Da Niao

Trying to find some light in the darkness of conflicting instructions concerning civil surgeons and Form I-693, I called the USCIS Form Completion Help Desk twice. The first time, the agent said she would have to connect me to the next higher echelon of support, but that the computer connection was down, and would I please try again a few hours later. The next time I called, the agent who answered didn't know anything about a higher echelon of support, but he also could not resolve the conflicting instructions, so he advised me to get an Infopass appointment at the local regional USCIS office and discuss the matter there. The Infopass system worked beautifully for us: it offered several appointments within the next few days, and we picked a suitable one. When we arrived at the Federal Building we discovered that instead of being twenty minutes early, we were ten minutes late, as I had made a mental note of the wrong time. It took us ten more minutes to get through security, get upstairs to the right room, put our appointment slip in the box, and have the box noticed by an agent. Since the SOP is that if you come late, you can lose your place in line and have to make another appointment, we were very relieved when my name was called shortly and I was able to discuss the issues face-to-face with a USCIS agent. The luck of the draw — I talked to an agent who had no idea of the problems with civil surgeons, and the only advice I was able to get was just to go to some civil surgeon and make the best of whatever his interpretation of the requirements might happen to be. Which is what those of us who need the civil surgeon's signature have been doing all along, and what has led to the many threads and stories about the searches for civil surgeons who do not make unnecessary tests and excessive charges. I asked the agent if he would accept my written report about the problems and inconsistencies in the forms and on the USCIS website, to pass it along up the chain of command. He declined to take my report, but handed me a red card designed for USCIS feedback and suggested that I send the report to the address on the card. The USCIS agent I talked to was an agent-in-training, one who staffs a window with a more experienced agent lurking behind him, with whom he exchanges whispered conversations after every question posed by a visitor. So you aren't really speaking directly to a USCIS agent who knows something, you are asking a trainee, who then presents his understanding of what you were asking to an invisible mentor on the other side of a curtain, and then you get the trainee's version of what his colleague tells him. This was very similar to my fiancée's interview in Guangzhou in June, at which the interviewer turned aside repeatedly and exchanged comments and chuckles with another agent sitting nearby. This being the year of the trainee for us, we almost expected to have a trainee civil surgeon interviewing us when we went to a clinic in our area a few days later. Fortunately we encountered a real civil surgeon, one who was fully aware of the impossibility of ever understanding the forms and instructions in their present form, and who said that the best he or any civil surgeon could do was to muddle through in the most plausible way possible, send it in, and hope that it would be accepted without a Request For Evidence. He said that he had had RFE's when he was sure that everything was complete, and that forms had been accepted when he knew that they were not really in accordance with the wording of the instructions. So he wanted to insert the blank pages 2, 3 and 4 of Form I-693 into the sealed envelope, but when I told him that the USCIS website guide said that pages which were not filled out could be omitted, he was willing to try leaving them out. He did not follow the instructions to the civil surgeons which said that a TB skin or blood test must be made, accepting the interpretation that that would be part of a medical examination which was not necessary because she had had the medical examination in Guangzhou. But how can the civil surgeon know what kind of an examination she had in Guangzhou? We had a single sheet of paper to show him, which did not mention a TB test, and showed only a single number as the entire results of blood testing. So the surgeon signed under penalty of perjury that he had performed "this examination", and gave us a sealed envelope which we will send off to the Chicago lockbox later this month. Charge was $66, and would have been $120 if he had performed the entire medical examination. What he had done was to confirm that my fiancée had had three shots, and this is all that the USCIS will really find out upon receiving her Form I-485, since they will have no way of knowing, or finding out whether she ever gets the booster shots due in ten days and next February. Now we have to send in our packet of forms and wait either four months (with interview) or six months (without interview) for that green card, according to current timelines. Assuming the 693 is accepted.

Thanks for mentioning the 485 instructions, Dan. They clearly state that no medical report is needed, and that you may include the vaccination supplement with your Form 485. The Instructions for Form 693 say that you are required to include the vaccination report with the application for AOS. On page five of the form itself it is called the vaccination record. So here are three designations for what is probably (hopefully) the same thing. :-)

Further research on this matter has not shed any light on the situation, it has uncovered further contradictions and unclear language, making it next to impossible for applicants and civil surgeons to understand how to complete form I-693. It is strongly recommended to follow Dan Noblett's advice about having all vaccinations performed in China and recorded on the Form 3025, thus eliminating the requirement to file an I-693.. If you decide to have the vaccinations administered in the USA, it is common knowledge that the shots are cheaper in the local health department than they will be in the private practice office of the civil surgeon. Our local health department gets its vaccines from a company which makes no charge for the vaccine if it is for a non-US-citizen with an income of less than $40,000 per year, making the health department an even better option for us, as long as my fiancée gets the shots before we get married. But neither the health department or the civil surgeon can know which sections of the I-693 must be filled out, because the instructions are contradictory and not even the USCIS knows how to resolve the contradictions. First of all, I present my guide as to how to call the USCIS and speak to an actual person. This guide applies only to questions about forms which are not specific to a particular case, and refers to menu options which are current as of August 2012. As you know, menu options tend to change. 1. Dial the USCIS numer 1-800-375-5283. 2. English-1 Spanish-2 3. filed electronically-1 all others-2 4. Press 0 if you came to the USA as a child and… etc. 5. Now comes the main menu skip options 1,2,3 choose Option 4: Field Office or Application Support Center 6. next item: choose option 2: Application Support center 7. enter your zip code 8. you entered XXXXX, if that is correct, press 1 9. then they give you the address of the local application support center 10. next option: to hear more info about the application support center: yes, press 1 11. next options offered: choose option 6, "other questions", and you will be connected with a human being!! 12. they ask if you have a case pending (say no if you haven't filed yet), they ask another question, and then you are free to talk. 13. I have spoken to three agents so far. They have all been patient and friendly. But they could not resolve the contradictions in the forms, instructions and website. The only suggestions I was left with from USCIS were "get an info-pass appointment with the local field office and try to resolve the issue there", or to go to the civil surgeon and see if he is one of those few who are willing to sign that he has performed the medical examination. In the following summary of the contradictions and unclear places in the forms I refer to the Form I-693 dated 10/11/11, the instructions for that form dated 10/11/11 and the fifty-page Customer Service Handbook of the USCIS found at http://www.uscis.gov.../File_Forms.pdf (I had never seen this link until today). In a nutshell, the problems are: 1. The instructions (top of right column, page 4) say that a K-visa applicant for AOS with completed medical exam in China but arriving in the US with incomplete vaccinations is required to have the vaccination report completed by a designated civil surgeon and to submit the vaccination report and page 1 of form I-693 with the application for AOS. 2. Page 4 of the above-linked USCIS Customer Service Handbook states "When you submit your I-485 application, you will need to submit completed Parts 1, 2, and 5 of the Form I-693". If this sentence had just said "Parts 1, 2 and 3", then it would have been in agreement with the form instructions, since page one of the form contains parts 1, 2 and 3. 3. Page 7 of the handbook states: "If you are not required to undergo the entire medical exam, you need to submit only Parts 1 and 2, and either 5 or 6, depending on whether the vaccinations were administered by a local health department or a civil surgeon." 4. But then Page 7 states "Part 6 is only necessary to be completed for individuals who are filing based on refugee status." 5. Form I-693 contains sections designated "Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3". After that comes the Civil Surgeon worksheet on pages 2, 3 and 4, which includes six sections, numbered 1 through 6. Finally, the Vaccination Record on page 5. There is no "Part 4", "Part 5" or "Part 6" on the form. All clear? I searched the USCIS website for information and only got a page referring to the forms and requirements in the year 2008. If my local civil surgeon insists on performing a second medical exam, I shall try to get an appointment at the nearest USCIS office and try to clarify the I-693 problem. Within the next few weeks I shall make a further report on this unsatisfactory situation.

Re: the instructions to form i-693 which state "If you were admitted as a K-1 fiancée...and you received a medical examination prior to admission, then you are not required to have another medical examination..." on the one hand, and the civil surgeons who insist on giving and charging for a second medical examination (with chest x-ray, TB skin test, etc.) on the other hand, these civil surgeons point out that on the form i-693 itself the following wording is still found: "Part 2: Summary of Medical Examination (to be completed by the civil surgeon)" and just below that "I certify under penalty of perjury that ... I performed this examination". They are faced with instructions which state that the exam is not required, but they are expected to certify under penalty of perjury that they have performed the examination. So it is understandable that some may not be willing to ignore the actual meaning of what they are signing. In order to save my fiancée a second exam, chest x-ray, and a TB test with nine months of Isoniazid pills (75% of Asians test positive because of immunizations which they have had in prior years), I plan to seek further clarification about the conflict between the form instructions and the wording of the CS Certificate in Part 3 of the Form i-693.

With my first K-1 in 2008 I got in the visitors line with my fiancée because obviously she was not a US Citizen or resident. After we had waited an hour in the long line (Chicago) an officer approached us, discovered that we were K-1 and put us in a special line in which there was just one K-1 couple ahead of us. This time around, in San Francisco, I approached an officer and asked if there was a similar special line for K-1 visas. He instructed us to wait together in the line for US Citizens and residents, which we gladly did, because it saved us an hour's time. Based on this, I would recommend just lining up with the US Citizens, although I could not guarantee that this is OK in every port. There was no officer at the head of the line directing individuals to particular lines, so lines formed naturally in front of all the open "windows". We noticed that one line had formed behind an aisle in which two officers were checking passports, meaning that that line was moving twice as fast as the other ones. It also meant that we did not hold up anyone behind us because of the longer time needed to process a K-1. The officer opened the sealed envelope, leafed through all of the forms, asked us if we had set a date (we hadn't), stamped the visa, the I-94, and the packet of forms, and sent us on our way. Customs hardly even blinked at us, just waved us through, and we were in and out of the SFO airport in record time. The POE officer writes "K-1" on the I-94 by hand. Check to make sure that that entry is legible. In 2008, our "K-1" was written so sloppily that it looked as if it could have been V-1. Later in AOS we ran into trouble because of the entry. No matter that K-1 was clearly printed on the visa, we were being held up because it looked like V-1 on the I-94. The local office in Cincinnati would not make a change in an official document, and the POE office in Chicago also declined to correct it. I forget how that turned out, but because that marriage failed before completion of AOS, it ceased to be a problem.

We should really never let our SO's read CFL before their interviews. All of the horror stories and instances of arbitrary and idiotic decisions by VOs who got out on the wrong side of the bed would only make them insecure at a time when they should be filled with self-confidence and joy. Waiting for my fiancée to come down from the fifth floor, I gave her no more than a fifty-fifty chance. On the one hand, our paperwork was perfection, every notarization and signature in place, forms not handwritten but photoshopped with all entries in English and Chinese fonts, 187 pages of QQ call logs and IM's, two years of text messages and two kitchen sinks for good measure. My fiancée knew my family details and my life history. There appeared to be no substantive reason for denying the visa. And yet red flags were lurking in the background. I am 70 years old, my fiancée 53. I first met my fiancée in person the day after my divorce from my fourth wife became final. I had only been able to come to China once before the interview week. You can read a lot of warnings about these things on CFL, and yet are they not matters of moral and social judgment which should have no place in a sober legal determination? The line-up in front of the consulate was pure chaos, five signs were meant to indicate five different lines, but none of the signs had "K-1" written on it. We were there 20 minutes early, and the right line turned out to be the one with a few couples of mixed ethnicity. Logical, of course, but it means that in order to find the right line, you have to do a little racial profiling. My fiancée drew a friendly male VO in his fifties, who asked her if any of my family members live in the USA, the reason for my only having been to China once to visit her (she explained why), how many times I had been married before, and the reason for my latest divorce. We had indeed met for the first time the day after my divorce became final, but the dates on the decrees don't show that the separation had occurred two years before that. He didn't look at my passport, the EOR, Intent to Marry, QQ, text messages, or any of the other stuff we had meticulously prepared, but he did look at the folder with eight photos. He also didn't offer her either of the "do not write below this line" forms to sign (GNI-2 and 156K), nor the Chinese certificate of intent to marry. And in the end she didn't even get a pink slip. It was the white pick-up notice with the words "Congratulations! Your visa has been approved." Length of interview: about 4 minutes. We are having the visa sent to the post office catacorner from the hotel Westin (that little one-desk hard-to-find post office in the basement of the Zhongxin Guangchang) because we are pressed for time and are guessing that we will get it sooner there than if we waited for China Post to send it to her hometown. We are greatly relieved, and feel for all those who worked hard to prepare their cases, but in the luck of the draw ended up with consular officers who had chips on their shoulders and delayed their cases unnecessarily. Da Ben Niao

Here we are in GUZ, category K-1, things are going smoothly so far, tomorrow is document turn-in day for us. I went through the whole procedure four years ago, my fiancée sailed through with pink but the marriage didn't work out. Now with a new fiancée we are trying to repeat that pink-slip success, with a red flag or two lurking in the background, but those details will come later. For now an interim report about the medical exam Staying at the Yangs (again), always a good decision, but the full Yang report will come after we have left Guangzhou. The weather here was incredible the first few days, no heavy, unrelenting rains, no typical oppressive heat and humidity. We have hardly needed our umbrellas, and there have even been a few cool breezes. Thanks to the Yangs we were escorted to the new International Travellers facility for medical exams at 59 Huali Road, about a ten minute (and 15 to 20 RMB) ride from the consulate. http://goo.gl/maps/QEWJ. If we had been on our own, I would probably have gone back to Shamian Island and lost a half a day wondering what was going on. The building is just another office building, with no sign of being a hospital or clinic. There is an East entrance and a West entrance (both facing the street). If you go in the west entrance you will be in some kind of government tax advisory agency, so go in the east entrance and take an elevator to the fifth floor. We got there early, before 8 AM, and my fiancée was out by 10 AM, we came back to pick up the report at 3 PM, waited about 30 minutes for that. The cost was 900 RMB and they took four photos. Other instructions and postings have said six photos and seven photos, but yesterday it was just four. The waiting/registration room was peaceful when we got there, with one clerk barking out instructions for getting a number. She was the only one at a counter with places for several agents to process applicants. Over the next hour the room rapidly filled with people, different kinds of visas, surely all of them going to the USA (where else in the world do you need a physical examination to get in?). Although the P4 letter/email said to download the medical forms, it is true that they are generated at the examination registration desk. We brought a set anyway, because in this business, you never know! You do need your appointment invitation letter to take the exam, but they do not stamp it or change it in any way, they just look at it to get the name and GUZ number, so you don't have to bring the same copy of the letter to the consulate later in the week. Dan Noblett's suggestion about getting all the shots there at the medical exam, instead of later at a civil surgeon in the US, is very sensible; however we had reasons which I cannot state here (yet) for postponing her shots until later. By nine o'clock the place is really a madhouse, there are five registrars, a calculating-the-cost cashier and a take-the-money cashier. I could hardly hear the numbers being called (they have illuminated signs showing the next number, but most of them were not working), but my fiancée could hear them. After she registered, she went to a desk at the far right of the room where they gave her a slip to take to the money cashier, who was the last position on the right of the long registration desk. Then she went into a room where she put her purse and upper clothing into a locker and put on a pink gown which identified her as a testee. There were not nearly enough chairs for everyone to sit down, so I went downstairs to find a coffee shop. There is nothing in the building, but at the corner there is a Starbucks, also a few other places to sit and get a bite to eat. By mistake, I ended up with both of our cell phones, so she was unable to call me when she was finished. Since it went so fast, I wasn't expecting her when she came out looking for me, and we lost time finding each other. At ten AM the place was incredibly full and noisy. When we came back to pick up the report at 3, things had calmed down, leading us to suspect that if one arrived for the test in the afternoon (but not later than 2), the whole procedure might be somewhat calmer, because the big mob had come earlier. As I was leaving at 8:30 to go find a place to wait, a man came up to me with a handful of forms and said he needed help. He was a Chinese man, naturalized American citizen and living in the USA for over 20 years. His fiancée was taking the medical exam, her interview will be Friday and they are both divorcees hoping for new happiness together in the land of the round doorknobs. He had been to an immigration lawyer in the USA for advice. Here he stood, with all the forms in his hand. He hadn't started to fill them out yet. They were forms dated 2006, 2009, the old 157, and so forth. I told him I couldn't possibly help him fill out his forms in an hour or two, when it had taken me weeks to prepare my fiancée's packet. But we sat down and plunged into the GNI-2 anyway, just to get him started. I told him he should download new forms (did his lawyer give him those old ones from his archives?), and then I saw his 134, where he had listed his annual income as $10,000. I didn't have the heart to tell him what I really thought of his chances, but I told him that the ten grand did not look so good with no co-sponsor. I wonder who his lawyer was. Well, in Guangzhou, you never know. Maybe she will get pink and my fiancée will be singing the blues in spite of our weeks of preparation. I hope to be able to update this report after the interview, but, pink or blue, we are whirling off to Hong Kong for the weekend. Someday this fall I hope to post a blog with all of my experiences at the US Consulates in China from 2004 to 2012, with three fiancées and some unbelievable consular officers. But being a little superstitious, I won't put anything in writing until my current fiancée has her feet firmly planted on American soil.

Yes, thank you, Dan. I realize that "Do not write below this line" is pretty clear, but in the course of reading dozens of descriptions of what happened at interviews, I don't recall ever having read about those forms being passed under the window glass, having them signed and passing them back again. One curious thing to me is that the appointment letter instructs my fiancee to download the medical forms from the GUZ website (they are included in the list of forms in the K-1 packet), and another place I read that the forms would be provided by the hospital. So we are going to print them out just in case.

Our (her) interview is the 28th, so we are getting down to the wire. The short question: both Forms 156K (Chinese and English) must apparently be signed in the presence of the Consular Officer. Is it correct that these forms will be turned in unsigned the day before the interview, and at the interview the Officer will present both of them to be signed in his presence and countersigned by him? The long question: how to get the visa as soon as possible. A visa picked up at the Guangzhou post office used to be ready in three days. Looking at timelines, there are now a lot of people who wait ten days for their visas, and I am assuming that these are the ones sent by Chinese "express" mail, with which I have had sad experiences in the past. I can understand why one would prefer to wait at home with family and friends instead of waiting in a hotel in Guangzhou, but if speed is a major factor, wouldn't the P.O. pickup in Guangzhou be likely to be the fastest? Da Niao, aka Da Ben Niao

We are also ready to submit to GUZ. Can one submit either the English pages or the Chinese pages of Form OF-169? Or has anyone ever had any problem because they didn't send *both* sets of pages? They want the printed name in Pinyin and also in Chinese characters. But they don't say whether they want the signature to be Pinyin. I would think the Hanzi signature would be sufficient. Thanks for your ideas. Da Niao