Kajikit

If you looked on the old forum there were several polls about who used a lawyer for their visa... and about 75% of people who responded did it all themselves. And most of them were successful. It's not like a court case where you need a professional legal representative or somebody who knows the law book backwards - you just fill out the forms carefully and in the right order and send them in and wait around a lot. Anybody of average intelligence and with the ability to read English should be able to do it for themselves just as well as a laywer.

Your visa is NOT finalised yet sweety... you've still got somewhere between one and three or four months until you actually have it - the 'approval' was when they said 'okay, it looks okay on the US end, now we'll send it to the beneficiery's country and see if it's okay to actually give them the visa'.

Even once you have the visa in your hot little hand, you still have six months to decide whether or not to use it... and once you get to the US you have ninety days to get married. You don't have to rush into anything right away... if you come to the US and decide that it's not going to work out after all, all you have to do is to go home when the 90 days is up.

It sounds to me like the stress of the long-distance thing is really getting to you both, and you might be better off once it's all over and you're together 24/7... You've come this far, so you might as well actually get the visa, and you've still got time to 'work on yourselves' if you so choose.

Getting the visa can be complicated and time-consuming and some people prefer to pay someone else to do it for them... but really unless there is some definite problem that you can forsee it's not hard to do it yourself. You're not at all likely to be denied just because you filled in a form wrong - they'll send you a RFE and ask you to do it again, or tell you that they need X document, or at worst they'll send the original packet back to you right away if you forgot to put the check in with it.

If my fiance could do my paperwork, and I could do my own AOS, anyone can do it and it sure doesn't need to cost five thousand dollars! Just read the guides here carefully and ask on the forum if you have any extra questions and somebody will walk you through it...

Sounds like the guy was trying to scare you into signing on the dotted line to me...

It doesn't need to be notarised. It just needs to be a one-sentence letter signed by your fiance...

You did NOT get denied... they said 'we need more information and we can't finish processing the visa until we get it'. That's not a denial... and though it's worrisome for you to have to sit and wait, there's no reason to assume that they will deny your fiance once they get the paperwork. I hope that they get into contact with your fiance soon, but a week is a very short amount of time to wait... it might take a lot longer than that.

It doesn't really mean anything... it's just something else for the #######-retentive types to keep track of! It means that somebody somewhere did SOMETHING to your file, but there's no way to know what. There's been some speculation that it just means it was shuffled from pile A to pile B and back again.

The only way to know if you've been 'touched' or not, is to register your file on the USCIS website and to ask them to send you email updates. It's not compulsory and you'll be approved just fine without it - I use Firefox and it's not compatible with their portfolio management program so I couldn't do it - I just went and manually checked my status every few weeks to see if the message had been changed.

It doesn't matter a jots you can fit them in the envelope. USCIS has more important things to worry about than what size paper your application is printed on

I hope she's not taking him for a ride... but again, if she is there isn't really anything that you can do about it. At 18, even if you filed a missings persons report on him and said he ran away from home, the police wouldn't do anything about it because he left of his own free will. About the only way to find him would be to drive to this town and ride around blindly hoping to see him, and I really don't think that would work... even if you DID happen to run into him I am pretty sure that it would backfire because he is asserting his newfound adulthood and nobody who's 18 wants to be treated like a naughty six-year-old.

If she IS taking advantage of him, presumably sooner or later he'll realise it and get out of the situation, and the best you can do is to be ready to take him back... and maybe just maybe he's actually found the love of his life and they'll be happy together. I'm sure we'll all join you in praying that this particular piece of growing up isn't too painful a lesson for him and that he actually DOES learn something from it.

Good idea! How often have I wished that I could killfile certain individuals who existed only to pi$$ everyone else off? Now I can!

To be honest, I'd say that if the girl really IS 17, then she's not really a 'minor' especially if she's taken on as much adult responsibility as it sounds like she has. 17 and 18 isn't a big difference in age... he's not committing any crime in being with her because AFAIK 16 is the legal age of consent. So little as you may approve of his behaviour, he's not breaking the law.

If you ship him off back to England now, he's going to be p'ed at you to say the least, and I don't think he'll be running back to do his AOS interview... so he won't be able to come back to the US to live. And you won't be able to be much of a positive influence on his life from ten thousand miles away.

It sounds to me like he's attempting to assert his adulthood 'I'm 18, I can do what I like'... and you might be best off to leave him be for awhile. Let him try out adult life - maybe he'll find that he likes it and he's ready to grow up, or maybe he'll realise that he's still got a heck of a lot of growing up to do and come back. In Australia, 18 is still a kid, but in the US it seems to be when a lot of young people leave home to go to college and they never come back again... on those grounds, you're not responsible for him - HE'S responsible for him.

Thanks Russiangirl! I know it's a long way away... but it's not nearly as long as it seems! I will now depart from this forum for the next 12 months so as not to scare myself

That's what I tried to tell her, folks... I was quite frankly horrified that she left it this long - when we got our RFE for a medical I jumped up and down whining about how it 'wasn't fair' for about ten minutes, and then I picked up the phone and booked an appointment for the next week. There was no way on earth I was going to take the chance of not getting it sorted out in time!

But I can see her viewpoint too - they're very young and they have a baby daughter and her husband lost his job just afer she was born and they've had no income for over six months and she JUST managed to find a job last week so she's still doing the training and she said she has to be in class from 8-5 every day without fail or they'll fire her on the spot... She probably had other things on her mind than immigration... If she'd asked me three weeks ago I would have sent her a check on the spot, but it's too late now... anyway, it's their life and it's up to her to decide what to do when she gets that denial letter. She lives two hundred miles away but I suspect I'll hear her screams of despair from here

He's toooo cute!

I'm REALLY not good at math... can anyone figure out what date that will be if the greencard expires on 1/11/08?

congratulations!

I know I don't need to worry about this for a long time, but I was glancing at the FAQ and it looks like lifting the conditions is a lot more complicated than it sounds (surprise, surprise - this is the INS we're talking about!) So I want to get a rough idea of what I'll have to do, and what sort of stuff we need to try to accumulate for it... but my biggest question right now is, when exactly do I send in the paperwork for it? My greencard expires on 1/11/08 and while it seems like a long way away right now I know it's not really very far away in real time! If someone who's more knowledgable than me can give me an exact date to apply, I'll put it at the bottom of my sig to remind me to be ready for it...

This is NOT me... I got my greencard last week. A friend of mine came to the US a few months before I did and she applied for AOS in March 2005. A few months ago they sent her a RFE for a new medical exam, saying that hers was too old and she had to have another one. Nothing more was said until the other day when I mentioned that I got my greencard (hooray) and she said that it's not fair she applied first and she still hadn't heard anything... and then she said that for various complicated reasons that I won't go into here, she IGNORED THE RFE! She thinks that since she had her medical exam in France that's enough and that somehow they'll accept the old one in lieu of a re-exam...

What is going to happen to her next week when her time for filling the RFE is up and she hasn't done it? Can you submit the form late and have them still accept it? Or is it a case of 'times up, you're out of here'... she thinks that she'll be okay but I've got a terrible feeling that the next time I hear from her it'll be her saying that she's been denied and deported (I KNOW she doesn't have the money for appeals and laywers, and I don't think 'we couldn't afford the medical' counts as a good excuse for not getting it...)

Also, if she did get denied and deported, would she and her daughter (born here) ever be allowed back into the US to visit the kid's grandparents?