Thanks all...
"Free at last, free at last,
Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last.
The very time I thought I was lost,
Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last;
My dungeon shook and my chains fell off,
Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last,
This is religion, I do know,
Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last;
For I never felt such a love before,
Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last."
- Dr. Martin Luther King
Hey folks,
Thanks for your good wishes. The long winding road towards permanent residency finally ends for my wife and me.
It's definitely been an arduous and frustrating journey to get here, but the rewards are rich and reaching the end zone is very gratifying. I’d really like to thank everyone for their support through the days of sheer exasperation and despair and special thanks to the folks hosting this invaluable forum. Mr. Khanna, thank you sir.
My journey in the United States started in the mid 1990s. I was in my late teens and came over for school. In a lot of ways, I grew up here in New Hampshire, where I did my Bachelors and subsequently my Masters. I met my wife at work in 1999 and we’ve been together since 2001, and got married in 2003. She came over for school in the mid 1990s from Japan. Both of us were on H1-B. My first labor was filed in 1999, but in 2000, the company split into four entities, thereby requiring a re-file of the labor. Then came an SEC investigation and the company put a moratorium on all green card filings, including the one for my wife (who wasn’t my wife at the time). Finally when they re-filed for me, the travesty of September 11th happened, and that made the organization reinstitute the immigration sponsorship ban. We coasted along for a couple of years and they finally filed again in 2003, only to see me get laid off in 2004 as the company shrank from 8000 employees to about 1500.
Two days later I was at a new job with a new sponsoring organization. However, this organization was a large consulting firm, and despite them telling me that I was filed under EB2, I found out a year later that they had filed me under EB3 (backlogged severely at the time). They wouldn’t relent to converting my application to PERM either, so I had no choice but to leave them in the summer of 2005 and join the organization which finally got me to the green card. My labor was approved via PERM in a couple of months, but then retrogression struck for EB2 India.
Then I happened to stumble upon the cross-chargeability rule, wherein, we can charge our visas to the spouse’s country of birth. Since this was relatively unchartered territory, it took a good amount of time convincing my employer and the attorneys that cross-chargeability is legit and we can file AOS based on EB2-ROW. So, four months after the labor approval, they finally filed AOS, only to have the VSC return the packet since the mailroom ignored the cross-chargeability part. The applications were sent again and accepted where they sat since March of 2006. Then came the FBI Name Check blackhole, where my wife was done in three weeks, but I was stuck for 16 months. In early 2007, I took the proactive route and sent letters to everyone from my congresswoman to the Senator to the First Lady and most recently the USCIS Ombudsman.
Finally after a lot of coordination with my wonderful congresswoman’s staff and the senator’s staff, I got the approval emails today. After a dozen years in this wonderful country and this fantastic state. God bless all of you who are awaiting your approvals and my best wishes. I’ve been fortunate enough to gain some experience and knowledge in these forums, and try and help within the best of my abilities. Please feel free to drop me a note if anyone has any specific questions, but all in all, I don’t plan on leaving these forums anytime soon.
