PantomimeGoose

Of course, I meant to write (3 years minus 90 days)

Cheers! That made our month!

Thanks for all the advice!

Heh. I would be fine with an interview....just wish they would get around to it already! Feel like we might get pushed into limbo because others have said that when they've called after 60 days was up, they were told they were just "waiting for the local office to schedule an interview" or they get a letter to the effect that an interview is being scheduled. Oh well, ~4 more months to naturalization.

So my husband and I filed for ROC coming up on a year ago now, and his letter extends his residency priveleges until May. We got an RFE, which we now submitted over 4 months ago and they seem to have no intention of making a decision any time soon.

My concern is, come May if they make no decision his driver's license expires. Will he be able to renew it? Will he lose his eligibility to work? Is he out of status or what? We plan to apply for his citizenship ASAP at that point, but who knows how long that will take the way everything is going. They may also grant it slowly since I've been commuting to school (assuming that contributed to the RFE in the first place).

Thanks!

Just thought I'd bump this in case anybody else was in a similar situation. We called after 60 days, got elevated, and they told us that though 60 days was up the decision was still pending and couldn't tell us anything about the case. So I guess it does happen.... 78 days and counting.

We speculate that USCIS has gotten slammed with bureacratic chaos with Obama's most recent immigration "reform" and will be temporarily useless on backlog. We also speculate that perhaps two four-inch binders of additional "evidence" may have been overkill.

I know what you're saying, but aliens have no constitutional right to be here. Further, marital rights are granted by the individual states, so we're dealing with an overlap between federal law and the individual laws of 50 states. Federal law is generally silent on marriage (with the exception of federal recognition of marriages for the purposes of certain benefits). Your right under state law to be married to your spouse doesn't trump federal law regarding the admissibility of aliens.

Look, I'm obviously sympathetic to how long this takes. I went through this myself. But no one wants to hear about legal immigration. It's not sexy or interesting to most people outside of the process. Legal immigration needs non-polarizing advocates who can use thoughtful, intelligent means to bring the topic into discussion.

I'm not arguing that aliens have constitutional rights (at all). But I think there's a viable argument that denying USCs access to their families is potentially a violation of various rights possessed by the citizen; equal protection under the law, implicit right to privacy, pursuit of happiness and so on. While federal law doesn't necessarily have much to say about marriage, we are a discrete minority who is potentially being discriminated against by the implementation of immigration policies that are unnecessarily onerous. Our spouses coming to live in the US is and should be a privelege, but it just becomes a farce when we, who have rights as citizens, go through a prolonged, awful process and the law is changed for illegal aliens because people feel it's too mean (i.e., it seems to be violating rights that they don't have in the first place).

I'm not sure that anything is advanced in the US government with thoughtful, non-polarizing advocates these days. The discussion about illegal immigration reform has been about as thoughtful and intelligent as a Life Time movie. It does a good job of plucking the heart-strings for theme music though.

While we do have the right to be married to whomever we please within the law, it is a privilege accorded us to bring non-USC spouses (or allow them to adjust) to the States to live permanently. Only natural-born USCs have an irrevocable* right to be here and enter freely.

*Barring something like voluntary surrender of citizenship.

Cohabitation and conjugal benefits are arguably also a right (unenumerated freedoms with long-standing establishment in our traditions), which is part of why the spouses of criminals may be allowed conjugal visits I believe. I'm not saying that immigration is not a privelege, but aspects of the current process violate our rights in unnecessary ways.

Not a lawyer here, but I would guess that the way to tackle it would be violation of substantive due process: the government discriminates against our marriages by putting financial requirements on US citizens and depriving us of conjugal rights by separating us. The burden of proof (needing to pay joint bills and produce the documents that make us appear married for two years) also violates our privacy and restricts our freedoms in other, sometimes non-trivial ways: for example, my husband and I are about to have an interview most likely because I commute to school. If I take a leave of absence to deal with more of this immigration bollocks, I may lose my scholarship and my livlihood.

Marriage (and the benefits of cohabitation) is arguably a fundamental right under US law, which means that the government can't deprive us of it without a valid reason (National security is this). Even if they have a valid reason, the law must be narrowly tailored to prevent discrimination. The minimum financial requirement is probably not as narrowly tailored as it could be: all the government needs to do is say that the non-USC has no recourse to public funds. Separation during waiting times is not as narrowly tailored as it could be: it takes 15 minutes to run a background check proving legal marriage and lack of criminal history for the USC. It's longer than this for foreign nationals, but it's certainly not 8 months or more, during which many couples, especially non-European ones, are forced to be separated. Even the Europeans are faced with the choice of "visiting" at great personal expense. The requirement that we prove we're married "in good faith" is also fairly ridiculous: legal marriage is easy to prove, so what they're trying to justify is some kind of undefinable "romantic marriage" yet they ignore "romantic evidence" like photographs. It is basically a witch hunt.

I would argue that the only things the government has a right to prove is that we're legally married, and allowing our spouses to enter the country poses no threat to national security. Which is all to say, I would be behind this if a lawyer would take the case.

I'd say stir up the folks at Fox News. There has got to be someone in that community who would take a case like this just to stick it to Obama.

Cheers. Sod's law: I'm about to travel for a conference for about 3 weeks.

Agreed. My husband and I are most likely about to get an interview for our removal of conditions, and I will most likely have to take a leave of absence from my PhD, which I have been commuting to so we don't go into debt. And the government sits there saying that everything must be done to keep families together, and to help students who are high achievers struggling for a better life.

I guess that doesn't apply to my family, and my education.

Thanks. I was afraid of that. How did the interview scheduling for people go? Do they just stick you with a date and how far in advance is it?

Our infant mortality rate is high for a developing country because we have a lack of social services, and are one of the few developed countries foolish enough not to advocate for wide-spread birth control and family planning. Lack of access to education and medical resources for family planning equals a greater unintended fertility rate. Unintended fertilty correlates highly with infant death.

The reason infants typically die around the time of death is unsanitary birthing practices or congenital defect. A hospital will prevent your baby from dying of these things, even if they stick you with a big bill later. Historically, the reasons infants and young children die later in life are weaning hazards, lack of medical attention, urban stressors (crowding, pollutants). These factors are predicted by parental investment (which can prevent accident, malnutrition, failure to seek medical help etc.). Give people the resources to choose not to have babies, or to take care of the babies they have, and the babies will stop dying.

Interestingly, the primary reason that we chose not to implement many of the social programs that low infant mortality countries like Sweden enjoy, is because they were pioneered by Germany, right around the time we became suspicious of everything German. Today, Germany's infant mortality rate is half ours.

Hi All,

After receiving our RFE late this summer, my husband and I sent additional evidence (tons, though most of it "soft evidence" like greeting cards, affidavits, and photos) 60 days ago come November 23rd. We never got any confirmation that this was received from USCIS, though we got confirmation from the shipping company. My husband's been calling USCIS, but in true form, they say they can't tell us anything until 60 days is up. Does anyone know what the options are for what they'll tell us? I.e. can they say they're still working on it at that point, or will it go straight to either interview or approval?

Thanks!

Thanks!

Hey All,

We sent in our RFE evidence a few weeks ago now. We have confirmation from the carrier that they received it as USCIS, but of course USCIS itself will give us no confirmation of any kind....... Is this normal?

After receiving a RFE because USCIS read the wrong date on our bank account and said it didn't show the duration of our marriage, even though he was added to it two days after our wedding, my husband sent off this behemoth this morning:

If we're going to discuss ICE releasing criminals, let's look at these numbers:

NEW YORK - The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released 36,007 convicted criminal aliens last year who were awaiting the outcome of deportation proceedings, according to a report issued Monday by the Center for Immigration Studies.

The group of released criminals includes those convicted of homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping and aggravated assault, according to the report, which cites a document prepared by the ICE.

A majority of the releases were not required by law and were discretionary, the organization says.

According to the report, the 36,007 individuals released represented nearly 88,000 convictions, including:

• 193 homicide convictions
• 426 sexual assault convictions
• 303 kidnapping convictions
• 1,075 aggravated assault convictions
• 1,160 stolen vehicle convictions
• 9,187 dangerous drug convictions
• 16,070 drunk or drugged driving convictions
• 303 flight escape convictions

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-36k-criminals-freed-while-awaiting-deportation/

PantomimeGander and I are now discussing the merits of including this illuminating article in our RFE packet, or simply waiting until we get an interview for being suspicious-types and reading it aloud in the lobby of our local USCIS office.

Why did Keroauc drop out of Columbia and ramble around the country on his family's dime? The youth are disaffected and they want to feel something more real than getting a 9-5.

I agree that it's a little fruitless to say 'that's not Islam'. The Westboro baptist church 'isn't Christianity' at this stage in Christian history because 'Christians' like that are thankfully now only a vociferous minority compared to the many visible Christians in our society. That doesn't mean that that was *never* Christianity: it was once. Heck, it could be again someday if the disaffected fringe takes back over.

"The Abortion Myth: Feminism, Morality, and the Hard Choices Women Make" by Lesley Cannold is good reading on this topic for the literarily-inclined

For what it's worth, making abortion available and destigmatizing it drastically lowers the rate of infanticide and late-term abortion. My master's thesis was on infanticide in the ancient world. Partial-birth abortion, accidental smothering, and negligent wet nurses were more-or-less legal and common ways of family planning until just before the industrial revolution.

No slavery here. See, accepting that you might get hurt in a car wreck is accepting the risks of driving. Accepting you might get pregnant or get an std from sex is accepting the risks of sex.

Someone telling you that you're not allowed to ameliorate your situation by means available to you (by say, putting a cast on a broken leg, or getting an abortion if you can't raise a child) is punishment, designed to demean you as a human and make you feel like you are a bad person who should suffer for participating in a normal activity.

I would say that an abortion can be a very responsible decision, compared to raising a child a mother may hate or may be incapable of caring for or putting them into the system where they may very well be neglected or abused.

Everyone know the risks of using contraceptives. The individual took the risk and the baby should not pay the price. That is an example of taking responsibility.

.

It's forcing *one party* to take life-long responsibility, which is why the 'slavery' argument keeps popping up. It's like arguing that if you're a careful driver but are in a no-fault car wreck one party should go without medical assistance for their injuries and spend the rest of their life with a disability because 'they knew the risks of driving'.

It is just about the woman. No one can force you to donate your bodily tissue even to save the life of another fully living breathing loving functioning grown human person. Would it be moral if they were able to?

So we've received an RFE (co basically read the wrong dates on our bank statements and said they didn't cover the period of the marriage). We don't have a huge amount of additional financial evidence, but are capable of deluging them with personal proofs and a few other financial things. We should have it in by the end of this month at the latest.

We're hoping we don't get an interview, but my question is, if we do, how soon do they tend to respond and is the date flexible? I have to go on 3 substantial international trips for conferences and research for my PhD this year (Nov/Dec and possibly February or spring). Obviously my husband's visa is of paramount importance, but I also don't want to endanger my scholarship or graduate any later....

Would it be smart to submit dates/evidence of my travel with the RFE? How long does it normally take for them to schedule an interview?