hugazebra

Not sure "most stable" property prices is anything to crow about. Parents bought a house 40 years ago and yes, the price is very stable, to the point it's only appreciated 100% over 40 years. Then again, that's what you get for buying in cheap places like Irondequoit.

Given that your interview is Jan 2011, your window to submit the amendment with W-7 request for ITIN is pretty tight. As part of the ITIN application, you will need to provide notarized or certified copy of wife's proof of identity and foreign status. If you are in China with her, make an appointment with nearest US consulate to make a certified copy of her passport for USD$50. Otherwise she needs to go to a Chinese notary - and then you will have to submit that to your state secretary for notarization/certification in the US, all of which takes time. If you are a frequent traveller to US, you can bring your wife's original documentation to an IRS TAC office to get them back same day. Don't worry about 2010 returns - those aren't due until April 15th 2011 for precisely the reasons you outlined. If you have a strong case, i.e. lived in China with your wife for past year, my personal opinion is not to worry about the tax return. If not, and you are worried about a white slip and are willing to wait, you might consider delaying the interview another couple of months until you have the tax return sorted out, and possibly even have the 2010 returns ready in hand as well.

Thanks for the Xray advice. Friend finally found a company willing to ship it unopened. We received the visa and entry packet this past weekend as according to original timeline. To our surprise, they gave us six months from the latest medical exam date to enter the US. On the call-in letter, the security advisory background check expiration date was four months (2010-Oct-13 to 2011-Feb-13), so fortunately that background check is not the limiting factor in visa expiration. Now comes the final and toughest part - getting the wife to actually let go of the job and friends in China to start over again from scratch... It was easy enough to talk about when it was just a future possibility, but much more angst provoking when it's time to execute.

My turn to announce some good news. While in Guangzhou last week during the Thanksgiving week call-in mess, I had my wife go to a Guangzhou notary to designate a close personal friend to handle the call-in. The notary seemed familiar with this type of letter and had a template document all ready to go. I figured 200rmb was cheap enough to give this a try, and worst case was another flight down to GUZ. The notarized letter was available for pickup this past Monday so our friend promptly took it to the consulate along with call-in letter, new medical exam, and her passport. The consulate promptly gave a pink slip and sent our friend to the EMS desk. Hopefully another couple of days and we'll see what visa expiration date will be. Our next problem is how to get the medical exam X-ray tube back up to Shanghai. None of the kuaidi delivery services were willing to ship it unless they could open it up and inspect the contents. Of course, breaking the seal on the tube invalidates the contents for US customs purposes, so we'll have to wait for someone to bring it via plane.

After looking at the PM10 time series, I think "crazy bad" is still an understatement... AMFIC air quality Anyhow, it's good reason to start smoking heavily. The air coming in through the cigarettes would be much cleaner than trying to breathe the air directly. I gave up on China after five years because I finally developed asthma and started getting fluid in the lungs and coughing like crazy if anyone within a 10m radius lit up... (and that was at Shanghai pollution levels - equivalent only to a C. on the C.R.A.Z.Y. pollution scale)

Nope, didn't find out about this ahead of time... wife physically went to Guangzhou and came back today. That's two people on this board screwed over on the same day.

!^$@^%$#%(!#$^&!)#!*!$#@*!@)%@%#@ I'm ready to fly to Guangzhou and start throwing bricks at the 5th floor window. My wife blew USD $200 on airplane tix to Guangzhou and took days off from work and then found out they decided to do renovations this week. And of course, the website shows they JUST posted this last Wednesday, well after travel plans had been made... Weeklong renovations just don't happen on a dime. A lot of planning goes into renovations of any US consulate, so this is just sheer incompetence on the part of Guangzhou management. This is no longer borderline insane, this is just pure lunacy. Too bad immigration and border security are pretty much unaccountable to nigh anyone. On the plus side, at least the health clinic at Shamian island let my wife get a new medical exam done even though the old one wasn't expired. Just another case of ask enough times and you will get the answer you want...

So now that ACH is cancelled, how do we get straight answers from the GUZ consulate? Every time I've used that infernal web email form, I get a reply back the next day that there is no way they can verify that my email address is tied to the case in question. Darned right there's no way - my case is so old that the NVC forms I used didn't have form fields for email addresses yet. It's not clear whether the new update language now also excludes physical mail and FAXes to their office... BIOTECHS

If you got no income, use somebody elses income :-) I had to get a family memeber who made a respectable salary to come to my rescue with a joint affidavit of support (I-864), and that took care of the unemployed with no income part. Can't help you with overcoming ex's though...

Well, if you happen to be in HK, see if you can find a cheap trebuchet operator to fling you over the border. That counts as travel by air, no? I pick the times nobody else wants to travel. i.e. UA Rochester, NY -> Shanghai Depart 11/24, return 12/3 Price $838 + taxes Of course, if you live in San Francisco, you get screwed for an extra $300 or so. General tips are to plan for at least a 6 day stay, try to travel on Mon-Thur. And of course, Xmas season will be sky high, but sometimes you can find cheap fares towards last minute, especially if you are travelling on 12/25. Good luck

Missing Thanksgiving with the family and haveing to cancel a planned wedding can't be fun. However, assuming your fiance arrives in US before year end, couldn't you just have a civil wedding registration without the ceremony and stuff? It means having to remember two anniversaries every year for rest of your life, but hey, the things some people do to avoid paying taxes...

1 week is just the time between when consulate sent the call-in letter and when EMS actually got it into my wife's hands. She hasn't made the trip back to the consulate to turn in passport yet, so hopefully next update in a few weeks will be pink slip.

Thanks, that sounds like a sensible explanation. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, so I am eagerly waiting to see what your wife's visa expiration date will be. I am very thankful to have found a "visa buddy" on this forum with such a similar situation and interview date. Fortunately, I've banked up a few frequent flier miles over the years, so if she gets a close-in expiration visa, worst case is to bring her to US for a weekend in early Jan...

The Health Center does things according to the directives established by the consulate. Why would you want to do things differently? No one at the POE will be able to accept it - everything must be in the sealed envelope given to you by the consulate. Well, the idea is that since we haven't gone back in to actually get the visa and have not received the sealed envelope yet, that we can submit a new health exam prior to executing the callback visit. Then they can just dump the new health exam in the sealed envelope for the POE, and issue a visa with longer validity. May have to just solve the problem by waiting until last month of medical report validity to force the consulate to issue a new letter requiring updated health exam and then do health exam and revisit consulate a day later to submit results. Don't like cutting it that close, but oh well. It would be nice if we could just frontload things like you can with the NVC step.

Just wanted to add a note about security background check expiration dates for the benefit of any future applicants traveling the same path. Our IR1 call-in letter was dated 2010-Oct-14, and the listed document expirations included medical report, police report, and background report. The medical report had a 6-month expiration, the police report had a 1-year expiration, and the background check expires on 2010-Feb-13. Without knowing the internal processing timeline, I cannot hazard a guess as to what determines the background check expiration date, but since we hope to travel 7 days after Chinese New Year, this will come down to the wire. Probably leave 2 days spare just in case the airplane spits out an engine disc and we have to turn around mid-flight :-)