Good morning! I hope you all had a fantastic Easter and are ready to embrace spring in its full swing.
This week I am writing about: US- Immigration laws - What a nightmare! Unless you are a citizen of one of the nations America feels attached to for reasons of war, trade or purely geographically inseparable vicinity, you might want to reconsider your desire to emigrate from your original country and apply for permanent residence and a work permit here. Quite obviously I took exactly that path for I would not be sitting here and rambling about what changed my life fairly dramatically. Needless to say, I am not from an allied country and thus clearly feel the need to review my application steps, process. progress, and outcome. In summer of 2007 my fiancé and I learnt through a bulletin sent out generically by a law firm which we had once before consulted that from August on the immigration application fees were going to be quadrupled. We talked about that issue and spontaneously decided to first elope before that deadline and right after start the application process for my green card. Against all odds on part of both our confused and bewildered parents, we got wed in the back yard of my husband's sweet aunt and uncle. Soon after returning from our honeymoon, we sought legal advice, issued all kinds of documents and filled out several forms.Then I had to give a blood sample, undergo a medical exam and get vaccinated fourfold which by the way we had to pay for ourselves as well. Last but not least, I asked our lawyer to add a letter explaining that I was planning on going back to my home country for fall as I had promised to resume my teaching career after a year off. Her words are still echoing in my ears even though we did not give it a second thought back then. "I would not go back and teach if I were you, but that's entirely up to you." That's all she said nothing else, and so I left for Austria at the beginning of September and understandably stirred up a great deal of problems at the new school right away announcing that I was most likely not going to teach any longer than March as I had been under the assumption that I would be ordered back to the States for the purpose of taking all kinds of required steps further into my application process. In the following weeks though, my husband received a letter which was inviting me to a bio- metrical registration in the capital of our state. My husband came to visit me, and three days later we were on our way back to America. At the airport customs in Boston I was held up immediately and got temporarily detained. We were told that first applying for a green card and then leaving the country in an unauthorized manner had not just led to a severe violation of this country's immigration laws but had also caused a dead- lock because all they thought they could do then was to issue a 30- day probation! I was indeed caught in a grid- lock! However, I have to give the authorities here credit for not having deported and barred me from coming back into the country either, but ultimately I lost everything back home since I was given a choice to either stay here and wait it out after re- applying or return home immediately and risk a life- long ban from re- entering the USA. Of course, I stayed here with my husband, re- applied and got my green card after three months. The system, I'm afraid, is absolutely worthless the way it is executed on green card applicants, but thank God, I was treated by good people with big hearts and a lot of compassion who tried to help by picking up the broken pieces that that insane bureaucratic obstacle course had left behind. I am pleading for US- immigration laws to be simplified, centralized and equalized for every nation in the world!
This week I am writing about: US- Immigration laws - What a nightmare! Unless you are a citizen of one of the nations America feels attached to for reasons of war, trade or purely geographically inseparable vicinity, you might want to reconsider your desire to emigrate from your original country and apply for permanent residence and a work permit here. Quite obviously I took exactly that path for I would not be sitting here and rambling about what changed my life fairly dramatically. Needless to say, I am not from an allied country and thus clearly feel the need to review my application steps, process. progress, and outcome. In summer of 2007 my fiancé and I learnt through a bulletin sent out generically by a law firm which we had once before consulted that from August on the immigration application fees were going to be quadrupled. We talked about that issue and spontaneously decided to first elope before that deadline and right after start the application process for my green card. Against all odds on part of both our confused and bewildered parents, we got wed in the back yard of my husband's sweet aunt and uncle. Soon after returning from our honeymoon, we sought legal advice, issued all kinds of documents and filled out several forms.Then I had to give a blood sample, undergo a medical exam and get vaccinated fourfold which by the way we had to pay for ourselves as well. Last but not least, I asked our lawyer to add a letter explaining that I was planning on going back to my home country for fall as I had promised to resume my teaching career after a year off. Her words are still echoing in my ears even though we did not give it a second thought back then. "I would not go back and teach if I were you, but that's entirely up to you." That's all she said nothing else, and so I left for Austria at the beginning of September and understandably stirred up a great deal of problems at the new school right away announcing that I was most likely not going to teach any longer than March as I had been under the assumption that I would be ordered back to the States for the purpose of taking all kinds of required steps further into my application process. In the following weeks though, my husband received a letter which was inviting me to a bio- metrical registration in the capital of our state. My husband came to visit me, and three days later we were on our way back to America. At the airport customs in Boston I was held up immediately and got temporarily detained. We were told that first applying for a green card and then leaving the country in an unauthorized manner had not just led to a severe violation of this country's immigration laws but had also caused a dead- lock because all they thought they could do then was to issue a 30- day probation! I was indeed caught in a grid- lock! However, I have to give the authorities here credit for not having deported and barred me from coming back into the country either, but ultimately I lost everything back home since I was given a choice to either stay here and wait it out after re- applying or return home immediately and risk a life- long ban from re- entering the USA. Of course, I stayed here with my husband, re- applied and got my green card after three months. The system, I'm afraid, is absolutely worthless the way it is executed on green card applicants, but thank God, I was treated by good people with big hearts and a lot of compassion who tried to help by picking up the broken pieces that that insane bureaucratic obstacle course had left behind. I am pleading for US- immigration laws to be simplified, centralized and equalized for every nation in the world!
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