Waiting for AOS.....some bad news

[AngryTexan]

Came across the following article in today's New York Times concerning waiting periods for green cards, AOS, etc. The Black Hole reprised.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/nyregion/06VISA.html

 

Not sure I did this correctly to create a link, so if anyone knows how to do it, your assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Jim - Portland, USA]

Tex,

 

I tried to read that article, but apparently one must have a valid subscription to the NY Times to read it, which I don't have. Can you be so kind as to break the law and post it here?? Thanks!

 

BTW - when you want to post a web link, hit the blue "http://" button and paste in the actual web address, then hit okay then type in some kind of logical/readable title, then hit okay again.

[bobmal99]

We finally got our AOS stamp on March 23, 2004. Almost five months after our AOS interview

[hypoclear]

wow!! this is scarey and for Bea and I more so as the journalist and his Chinese wife have the same problem.. being ibn the states and pregnant and wanting to return for the birth.

 

And of course the raise in fees to cover Bushes... ideas.. nawww you have to have a brain to have those. his plan.

 

This is certainly worth reading and will just take a few minutes to register and it's free!

 

I think it could become an issue ( in the election) because big business is being hurt by this as well.

 

Mark

[keelec]

Ok,

I put in my name and password (free)

 

Wait for U.S. Residency Soars Over 18-Month Span

By NINA BERNSTEIN

 

Published: April 6, 2004

 

 

abriella A. Barschdorff, a vice president for strategic investment at J. P. Morgan Chase in New York, is not exactly the huddled-masses type. But one rainy day last week, shortly before 7 a.m., she joined the long, bedraggled line of immigrants standing outside 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan. There she took the spot held for her by a young man she had hired to camp out in his sleeping bag.

 

It was all part of a last-ditch bid to get her formal travel document, a paper that, as a legal foreign worker with a pending green card application, she badly needed. If she failed, she would miss a business meeting in London. If she went without the permit, she risked being barred from coming back to America.

 

Ms. Barschdorff, who is Swedish, is one of thousands of skilled foreign professionals working legally in the United States who find themselves virtual prisoners of a ballooning immigration-services backlog. In the last year, the mostly routine paperwork they need to work and travel has slowed to a crawl.

 

Processing times — for everything from renewing an annual work permit to securing permanent legal residency — have as much as quadrupled over the last 18 months, despite the Bush administration's pledge to cut waiting times in half. The wait to replace a lost green card, for instance, has grown to 19 months from four. And the kind of paperwork sought by Ms. Barschdorff — a document allowing her to re-enter the country after a brief trip — now takes seven months instead of two.

 

As a consequence, and despite an infusion of $160 million earmarked for cutting the backlog, the number of pending applications has risen by nearly 60 percent over the last three years, to 6.2 million, according to a recent congressional report. The root cause, officials say, is the post-9/11 reassignment of 1,000 agents who used to issue documents and now do extensive security checks of every applicant instead.

 

The fallout ranges from minor inconveniences to wrenching dilemmas.

 

There is Christopher B. Murray, for example, the manager of nano-scale research for I.B.M., who had to decide whether to rush to his mother's side when his father died in Nova Scotia last week, or battle for an emergency travel document to replace the one that he had applied to renew last year. And there is William Powell, an American journalist for Fortune magazine, and his Chinese wife, Joyce Cui, who spent most of her pregnancy agonizing over whether she should go back to Beijing to give birth near her family. Because she had applied for a green card, she risked being barred from the United States if she left before her travel documents came through; if she stayed, she risked going into labor alone in New York when he was reassigned to China.

 

"The delays in processing some of these cases have clearly been as a result of moving so many of our employees, especially in the service centers, into security checks," said William R. Yates, associate director of operations for Citizenship and Immigration Services, in Homeland Security. "We don't apologize. We have identified a number of persons who represented a threat to the United States."

 

But he added, "Everything else has suffered, unfortunately."

 

Mr. Yates reiterated the commitment to cut the backlog by the end of September 2006. But there is little optimism among many international businesses and institutions struggling with the problem on behalf of 700,000 U.S.-based foreign employees.

 

The new obstacles and delays, business leaders say, are already hurting their ability to recruit and keep the best talent worldwide.

 

"There are key people who are unable to work, unable to close the gaps in their status," said Mr. Murray, adding that his recruitment of foreign researchers at Harvard and M.I.T. had been damaged. "There are family impacts. But if you want to be very cold about it, it puts the U.S. at a serious disadvantage."

 

One reason the backlog has ballooned is that processing delays force employers to file costly multiple petitions just to keep an employee and dependents in legal status, complained Lynn Shotwell, director of the American Council on International Personnel, a Washington organization for 250 corporations and institutions that want to ease the movement of personnel across national borders.

 

The council has protested a Bush administration plan to impose higher processing fees to cover the cost of hiring additional personnel.

 

One of the regional immigration offices most beset with delays is the Vermont Service Center, which handles applications from New York and other Northeastern states. Mr. Yates, the homeland security official, said the office, in St. Albans, stopped issuing travel documents for several months this winter because it ran out of security paper with the department's new logo.

 

The overflow spilled into district offices like 26 Federal Plaza. In theory, after waiting 90 days for a work permit to be renewed by mail, for example, an applicant is entitled to have one issued in person, the same day. But in practice, no more than 100 such permits are given out daily.

 

Such problems played out last week when Ms. Barschdorff, 33, passed through the metal detectors at 26 Federal Plaza. She wanted to renew her annual work permit and to get the document that would let her travel safely to London and back to her 1-year-old American daughter.

 

For her, the last best hope was the young man with the sleeping bag, Kendo McDonald. Mr. McDonald, 28, has worked for a decade as a trusted "runner," shepherding documents and now clients for the international immigration law firm of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy. He has his own measure of how much worse the backlog grew in the last year.

 

"Before I didn't have to do this 3 o'clock in the morning thing," he said, rainwater still dripping from his jacket. "I could come at 8 a.m."

 

After vetting Ms. Barschdorff's documents, and those of two other clients, Mr. McDonald guided them into the netherworld of federal bureaucracy. Ms. Barschdorff would spend the next nine and a half hours there, in a labyrinth of lines and waiting rooms.

 

The two other clients asked that their names not be published, worried that publicity could hurt their pending green card applications. One was a 33-year-old computer scientist at I.B.M. who left India eight years ago to earn a doctorate at the State University of New York at Stonybrook. He said he had risen at 3 a.m. to make it from his home in Mohegan Lake, where his wife and 5-month-old U.S.-born daughter were sleeping. The other man described himself as a "denim consultant" who was born in Zimbabwe but had lived for years in London before moving to New York six years ago to work for the fashion designer Calvin Klein.

 

Together with Ms. Barschdorff, who previously worked at the European Parliament in Brussels and has degrees from Columbia and the London School of Economics, the trio almost typified the mobility of an international class of go-getters whose cosmopolitan careers help make New York a global hub of finance, science and design. Both men were being sponsored for green cards by employers as "aliens of extraordinary ability" — a phrase "that makes people think of E.T.," Ms. Barschdorff joked. But without the work permit renewals they needed, they could be left without a paycheck.

 

Mr. McDonald warned Ms. Barschdorff that her goal of renewing two documents at once might be impossible. The waiting room for one was on the eighth floor, the other on the ninth.

 

There are plans for every waiting room to adopt a number system like the one used by busy New York delis, Mr. McDonald said, but for now, after turning in papers to one of the window agents, applicants just have to wait until they are summoned by name. The typical wait is four to six hours, he said. And if Ms. Barschdorff ran up and down between waiting rooms, she would risk missing one or both calls.

 

It was Mr. McDonald who helped her manage the juggling act, and smooth the way when her paperwork seemed deficient. J. P. Morgan was paying $1,500 for the law firm's work to renew Ms. Barschdorff's employment authorization card alone, she said.

 

Many in the room were fending for themselves. The line that snaked through the ninth-floor waiting room included a Polish construction worker, a Nigerian nurse, and a turbaned chef from India. Only the chef, Manjit Singh, 42, would give his name after explaining that his boss was sponsoring him because of his skill at making curry for a restaurant on Union Turnpike in Queens.

 

Some were turned away, but after nearly 10 hours, Ms. Barschdorff emerged triumphant. She had gained both the right to travel and another year's work authorization. Her two companions had their work permits, too. Mr. McDonald was headed back to Queens for a few hours' sleep before doing it all over again.

 

"Even though I absolutely despise this bureaucracy," Ms. Barschdorff said, "at the end of the day you can come to America."

 

[keelec]

You know, I wonder if the US Government could actually be a bit more efficient with some things.

 

For example,

 

An Exhaustive background check was performed less than 3 months earlier for the K1/K3 visa.... Does it really have to be repeated?

 

Hmmm, why apply for both K3 and I-130.... Double the paperwork, if the I-130 could be more efficient, there would be no need for the K3?????

 

And, if everyone got their AOS processed in 1-2 months, there would be no need to apply for both AOS and AP concurrently.

 

And, of course, having a good online application system would likely save the US Government several million dollars every year....

 

Couldn't they dump a few hundred thousand into developing it.... Oops, this is our government.... Can't possibly spend less than a million on anything.... Want a million dollar hammer?

 

Well, I guess efficiency would be too much to expect from our government.

 

----- Clifford ------

[se_lang]

One of the regional immigration offices most beset with delays is the Vermont Service Center, which handles applications from New York and other Northeastern states.

 

Give me a break that is the fastest service center. Maybe the writer should have gone to NSC or TSC.

[keelec]

One of the regional immigration offices most beset with delays is the Vermont Service Center, which handles applications from New York and other Northeastern states.

 

Give me a break that is the fastest service center. Maybe the writer should have gone to NSC or TSC.

It may be that Vermont prioritizes the I-129 & I-130 applications.

Other applications may suffer.

 

According to their website, they are processing the I-485 from Feb 15, 2002 (Employment based). I am still a bit confused about all of the AOS forms and procuedures. I have thought that I would look it up when that time rolls around

 

Of course, what I would like more than anything would be for my finacee to join me in the USA.... I can wait for everything else. Thus a fast K1 and slow AOS would be much better than a slow K1 and fast AOS.

 

Since I am looking at least 1.5 years for my K1 app, I assume the AOS should take less than 5 minutes :D

 

----- Clifford -----

[hypoclear]

One of the regional immigration offices most beset with delays is the Vermont Service Center, which handles applications from New York and other Northeastern states.

 

Give me a break that is the fastest service center. Maybe the writer should have gone to NSC or TSC.

It may be that Vermont prioritizes the I-129 & I-130 applications.

Other applications may suffer.

 

I think that is it Cliff.

 

Coz ours ran thru it pretty quick and the times I called there they were wonderful and very helpful. They wanted her birth cert again, why I don't know coz we sent that in with all the other paper work, and even gave us a fax number for this. "Don't tell anyone."

 

So that must be how it is set up there, later on in the article it explains they stopped handing out the docs coz they ran out of paper!??? huh?? My wife deals with the printing industry over here and even as slow and some times disorganized as they can be. Even without knowing the language they could turn a print job around in 3 or 4 days!

 

Now if you are in the toilet and run out of paper.. you are out of a**wipe or you ARE an A**wipe.... lets see them government spin docs spin this one!! hehe

 

Mark and Bea

[Mike and Ying]

Phoenix AOS 1-485, Now Processing Cases with Receipt Notice Date of: April 30, 2001

 

Ying is here so the wait is not a major thing

[Mick]

We finally got our AOS stamp on March 23, 2004.  Almost five months after our AOS interview

Congrats, Bob and Lili. The card should arrive in a few weeks. I know it has been a long wait for you, but would trade places in a heartbeat. You guys ripped through the process in the midst of the black hole and got stuck behind the AOS 8-ball. We got derailed at every turn and finally made it out the chute after 17 months and made it from AOS filing to green card in about 5 months.

 

Anyway, I'm happy to hear that things finally moved for you. I know that Lili was very frustrated with the delay. Best to you both!

Congrats to Bob and Li. Best wishes for the future. Now, if only Atlanta could get moving.....