M+K IL

You should probably get an emergency passport made if there's no time to get a regular one made - US citizens need to enter and leave on US passports https://law.stackexchange.com/a/17967

Oh man we miss Key West, haven't been back in 6 years

Oh man that's annoying. When we lived in Seattle it's legal so it's even louder. Some nutcase in the next neighborhood burned down an apartment building in a firework accident!

We hear fireworks starting Sunday night here in Chicagoland, and it's actually banned in the whole state 😅 Laser printers are so nice compared to inkjets. Our kid had his first Fourth of July parade at his daycare, he really liked it.

One thing to flag here is there might be an issue with a foreigner being a joint owner (or both owners being foreigners once your soon to be wife gets US citizenship). Seems like only certain kinds of property can be owned by foreigners https://www.realtytoday.com/articles/111165/20200121/buying-property-in-myanmar-as-a-foreigner-a-short-guide.htm (I'm from Indonesia which has similar restrictions)

You have to go with assets, yes. Also - slightly related - you also report your foreign income to the IRS, right, even though they might be excluded from paying tax? https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/reporting-foreign-income-and-filing-a-tax-return-when-living-abroad

Looks like you can now apply online https://ph.usembassy.gov/u-s-citizenship/#appointments

Thanks! I'll dig around to find our tax returns. And yeah definitely going to download these each year now that I know they don't get retained

Thanks. Since there's only four years for some reasons, should I upload the account transcript or wage/income from 2018 as well?

Hi! My wife and I both filed for naturalization under the 5-year rule (she got her GC as my dependent, my employer filed under EB-2 and we got ours on the same day in 2018 - and getting interviewed on the same day too this time) There are four types of tax transcripts that show up on my dashboard: - Return Transcript (from 2019-2022) - Record of Account Transcript (from 2019-2022) - Account Transcript (from 2018-2022) - Wage & Income Transcript (from 2013-2022) Not sure why the discrepancy in years - also, I was not even in the country and a tax resident in 2013-2015. The Get Transcript page recommends Return Transcript for immigration reasons, but that does not cover 5 years. And the Return Transcript actually has SSNs masked except for the last four digits. For comparison, for our mortgage our lender wanted the Wage & Income and Account transcripts instead. Also, all transcript types except Wage & Income have my wife's redacted SSN and name also listed - so can she just use my transcripts or should she set up her own IRS online account and download hers? She only started working (part time) in 2023 - couldn't work as a dependent under H-4, then she went back to school and we had a kid. Looking at 2022, the document lengths are - Return Transcript: 9 pages - Record of Account Transcript: 10 pages - Account Transcript: 1 page (2 pages but the second is blank) - Wage & Income Transcript: failed to be generated, file size too large -- need to submit 4506-T. I guess I'm not submitting this one So... maybe return transcript (4 years) and record of account transcript (5 years) would suffice, and submit the same documents and print them out for my wife to bring? Our interviews are staggered by two hours so depending on how long it takes we are planning on bringing our own copies of documents just in case (luckily we have copies of our marriage certificate and our kid's birth certificate too, in case they are asked for) Thanks!

I was wondering about that, but the topic says 'old passport with US visa' so I assume typo

Worst case scenario is the wife naturalizes then sponsors IR-1 I guess? That should hopefully not be 10 years

Has PERM been completed? I wonder if that has to be redone too because it would have been looking for employees only in the Nashville area Apart from PERM, if I-140 has come out you'll have to file an amendment, but if it has not, I'm not sure. Good news is, in the worst case you should be able to still keep your priority date. Speaking of which, what's your PD? Which country are you born in (India, China, ROW) and which EB category? https://www.immi-usa.com/job-change-after-green-card-approval/

The US will need to deal with major internal population movements too, when that happens. eg a lot of Florida will be flooded. The latest estimate is that property is overvalued by hundreds of billions taking into account flood risk (higher taking into account other disasters) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-16/us-housing-market-is-overvalued-by-billions-due-to-ignored-flood-risk

Note in OP's last update that he got rescheduled to the 27th and has to reschedule that

So -- not me, I'm naturalizing, but I know Indonesians (not necessarily in the US; some are in Europe) who prefer not to naturalize in the country they live in because of inheritance issues (namely, Indonesia heavily restricts what a foreigner can inherit). I suspect this is less common for Indonesians in the US though - as you said, there are more hoops to jump through here, so those whose family have businesses back home will likely not get as far as getting GCs in the first place. Perversely, since EU visitor visa are tougher than US (hard to get multiple-entry long-term visas for the Schengen area), even though the Indonesian passport is rather weak, if you're based in Europe traveling is not that big a deal - free access to the Schengen area as a resident, and you can just get long-term visas for the US and UK.

Agreed with the rest of your post, but I'd like to note that immigrants might be from countries that do not allow dual citizenship - so there might be reasons not to naturalize eg China, India (though India's visa regime for ex citizens is almost a citizenship), Indonesia

Not K1, but I've experienced being sent to secondary inspections several times. The latest was in SFO when I first came in on an H1B visa - I got delayed by probably around 2-3 hours, and most of it was just waiting for the secondary interviews. Once I got called up it took only another 10 mins or so. The wait was not fun though, I spent some time holding my pee then decided I would risk a quick bathroom break.

Not just citizens, permanent residents too!

PS you can use the timeline search in this site to find data from other reported cases. Share your own timeline too to help others!

You can't really expedite the process, as I understand it. How long is your summer vacation for? The alternatives I can think of are to just either delay the oath ceremony, or get an expedited passport if travel is imminent. My personal preference (others' situation might vary though) is to just mostly avoid planning international travel until my naturalization is sorted, but I understand sometimes it is necessary

You probably should not hijack someone else's thread, please file your own thread next time? But yes, actively reviewed is standard in between stages. The notice for biometrics, if it is required, normally takes at least several days

not for employment-based GC surely, that would depend solely on the person being sponsored and not any family member?

Aha, thanks. In my case it was irrelevant (my country of birth and my citizenship both have the same priority dates) but for OP... ouch. in the last bulletin, for EB-2 the PD is 15 Feb 2022 for everyone else (so 16 months wait), 2019 for China and 2011 for India. EB-3 is actually faster by a year (2012 for India). I have heard some coworkers wondering if they should re-file under EB-3 instead because of these priority inversions https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/visa-bulletin/2023/visa-bulletin-for-june-2023.html

I'm a bit curious about this - say you're born to two Canadian citizens, and have Canadian citizenship from birth, but were born abroad in a country like India or China (where the per-country queue is long). Do you get put in the Canadian queue or the India/China one? (From what I can see USCIS only asks for country of birth and not citizenship at birth)