that the I-130 is in the hands of the USCIS