Even worse, the priority date for EB-1 India, where I am from, jumped nearly 11 months forward in 1 month, and my priority date is just 7 months behind. If I end up getting a GC before she is able to come back, we'll have to go through an entirely separate process to get her GC, which will take at least 1-2 more years.
The only option seems to be to wait for the GC for a few more months, and then move to a different country so we can be together and start anew. We will then have to start the process of getting her GC and deal with all the paperwork that entails, assuming laws don't change again. Who knows, in this time maybe we'll just end up living in the new place for good.
Both of us have PhDs from a top engineering school, own a house, and have lived in the Bay Area for the past 15 years. The chaos this is creating is mind boggling.
You must renew your visa in your home country. There is a possibility of doing it in another country, such as Canada, but this is not usually recommended and has a higher probability of failing.
Mind you, these are people that already have visas. They are simply being renewed. The secondary effect of this is that it slows down processing of visas, which lowers how many are given out and increases the cost of the USCIS. Although I think this particular thing has existed for a while now, the Trump administration has made it a point to needlessly increase the processing time by making policies to delay the processing. This is a tactic that further slows down the USCIS, making it much more costly, just so that they can point out how costly and inefficient the USCIS is when it is their policies that make those things worse.
For example, if you make an application for an H-1B, extension, or renewal, it takes months to prepare the paperwork. Once submitted, the USCIS can send it back, requesting more information. This has become much more common under the Trump administration, because it basically adds a minimum three to six month delay to the process. It gets sent back to the applicant, one must extremely carefully understand the confusing request for more information, provide the information, and resubmit. The USCIS then starts the whole evaluation process back over again.
I don’t think that’s correct. Although often it’s considered advisable to do it that way (consular processing), there is an alternative process (change of status) where you apply while remaining in the US.
(source: renewed an L-1A visa a few years ago; advice received from my firm’a immigration attorneys)
The process is so overly complicated, it's hard to track. I am not aware of any process in which you can re-stamp an H-1B inside the U.S. You meed to do an in-person interview, and these are done at U.S. Consulates and Embassies, none of which are inside the U.S.
Of course, it's difficult to quickly find the information on the official U.S. websites, but here are sites that explain it.
http://www.greencardapply.com/question/question17/H1B_Visa_S...
https://www.h1base.com/visa/work/h1b%20visa%20stamping/ref/1...
Upon renewal even the most trivial thing can be used with no transparency or accountability or review and keep you out of the country for life. Bam. Can't get back home, stuck in India, everything left behind. That's it. I know because I've had several clients lives ruined by thus lunacy.
Initial visa issuance (for three years) will be at a consulate abroad by definition, and then one more visit to get the extension stamped (for the next three years).
My experience of the whole process was much less dramatic than many here. I was advised to budget for a week out of the country (for consular processing of an L-1A extension), and it ended up taking rather less.
Is the real problem after the six year term when extensions are done on a year-by-year basis for those with pending labor certification or backlogged priority date for an immigrant visa?
Having said that, the story from the OP does not add up: you don't need to renew the visa stamp to stay in the country. The stamp is for crossing the border. I, for one, never renewed my H1B stamp since I did not have a need to leave the country. If I were to leave, I'd just go to a consulate and get a new stamp to get back so having visas stamped only outside of the country does not appear as such a hurdle - you only need the stamp if you are already abroad.
My story does add up. We needed to leave the U.S. to visit China, and we also visit Canada sometimes, hence necessitating the stamping process to take place at a U.S. Consulate in China. And it was this process that ended up being indeed a massive hurdle. In fact, so massive it is a major part of what kept my fiancee from returning. This is one of the cruxes of the story.
>We were visiting China in January to both see her family and friends and to do the yearly renewal of her re-entry visa.
sounds like the renewal per se was a goal of your visit. If you are saying that you went to visit China and had to get a new visa stamp because the current one expired then it indeed adds up.
No. At least for Chinese citizens, it is either every year or every two years that you must renew the stamp to be able to leave the U.S. and return.
I would advise not trying to dilute the impact of the rules just because you don't know or didn't experience them yourself. You aren't mentioning the country you are from, which also confuses the matter. These things change depending upon the origin country.
I am engaged to a Chinese citizen, who is an active H-1B visa holder working for a U.S. technology company. We were visiting China in January to both see her family and friends and to do the yearly renewal of her re-entry visa. This latter point is important because it is a mind bogglingly inefficient process that forces people to travel back to their home country to renew a visa they already have and are using to live and work in the U.S. just so they can be able to leave and re-enter. This is just so the U.S. can have the possibility of keeping them out when they want for whatever reason, just as they have in this case.
Anyway, the U.S. Consulates shutdown during the outbreak in mid-January, halting her visa processing, needlessly in my mind because she had already accomplished her in-person interview. Then, the U.S. Consulate held her Chinese passport, which had valid visas to other countries, for over a month. This prevented her from going to another country and doing the visa processing there. (It is normally recommended to do the renewal in your home country, for reasons of being stranded wherever you're doing the renewal.) So the U.S. stopped processing her basically finished visa renewal, then held on to her non-U.S. passport preventing her to travel between two countries that aren't the U.S., and now they have kept her out of the country on the point of helping unemployed workers when she already has a job because she was the qualified candidate. This was all in January and February and some of March, long before the "official" bans on visas.
I have not seen my fiancee in over five months. It is unlikely I am to see her in 2020 and even 2021. I may eventually be able to travel to China to see her, but it is looking more and more that she will be unable to return to the U.S. any time soon. This is all complicated by the fact that her H-1B is time bound and the Green Card is a lost cause because it takes multiple years to be issued.
This is a person who already has a U.S. job that she was more qualified for than U.S. citizens. Just because people are unemployed doesn't magically make them qualified for jobs they already lost out on. It also is unclear what companies who already employ H-1B holders are supposed to do. There is no policy or method to get the fiancee of a U.S. citizen who already holds a valid H-1B back into the U.S. right now, and it's not clear when one will open up. It also makes no sense, from the very beginning, why the U.S. prevented her from returning at any point unless you understand that the U.S. is literally at war with China, immigrants, and non-immigrant workers.
All of this is vastly compounded by the inefficiencies, directed by our miserable administration, of the USCIS, because applying for a K-1 visa is not as straightforward as you would think. Even though the H-1B is a dual intent visa, applying for the K-1 visa could see the H-1B process incur delays or even denial. The U.S. government holds immigrants and non-immigrant workers hostage, and this is affecting U.S. business and citizens' personal lives. Right now, it is literally impossible to get someone who has a job in the U.S., has a current H-1B visa, a home, cars, and other assets in the U.S., is engaged to a U.S. citizen, and planned on immediately marrying a U.S. citizen after a "routine" vacation back into the U.S. any sooner than years. This is a pathetic situation.
I am a tech worker who has worked for technology companies and national security labs. I am now being forced to think about leaving my parents and brother behind in the U.S. to consider moving outside of the U.S. so that I can continue my life with my fiancee and build my own family.
People in this country wax on (whine) about freedoms, but what they are really wanting is to do whatever they want when they want it at the expense of literally anyone else but themselves, including their neighbor. It's nothing but extreme narcissism, and I cannot help but feel this country is a lost cause. The U.S. is an extremist state now, taken over by charlatans and textbook traitors.