I pit my immigration lawyer

The BBQ Pit
1

My rage only burns with the fire of 993 suns, so I will post here.

Background: I am an American, gay male version. My partner is British. We met when I was living there. Now I live here, and he’d like to join me, legally if at all possible. So we have hired an immigration attorney and are applying for a visa. I’ve had to form a corporation (woo-hoo! I’m a CEO!) which will sponsor his immigration.

So: Thanks for sending the paperwork, Mr. Attorney. But you have checked the wrong type of visa, so it’s useless. And you spelled my city as “San Diago” in four separate places. This does not inspire me with confidence in your attention to detail.

I also appreciate your special way of surprising me with new information. So far, the list includes:

Surprise! We need a check written on the business checking account that we didn’t tell you that you should have opened.
Surprise! The 15 letters your partner has collected from eminent people in his field all need to mention a specific phrase which we forgot to tell you about, go back and have them all re-write the letters.
Surprise! Your partner will not, in fact, be able to get a job on this visa as we had implied, he can only work as a consultant.
Surprise! Here is a letter to sign stating that your new corportation will pay him $50 K per year plus benefits (oh, and we spelled his name wrong in the letter).
Surprise! We’ll need another check for yet another type of letter we didn’t tell you about.
Sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise: “Surprise! Although I won’t return your calls and rarely deign to answer email, today I will take your phone call.”

So, Mr. Lawyer, I pit you for poor communication. I pit you for poor spelling. I pit you for arrogance and attitude.

And while we’re at it, I pit Bill Clinton for the Defense of Marriage Act, which means that a marriage in Massachusetts or Canada is useless for immigration purposes, and I pit the U.S. of A. for making this process so difficult, dehumanizing, frustrating, expensive, inefficient, and putting an unbearable amount of stress on the relationship. If you force me to emigrate, I will take great pleasure in defaulting on $80K in student loans.

2

Well, if it makes you feel any better, getting a loved-one into the U.S. is no party for us straights, either. Every party in every department at every step in the process, I’m convinced, are trained to make it the most obnoxious, frustrating, humiliating, ire-inducing, expensive, annoying, stressful process anyone ever endeavored. Nobody you call has the right answers (IF you can get a human being on the phone). Half the forms have conflicting information on them. The agencies and offices who supply the forms you need will invariably send you the wrong forms or outdated ones (thank Og I’d already pre-printed what we’d need from souces I was able to track down online (of course there is no one place you can go to find all the forms you’ll need), or we’d’ve been screwed, big time). Pictures that qualified in the eyes of eight different agents at numerous different stages become suddenly not the right angle and have to be retaken at the last minute. The list goes on and on.

People couldn’t understand why all our plans were so vague and last-minute, particularly my sister. I had to create a website to show everything we were going through, in an effort to get them to shut up and be patient. And at this moment, that same sister’s husband is sitting in Canada, where he’s been waiting for the last year and a half, and will continue to wait for who-knows-how long, until his visa is finally processed (which would’ve gone faster had she listened to me and filed the way I told her, instead of listening to the immigration attorney she called for his opinion). I can’t decide if I feel bad that she has to go through all this shit, or glad she finally knows what we went through and maybe feels a little bad about how she annoyed us during our ordeal.

Anyway, best of luck to you. I hope you get everything resolved and live happily ever after.

3

Off to the Pit!

4

Its easier for us straights because we can get married.

5

Minor Hijack: If you’re an old CSN fan like myself, you may appreciate the video featured prominently at the top left of this page. It’s pretty cool and is actually somewhat relevant to the subject at hand.

6

Did I say anything about comparative “ease”? No. I simply tried to commiserate. The fact is, while there may be additional other hoops gays have to jump through (which, for the record, I think SUCKS), that doesn’t mean dealing with the INS or whatever acronym they’re calling themselves these days, doesn’t also suck for the rest of us. And being married is no guarantee that the process won’t fucking suck, as well. As I said, my sister’s husband is still in Canada a year and a half after starting the process, with no imminent end in sight.

7

Is your lawyer trying to get him here on some sort of work visa? Does your lawyer specialize in those? Those seem to be fairly specialized. I only know what I’ve been told by a friend of my wife who is here on a work visa but my understanding is that your visa is contingent on working only for the company that sponsors you.

I would sit down with your lawyer and ask him exactly what kind of visa you guys are applying for, what the requirements of those visas are and what the limitations on your partner are under that kind of visa.

  • I am not your lawyer, you are not my client. I am not licensed in your state and in fact have never been there and probably have no intention of going there. I don’t practice immigration law and in fact, hate immigration law and practice since you have to deal with the USCIS and that is a process akin to dentistry without anaesthesia. For all you know, I could be some random idiot whose sole qualifications are the ability to turn on a computer, access the internet and use a keyboard.
8

Being married doesn’t in any way make it easier to get someone into the country. My cousin was married in 1999 to an Indian man, and he was not able to come to this coutnry for four years, they threw so much red tape in his way.

They’ve made it harder for everyone.

9

I think it’s supposed to be hard everywhere. My friend married a girl from China, and just last week she was trying to get the police station to take her fingerprints so they could run a background check so she could get some security paper so she could attach it to some other form and send it to some other department so eventually she’ll have Canadian citizenship.

Last week they wouldn’t do it 'cause her last name on her healthcare card was different (despite them having their marriage certificate with them, which really should explain things). She got a new health care card, and now this week they wouldn’t do it 'cause you can read her signature spelling her old name on her driver’s licence.

So she’s changing her signature for their sake and has a new driver’s licence in the mail, but as in your situation, I hardly think it’s the last roadblock.

Good luck!

10

An attorney I was working for idiotically tried to help one of his (corporate) clients help his Canadian wife get her and her kids their U.S. citizenship a couple years ago. Among other things, the local then-INS office refused the documents we sent over because there wasn’t a cover letter authorizing the office messenger (who was an actual employee of the firm, not just from a courier service) to drop off the documents with them. We ended up having to have the poor woman come into the office to sign a letter so her paperwork could even be submitted.

They try every way they can to make it absolutely impossible to succeed. If there’s a more fucked-up, less efficient department in the U.S. government, I cannot imagine what it could be.

11

Thanks for the commiseration, everyone. I wasn’t trying to say that it was more difficult for gay couples than straight married couples, just that our not being able to marry was an extra layer of difficulty. I see from Shayna’s post that being married doesn’t always make it easier. Great system we’ve got.

The lawyer does seem to know about this type of visa, but it’s the attention to detail that worries me. I got the corrected documents today: the only thing they misspelled was my name, but I suspect that’s passive-aggressive support staff. Or so I keep telling myself. (It was only on the letter to me, so it doesn’t matter.)

12

Can I ask, preferably without getting flamed, why you want to pit your immigration attorney for anything other than helping you circumvent immigration laws?

13

Come to think of it, he doesn’t really seem to be helping you do that either.

14

It looks like he’s trying to comply with immigration laws, not circumvent them. The intended outcome, after all, is a perfectly legal and valid visa.

15

Don’t you mean “us breaders?”

16

It seems like the entire system is based on the principle of “if you don’t like it, go back where you came from.”

One might even get the impression America didn’t want any immigrants.

17

Personally, I prefer my fish grilled with some lemon.

18

That’s certainly one possibility. I suspect, hopefully without putting words in Monty’s mouth, that he was exploring another possibility – that the corporation is being formed not to do any real work, but for the express purpose of manufacturing a job which only the OP’s paramour can fill. In other words, if, having created this corporation, made it look real by opening a business checking account, and claiming a job exists that they cannot fill except with this guy, another applicant with even better qualifications for the job were to come along, the OP would not hire that other applicant. The job is not real, in this view of the situation; it’s created for the sole purpose of getting a visa for the OP’s partner.

If that’s what Monty is suggesting, then I’d say it’s fair to characterize that as circumventing the law.

19

Wouldn’t forming a corporation to sponsor his immigration with the sole purpose of granting him his citizenship, via signing legal documents saying your going to give him a salary and company benefits, be… um fraudulent? Of course, if you’re really going to pay him a wage for company services, and he’ll pay the required taxes accordingly, it shouldn’t be a problem.

20

Nevermind, I see it was already brought up. :smack: