But Shelat is married to a foreigner who still hasn’t completed the often years-long process that allows her to apply for a Social Security number. Her not having that number makes even him ineligible for the tax rebate checks that started going out last week because they filed jointly.

He is among an estimated hundreds of thousands of taxpayers — from legal immigrants to soldiers based abroad — who won’t be getting a share of the stimulus package because of a provision aimed at preventing illegal immigrants from getting rebates.

read more at MSNBC.

For K3 Visa Holders one major issue has been the delay in receiving a first Notice of Action (NOA1). As you can see below the USCIS has indeed corrected the problem (example shows the California Service Center):

For K1 Visa Holders the filing location was changed last year from four Service Centers down to two. Has it helped? On the whole the answer is “not yet”. In fact there appears to be an upward trend in processing time of I-129F’s for K-1 Visas:

The USCIS has also shown trends in post visa benefit processing times. Adjustment of Status applications have increased in processing time while Employment Authorization Document petitions are being processed faster:

For more information on other USCIS benefit processing times please see VisaJourney’s Immigration Timeline Tracking System.