US Immigration from Canada

Good read.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220717180736/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/nyregion/brooklyn-homeless-shelter-friendship.html

First part:

Quote

On his first night at the Brooklyn homeless shelter, Tin Chin met his best friend.

Estranged from his family, Mr. Chin was alone, stewing in anger and shame over all he had lost and how low he had fallen. The Chinatown restaurants he frequented with his wife and daughter, the elementary school drop-off routine, the friendly neighbors in Queens these had been the trappings of a middle-class life that once seemed secure. A college graduate and former civil servant, Mr. Chin had to learn his city anew, and now he could still hardly believe it as a homeless person.

On that evening in 2012 in the Barbara Kleiman Residence in East Williamsburg, he saw only one other Chinese person in the room. The man was skinny, his ill-fitting clothes hanging loosely on his frame. Mr. Chin sized him up with an expert eye: an immigrant, most likely from Fujian Province; no family, no English, no documents.

I m at the bottom, Mr. Chin remembers thinking. But I m better off than him.

The other man was named Mo Lin. Mr. Chin sensed that if they had met just a few years earlier, they would have had very little in common. At the beginning, I can t say I liked him, he said. But we are the two Chinese people in the shelter, so we talk.

Mr. Chin possessed little more than his closely guarded secrets, including a criminal record that haunted him. They ran through his mind on a loop, but he divulged them to no one, certainly not this new acquaintance, and instead shared his story in broad strokes he was born in Hong Kong and had grown up in New York and was new to being homeless.

Mr. Lin was hesitant and didn t say much. It would be a while before he described his years scraping by in New York. He was indeed undocumented, and although he had worked in innumerable Chinatown kitchens, his poor health had long ago made steady work impossible, and he looked far older than his 46 years. He spent his days shuffling along the streets of Manhattan s Chinatown, smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk, watching staticky TV in threadbare Fujianese community centers.

But the men soon began spending so much time together always chatting in the shelter, strolling downtown streets, sharing plates of noodles that acquaintances assumed they were family.

Hello everyone,

sadly i had a very hard month with the moving, and so many other things.

with that being said i lost my green card which I cried about for a whole week cuz i am always careful with my USCIS stuff to avoid any delays but sadly i lost mine at the airport.

I filled out the lost an found form a week ago n sadly no updates if they found it or not which is hurting me so much.

Since i already filed my N400 and have a picture of my green card front and back do i still have to have them issue me a new one?

the $455 pricetag i sadly cant afford right especially when i spent all my money on the move i have nothing left for months and i have to see my sick mother in September 2022 and i doubt even if i get a new GC if it will even make it by then.

has anyone else had an issue with this?

i wish it didnt take so long for citizenships , its been 210 days now of waiting :(

Hi everyone,

My child is almost 17 and about to have her interview for ir2, she s about to start her senior year of highschool. I m trying to get a couple what if scenarios answered.

Let s say she gets her ir2 visa this fall, can she activate it at the border then come back upto Canada to resume the school year? Then go back to the US when she graduates in June?

I m not sure how the returning resident thing works and how long you can be out of the country without losing your GC.

Canadian citizen here. If I am in the US on a B2 tourist visa to visit my friends, and my employer files an I-129 with premium processing for O1-A, am I allowed to adjust status from B2 to O1A or will there be issues? Anyone here done it before?

I am a bit fearful that USCIS might think I lied about my original intention of B2. Does the 90-day wait apply even though O1-A is a non-immigrant visa?

Thanks.

My friend's I-140 petition through EB2 NIW has been approved since March 2022. She indicated that "Alien will apply for a visa abroad at a U.S. Embassy or consulate, Montreal, Canada" in the Part 4, Box 1, Section on the I-140 form, but USCIS did not automatically forwarded the approved I-140 to NVC. It has been 120 days.

She filed a service request with USCIS and received the following response:

Quote

We have received your service request and researched the status of your case. Our records indicate that on your case was approved. However, the approved petition and accompanying information was not sent to the National Visa Center (NVC). If the person, for whom you are petitioning, decides to apply for a visa outside the United States based on this petition, the petitioner must file Form I-824, Application for Action on an Approved Application or Petition, to request that we send the petition to the Department of State NVC. The NVC processes all approved immigrant visa petitions that require consular action. The NVC also determines which consular post is the appropriate consulate to complete visa processing. It will then forward the approved petition to that consulate.

She has raised a Service Request with CIS Ombudsman, which can take up to 30 days to respond, but is there anything else that can be done in the interim to speed up the process? Should she just pay the $465 fee and get it done with, even though it is an error on USCIS' part?