ralph240574

Where did you get these numbers from?

The numbers published here are different:

http://travel.state.gov/visa/statistics/statistics_1476.html

Letter from F2A petitioner (Green card holder/LPR)

SUB :- Huge unissued F2A visa ending in long waiting times

Respected Sir/Madam,

The very important part of family union is being hit for green card spouses with the long waits. The wait time for reunite spouse and child with permanent resident(petitioner) is nearly 4 years. United families with shorter waiting periods will add and increase economic growth, as spouses would be able to work in mental peace and can contribute more in taxes.

I am not demanding anything more. Please check the below data and you will realise NVC is not following immigration act,1990.

Below are the statistics from travel.state.gov that NVC is using only partial quota of total alloted 88000 visas to f2a (under immigration act 1990) and causing agony and a long wait times for green card holders.

Year------------------------2001------2002------2003------2004-------2005------2006------2007------2008------2009

exempted----------------20,661-----14,565----9,343----17,160-----16,770----14,987----14,602----25,798----29,588

per country limit-------16,464-----11,524----8,189-----7,877------9,540----13,101----18,078----19,002----24,687

total---------------------37,125-----26,089---17,532----25,037-----26,310----28,088----32,680----44,800----54,275

visa usage in (%)-------42%----------30%------20%-------28%--------30%-------32%-------37%-------51%-------62%

visa unused in (%)------58%----------70%------80%-------72%--------70%-------68%-------63%-------49%-------38%

I am writing this letter as I believe you are the right person who can take appropriate action on this

Thanking you,

F2A green card holder.

SEND THIS LETTER TO FOLLOWING EMAIL ADDRESSES.....

Margaret.Gleason@dhs.gov

charles.oppenheim@dhs.gov

AmericanVoices@mail.house.gov

cisombudsman.publicaffairs@dhs.gov

VISABULLETIN@STATE.GOV

listserv@calist.state.gov

nvcinquiry@state.gov

and any other address which can help us....

Did you get 88000 from 77% of 114,200? Why wouldn't they be fully utilized given the long F2A waiting list?

that is just nonsense!

Correct, to be exact the number is 87,934. This is the minimum number available by law, as stated in every Visa Bulletin. The real picture is actually much grimmer: since 2003 the total number of wasted visas only in the F2A category was over 150,000. Actually the year 2003 was one of the worst with only 32,826 visas issued. There hasn't been a single year where the full quota was used!

The most frustrating thing is that in FY2010 only 60,652 F2A Visas were issued. This means 28,000 out of the available 88,000 visas were wasted!

http://www.travel.state.gov/pdf/FY10AnnualReport-TableV.pdf

Just wanted to check with other people. My wifes PD is Oct 2010, and my i130 was approved in March. I receive and paid the affidavit of support bill from the NVC recently. According to the NVC they only send it out if they think the PD will become current within 9 months. Anybody here with a similar experience? Hope this is not just a another fee collection scheme.

Thanks

My other question is will uSCIS process our petitions withi the five months in light of the retrogression

Mine was approved just 2 days short of 5 months. It seems they are trying hard to stay within 5 months. My wifes priority date is Oct 2010, and now the NVC has sent me already the affidavit of support bill. According to the NVC they will only start the process if they think visas will be available within the next 9 months. Hope that is true.

You need to contact the CIS Ombudsman:

http://www.dhs.gov/files/programs/editorial_0497.shtm

It should "only" take 5 months to process. It is important to make your case heard, so that they will get their act together.

Again, I say: If you are so unhappy then try to change it or leave. It's a simple process. Be proud of the fact that you received a mostly "free to you" education. I paid for my BSEE and BSME myself, never even having taken a grant. Good luck to you wherever you end up.

Thanks, that's is exactly what I am contemplating now, at least for the next year, a lot of tax dollars that Uncle Sam will loose...

This same "incompetent country" is the country you have elected to live in. Having had dealings with Colombia I know you are well aware of how streamlined and smoothly things run there with no delays or hassles. As a veteran who has served and fought for this nation I take offense when people start cursing the nation. You have every reason to be upset with the system, it's not perfect. Instead of griping and cussing spend those energies working to improve it.

I lived most of my life in Germany and when I say that this country is incompetent in it's immigration affairs, I mean it and I have plenty of reasons to support that.

I receive a PhD in 2001 from Georgia Tech mostly paid for by tax payers through Graduate Assistantships. After living in the US with an F1-student visa for almost seven years LEGALLY (yes grad school can take long), I could not even get a H1-B work visa after my OPT ended in February 2008, due to another quota. So I actually left the country until October that year, fortunately my employer could send me to a different country during that time. Then after receiving my green card in 2009 I thought I was done having to deal with any immigration issues but unfortunately I met my wife after I received my green card.

At this point I am very close to just max out my credit cards and walk away from my mortgage and move back to Europe, where I can bring my wife without any wait time and ridiculous processing fees. A spouse of any EU citizen (in some countries also gays) has the same rights as the EU citizen, i.e. they can work and live in all EU countries. In many European countries a person that lived in a country legally for certain period of time (e.g. 5 years in the UK) is eligible for citizenship.

Furthermore I was fully aware of the issue of long wait times and wouldn't have married just yet (so that my wife could have gotten a student visa), but last year the cut-off dates were moved dramatically forward. In November, after the December bulletin was out, one could have expected a wait time of 4 months, but then the big retrogression came.

So, YES the US is COMPLETELY incompetent regarding it's immigration policies. They are not able to enforce their own immigration laws, and people who actually follow the laws have to suffer.

The new visa bulletin is out. The cut off date is still at Jan 08. It seems they did not process all the people of 07. In June 2010 the dates jumped ahead more than a year. I hope after these applications have been processed the dates will advance again.

It is really sad that a country like the US is that incompetent in handling such a simple matter.

Support our cause here: http://www.unitefamilies.org/

I was reading the January Visa Bulletin a couple of days ago and was in shock, as many of you were. How is it possible that there is retrogression of 32 months to January 2008???

After looking at the available data on http://dashboard.uscis.gov I must say I still don't understand this. For FY 2009 the total number of receipts for all preference categories were 188,749 for FY 2010 the total number of receipts were 217,238, unfortunately there is no data available for previous years. In the November bulletin (which was published in at the beginning of October) the cut-off date for F2A was June 1 2010.

The number of unripe pending, other pending, and awaiting customer action were 172,955, 20,740 and 14,143 respectively, which is a total of 207,838 for all categories.

About 88,000 F2A visas are available each fiscal year, if we assume that about 50% of the applications are for the F2A category (let’s say 100,000), the wait time should be around 14 months (100,000/88,000).

Is there a huge amount of pending visas unaccounted for? (e.g at the NVC??)

If there was a huge surge in October and November this should not have an effect on the cut off dates which reached August 2010 for the December bulletin, it should only affect the future movement of the cutoff dates, i.e. they might move very slow for priority dates after August 2010.

My only hope is that this retrogression is only temporarily and cutoff dates will move forward again in the next few months at, if not someone made a huge mistake.

Anybody has any more insight on this?