Philadelphia Backlog Elimination Center Tracking

it's us

smallriver said:
If you are no paying that much, how come this county is called a rich country?
My dear , it is simply because it is cowards , unorganized nincompoops like us who are too scared to raise their voice in unison, we make the authorities take us for granted and thereby allow them to make them richER.Get it.....
 
Some_GreenCard said:
If you dont have greencard and your son (may in H4 visa) has to go school, is he eligible for any state sponspored scholorships ???
Well , he was offered a $4000 scholarship by a private school but it was going to be even costlier.so he continues in a public school.
At top of that my spouse cannot work for almost 4 years now and believe me, it is excruciating and very testing.
I am the only bread earner in the family and looks like , it'll be like that for a long time till myH1B expires. :(
 
bigbang2001 said:
You should consult a good attorney. There are provisions for children reaching age of 21. There are no clear cut guidelines about when the clock starts. I looked at Fragomen's website and it had a paragraph on this specific issue

This is what it mentioned:

Aging Out" of Minor Children. The general rule for children who are applying for permanent residence as "derivatives" of their parent's application is that they must be granted permanent residence before they reach the age of 21. If they turn 21 before they obtain permanent residence, this is known as "aging out." To remedy the fact that minor children often aged out simply due to the government's lengthy processing backlogs, Congress passed legislation several years ago called the Child Status Protection Act (CSPA). The CSPA includes a rather complicated formula for determining when a child is protected from aging out. However, the CSPA was enacted into law at a time when there were no cut-off dates in any of the employment-based immigrant visa categories, and its formula did not take into account the possibility of such cut-offs. Therefore, individuals with children in danger of aging out should consult with counsel immediately to determine the best course of action.
Well if your child is aging out , your labor needs to be cleared and in order to take advantage of the Act, the visa dates should be available.It is different for children of LPR and citizens.If the visa dates are not available, the child simply ages out as then he is not covered by the Child status protection act.
 
sick_of_waiting said:
I am in a similar situation. I am into my seventh year of H1-B with an expired visa on my passport. Next time I travel to my home country, I will have to apply for a new visa. They are taking on average 4 months to issue visas now. My hope was that as soon as I get my labor approved (EB3 - July 2002) I will get a work permit and advance parole and would be able to travel. But due to this retrogression, it will be at least 7 years before I get my advance parole. This is the extent of absurdity this freakin' immigration system has reached. If the McCain-Kennedy bill does not pass with 290,000 immigrant visas then I will leave the country forever because living like a bounded laborer is not for me.

Where did you read that it is taking 4 months to issue visas now? I know you have to take appointment 3-4 months before going to your home country. But once you go for interview don't they issue visa immediately and you get your passport next day by mail? Issuance of visa does not take 4 months, if you read that somewhere please post the link so we can all be aware of this?
 
Immigrant Wives' Visa Status Keeps Them Out of Workplace

By S. Mitra Kalita
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 3, 2005; Page A01

Some rooms are empty, most walls are bare, but the mantel in Hanuma Samavedam's new Loudoun County home seems conspicuously crowded. There, amid family photos and knickknacks from her native India, sit the academic medals and trophies she racked up in a previous life.

She turns to them often to remember what it was to feel proud, purposeful, independent.

She arrived in the United States in 2001, riding the coattails of her husband's H-1B visa, a guest-worker program for highly skilled professionals like him -- not that Samavedam wasn't. In India, she earned an MBA and worked as a finance manager at an accounting firm. But once she married, U.S. immigration policy put her in a different category: dependent.

For thousands of women like her, the word defines more than visa status. It defines them.

"When I came here, everyone said with my qualifications, I would get a job," Samavedam said. "I had a very good impression of America, that there are equal rights for women. ... It's not that I feel lonely. I feel unnecessary."

While spouses of diplomats and business executives can legally work in the United States, those married to computer programmers and software engineers -- the job descriptions most often associated with the H-1B visas -- cannot. According to the State Department, nearly half a million such visas have been issued in the past four years, while about 300,000 visas have been issued for their dependents.

"Having a trailing spouse in today's day and age is not dealt with," said immigration lawyer Elizabeth Espin Stern of Baker & McKenzie LLP. "We've neglected these individuals and their families. It is an arrogant stance and an insensitive one."

Since the mid-1990s, as the tech industry successfully lobbied Congress to increase the number of professional visas, hundreds of thousands of guest workers have entered the United States, mostly young men from India and China. In what has become an almost formulaic journey in the United States, the workers tend to arrive single and return to their homelands to marry, bringing their wives back to the United States on the H-4 visa issued to dependents.

In Samavedam's case -- in which her horoscope and that of Raghu Donepudi were matched, their family backgrounds compared, and their personalities deemed compatible after a 15-minute conversation -- immigration status never entered discussions.

"That topic never came up. He said he had an active life, that he played golf, cricket," said Samavedam, whose hair parting is streaked with red vermillion powder to show she is married. "When I told him about my life in India, he said here it would also be the same."

Instead, she discovered a world initially confined to their Stamford, Conn., apartment. As Donepudi left at 7 a.m., Samavedam tried to stay asleep so she wouldn't have to face a day "sitting idle," as she describes it. She rattled off how she kept busy: CNN, an afternoon nap, elaborate homemade meals, several immigration Web sites.

Nearly five years later, she lives in a spacious house in a South Riding development, but the routines remain the same. The recent birth of a son, Madhav, helped break the monotony, but Samavedam said her desire to work remains strong. She said she dreams of having her own money and of juggling day care drop-offs with morning meetings.

"Her career has already vegetated for four years," said Donepudi, whose application for a green card is among a backlog of 300,000 cases in the Labor Department. "We're living 50 percent of our full potential."

Some dependent spouses have been able to find employers to sponsor H-1B visas for them. Those work visas allow holders to stay in the country for up to six years, at which point they must return home or have their employers file green card applications. Once they have received green cards, workers and their families can live and work in the United States freely, but getting a green card can take years.

Advocates of more restrictive immigration laws say extending work authorization to dependents would take jobs away from Americans. Christopher S. Bentley, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said that he empathized with the immigrant spouses but that they entered the United States knowing their status would be temporary and dependent.

"It's a choice they made," Bentley said.

Lawyer and immigrant advocate Shivali Shah, who surveyed 70 H-4 visa holders, found that all but one of them would work if they could. And dozens of interviews with respondents revealed high rates of depression, isolation and loneliness. "The H-4 visa is taking some of the brightest women in India and turning them into housewives here," Shah said. "Their lives as professionals would have thrived in India but here, they are just somebody's wife. Not being allowed to work is skewing the power balance of the marriage."

As the co-founder of Kiran, a South Asian women's organization in North Carolina, Shah observed that an unusually high number of battered women seeking help were on dependent visas. Last year, she launched the survey with the hopes of using its results to lobby on their behalf. The dependent women, battered or not, have few advocates, Shah said. Immigration lawyers represent employers or workers, and other organizations tend to rally behind poor, undocumented migrants.

"Your most productive years for work out of college were spent e-mailing all day and collecting recipes from the Internet and waiting for your husband to come home so he can take you grocery shopping," she said.

Some women are so unhappy that they'd rather leave the United States -- and their husbands. After Brazilian native Marselha Goncalves married a Frenchman on an H-1B visa, she felt her world shrink down to the walls of their Arlington apartment. Night after night, Bruno Margerin found his bride on the couch crying. They bickered over stupid things like how much salt she had put in dinner.

To save the marriage, Margerin told his wife -- who had a master's degree in international peace and conflict resolution from American University -- to get as far away from him as she needed to find work.

Goncalves accepted a job this year in Haiti with a division of the United Nations.

"I'd rather be in a place where the two of us can work," she said during a recent visit to Arlington. "The hardest thing for me is to be apart. But here, I don't feel fulfilled. The Food Network cannot be the highlight of my day. We live in a capitalist world, so for you to be recognized, you have to get a paycheck."

Some women work illegally, while others fill their time on Web sites and listservs for dependent spouses, where they can swap recipes and status reports on green card applications. There is even a Yahoo group for dependent spouses in Dallas.

To combat the silence of suburbia that seemed so at odds with the bustling, crowded India she left, Bindu Reddy went to the library and volunteered at a school when she arrived in the United States. Sometimes the former special-education teacher browsed job listings on the Internet, knowing that few schools would sponsor her work permit.

She says she still wonders what would have happened if she had not immigrated. She probably would have opened her own school by now. Her house would probably dwarf the Germantown two-bedroom apartment she
calls home.

Before coming to the United States in 1998, the Reddys lived in London -- where spouses like Bindu are given work permits.

Like Samavedam, Bindu Reddy has been waiting years for her husband to get his green card so she can begin to have choices again. In a region where economists estimate that a family of three needs to earn $47,000 to $62,000 a year to get by, the Reddys, like many U.S. families, would like two incomes to earn money for savings or extras, such as dinners out or DVDs for the boys.

"We feel not for ourselves but for our kids. They ask us, 'Why can't we move?'" said Reddy, who has a master's degree in special education. "My son asks me, 'When are you going to work? I want to go to day care, too.' Sometimes I shout at him for saying that, and I feel bad."

In the case of India, where matchmakers do not hesitate to ask potential mates details about their salaries, skin color, even weight, observers say women's families are getting more inquisitive about immigration status. Because of a robust Indian economy and advances they have made in the workplace, fewer Indian women want to leave to become housewives, said Murugavel Janakiraman, chief executive of BharatMatrimony Group, a global matchmaking service.

"In the late 1990s, the people were more interested in going abroad and wanted a foreign groom. They were not really concerned about whether they could get a job," Janakiraman said in a phone interview from the southern Indian city of Chennai. "Now they prefer to be in India."

Mostly via e-mail, Hanuma Samavedam keeps up with news of former colleagues and the various job opportunities they are finding in India. Some have been promoted two, even three, times since she left. She acknowledged the education her son will get in the United States and the job opportunities for her husband. But she wondered aloud whether her sacrifice is worth it.

"I became a housewife here, but my mind wants to work," she said. "If I get a job today, I will like this country, too."

Source: washingtonpost.com
 
chinglun said:
what is your case number ?

I saw most approved case numbers are P042xx something ..
if you have P043 something , probably need to wait longer like me .

My case number is P-043xx-xxxxx.

Do you know why people with P-042 getting labor approvals?

Thanks.
 
ciril99 said:
My case number is P-043xx-xxxxx.

Do you know why people with P-042 getting labor approvals?

Thanks.

It is PBEC attempt at implementing FIFO ..... 042 is indeed before 043 :)
 
gp111 please help

gp111 said:
Yeah, That Qualifies your LC as EB-2
GP111
Can you give me some advise?My PD was august 2002 RIR,Ca and for some stupid reason,it was sent to PHili BECwho is still trying to process April 2001.Not even one Ca case has been picked up so far since they start from May 2002 probably.
Is there something that I can do since I did not ask to go to stupid Phili BEC in the first place.In the govt website, they list California cases to have moved to Dallas and not Philli.
Please help. :confused:
 
GC_Lover said:
Where did you read that it is taking 4 months to issue visas now? I know you have to take appointment 3-4 months before going to your home country. But once you go for interview don't they issue visa immediately and you get your passport next day by mail? Issuance of visa does not take 4 months, if you read that somewhere please post the link so we can all be aware of this?
Please correct me if I am wrong.But after the 7 yr extn,I believe that you have to apply for a new visa and the new visas cannot be issued for 2005 because they are already over the visa limits for the year 2005.
So after 7 year, you"ll have to wait for another year or so and compete for the small no of visas that can be issued.
I hope I am wrong. :(
 
spicensour - my understanding is ...

spicensour said:
Please correct me if I am wrong.But after the 7 yr extn,I believe that you have to apply for a new visa and the new visas cannot be issued for 2005 because they are already over the visa limits for the year 2005.
So after 7 year, you"ll have to wait for another year or so and compete for the small no of visas that can be issued.
I hope I am wrong. :(

Please consult your company HR/Attorney on this matter. I believe entensions do not count towards any CAP.

Yes, the candidate needs to apply (and continue to apply/get approved till the decision is made on GC - to be on safe side, of course they can use AC21 clauses and switch employers after six months of pending 485 or something like that) for new H1-B petition this is not the same as VISA. VISA is for traveling out/in to any country.

mdlbr20020531
 
not in Islamabad...there you send your passport and documents via FedEx in Pakistan and they give you an interview date (for biometrics etc.) and after that your name goes for a security check which takes several months. I have personally heard of people there who have been stuck there for months just to get a visa stamped on their passports...I don't know about India or EU but that is the way it is in Islamabad...don't they refer people to the consulates in their home countries if a consulate in for instance in EU is approached?

GC_Lover said:
Where did you read that it is taking 4 months to issue visas now? I know you have to take appointment 3-4 months before going to your home country. But once you go for interview don't they issue visa immediately and you get your passport next day by mail? Issuance of visa does not take 4 months, if you read that somewhere please post the link so we can all be aware of this?
 
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45 days letter

Hi

I got 45 days letter from PBEC, but there is not PD there is no mention of which state did they got it from.


How can I know that, this 45 days letter is in response to which state application?


Thanks
Sandeep Sahai
 
Your information is wrong. There are folks in this forum with 8th, 9th year even 10th year extensions and you don't need a new visa for your extension. You can check with your lawyer or browse thru' DOL websites to get your info.

spicensour said:
Please correct me if I am wrong.But after the 7 yr extn,I believe that you have to apply for a new visa and the new visas cannot be issued for 2005 because they are already over the visa limits for the year 2005.
So after 7 year, you"ll have to wait for another year or so and compete for the small no of visas that can be issued.
I hope I am wrong. :(
 
mdlbr20020531 said:
Please consult your company HR/Attorney on this matter. I believe entensions do not count towards any CAP.

Yes, the candidate needs to apply (and continue to apply/get approved till the decision is made on GC - to be on safe side, of course they can use AC21 clauses and switch employers after six months of pending 485 or something like that) for new H1-B petition this is not the same as VISA. VISA is for traveling out/in to any country.

mdlbr20020531
So what you are saying if a case successfully goes through the labour certification (say in about next 6 months)but 140 is still pending and the 485 can not be applied for(since the visa dates are not available), the person can be granted any # of extensions.
 
How to reply 45 days letter

Hi

Is there any list or documents which states how to reply 45 days letter?

Thanks
 
I-140 & I-485

Hi Guys.

When LC approved. If the VISA number is available, people can file I-140 & I-485 at the same time. No doubt about this.

But because there is no VISA number, people will have to file I-140 first. But before the I-140 gets approved, which may need to go through another backlog reduction center and take 10 years, can we file I-485 if the VISA number becomes available?

By logic, it should be OK, since they can file at the same time. But since we are not in a place that people use normal logic, we need to find it out.

Appreciate if you can give me some insight on this ...

Thanks

Stupid Guy in USA
PD = Sept/2001 from MD
RIR. EB2. Status = RIR at this time.
 
45 day letter

ssahai said:
Hi

Is there any list or documents which states how to reply 45 days letter?

Thanks

You should receive a page which indicates whether you wish to continue with the process or not. Also, you will get a correction list which indicates the things that they need before they can process. Please consult your lawyer. I suspect you only get pieces of 45 day letter. :rolleyes:

aycy
NJ PD June 2002
EB2 RIR
45 day letter received September 12'05
 
Now Is The Time To Act!

Everybody!
I have been a mere visitor to this forum for a while now withouth actively contributing. I have read a lot of the postings on this forum and sympathize with each one of you, especially since I am in the same boat [ NJ, RIR, EB2, PD 08/03].
While writing letters and raising the awareness level of these issues is a good thing. It is nevertheless an incomplete effort. Now is the time to take some concrete actions. We cannot afford to sit and hope that somebody listens to us and pray that they do more than just listen. WE NEED to ACT, and in a manner that gets things accomplished in this country. Here are my suggestions:

(a) Form a lobbying / non-profit group. Write out a charter and get the entity registered.
(b) RAISE MONEY ! Its amazing what money can do for you and just how many ears you can buy. They say that there are about 300,000 cases in backlog. If you get $20 from each such applicant, you are talking about $6 million. And this does not include additional contirbution from companys and gererous individuals who have been through the process.
(c) Get some high level attorney, individuals, and business leaders to sit on this committee. There are tons of active citizens who sympathize with our plight.
(d) Get out a website ---> the 100s of IT professionals here will be more than happy to contribute pro bono.
(e) Hire a lobbying firm in washington DC. $6 million will get you a long way.
(f) And please do everything according to the rule of law. Since we are all tax payers here, I beleive we are allowed to contribute to such casues.

I strongly believe that a heavily funded organization will help get us that extra reach.

Get the word out !
 
extension

You are piecing together multiple information and confusing yourself and others here. Even though this discusssion doesn't belong here, just to synch everybody's understanding:
You can extend H1B visa beyond 6th (or 7th or eighth or...) if you have a LC petition pending for more than 365 days. This extension is to be made every year as you will be given extension for only one year every time.
Beyond LC, if you apply for I140 and that gets approved, you can get you H1B extended for 3 years (irrespective of how many years you've spent on H1) if your visa date is not current yet. God forbid if the visa dates still dont get current after the three years, you can get another 3 year extension.

This is my understanding and I strongly recommend you check with your attorney on this before making any plans.


spicensour said:
So what you are saying if a case successfully goes through the labour certification (say in about next 6 months)but 140 is still pending and the 485 can not be applied for(since the visa dates are not available), the person can be granted any # of extensions.
 
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