Immigration into the USA, Complicated Road!
Okay well if you have managed to read a bit about me. you will know I am Canadian who has lived in the USA and is now in the UK. Well while in the USA I was there under a work Visa with my employer, I technically still have the Visa as I am still with the same employer, but now in the UK, at any rate while under that Visa my Employer began the process for the famous Green Card, or as it is also known Permanent Residency. Since this was being done through my employer there was quite a lot of work involved, and they actually have dedicated immigration Lawyers to handle this, although if you have a decent understanding of the English Language the paperwork is not all that complicated. the longest part right now is the waiting, at this point I have just received my new Advance Parole Documents which allow me to leave the country while my Application is being processed. This can take a while as we had to wait until the applications got to the processing stage, during that time we had to renew my Visa as it was about to expire and I had not had my Application processed, so just after we renewed The USCIS announced that they would process all applications received prior to July 2nd 2007. We just got in on the deadline but then there is the issue of waiting for an available Visa number. Which at this point in time is still the case, They had ran out of Visa number for 2008 and we are now waiting to see what happens for 2009, They issue a visa Bulletin almost every month which updates the status as of the last one I received they are up to 01 May 2005, and that has been like that since December of 2008. Still trying to figure out how they get the dates as depending on what your referring to they use different dates for the same process. The good thing out of all of this is that as long as the application is government limbo I am eligible to get advance parole documents and eligible to work with work authorization documents. The upside to this as opposed to being on a visa, is I am eligible to work for anyone not just my current employer that the visa was issued for. So right now it is just a waiting game to see when I can get my application processed to get the coveted Green card.
As a side note I am also working on getting my Italian Citizenship since my Wife is Italian as well. I can talk about that in another post as it is a complicated process as well.
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