Woohoo! Got my green card. (also, Ask the guy who...)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

That’s right, i’m now a Permanent Resident of the United States.

I actually married my American wife about 5 years ago, but because i was here on a valid student (F1) visa, i kept procrastinating about putting in the permanent residency paperwork. This was mainly due to the fact that i had heard some horrific stories of the hassle involved, not to mention the fact that it’s a fairly expensive process.

Anyway, i finally got off my ass and did it. As it turned out, my concerns were pretty much baseless. I mailed off all my forms on April 6, had my biometrics (fingerprints, pictures) done in the middle of May, and had the final interview on June 19. On that same day, i got final approval and had a 1-year Permanent Resident stamp placed in my passport. The actual green card came in the mail a couple of weeks later.

So, about three months from start to finish. Pretty damn good.

Of course, i have no illusion that my case is necessarily typical. I’m a white guy whose first language is English; i’m from a country that is not on any terrorist watch list; and i’m married to a US citizen. I probably had one of the more straightforward applications that they have to deal with. Still, even when everything should be simple, it can still be made unpleasant by people who act like jerks, or who go out of their way to make things difficult. I had none of that, and every single person i dealt with at the DHS/USCIS was polite, friendly, and very professional.

Anyway, just thought i’d share. If anyone has any questions, i’d be happy to answer them.

2

How expensive did it turn out to be?

Also, congrats!!

3

Congratulations!

Is the green card actually green? :slight_smile:

4

Woohoo! Congratulations. Good luck too. :slight_smile:

5

Thanks for congratulations and good wishes.

Some of the forms themselves have pretty large filing fees attached.

Form I-485 Application To Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status has a fee of $930, plus an $80 biometrics fee. The I-130 Petition for Alien Relative, which my wife had to fill out, cost $355.

Then there’s I-693 Report of Medical Examination and Vaccination Record. The form itself doesn’t cost anything to submit, but the cost of the vaccinations and blood tests that i needed added up to around $500. And, because none of them were medically necessary procedures, my health insurance didn’t cover any of it.

Finally, there was an expense that was not officially part of the process, but was unavoidable for us. I received my notice to appear for my interview, scheduled for June 19, and my wife had already booked a research trip and was going to be away on that day. There was no way to reschedule the interview (even though the form suggested that it was possible), so we paid almost $300 for her to fly back from the east coast for a day to attend the interview. She flew in on the Wednesday night, we had the interview on Thursday morning, and i put her on the red-eye back to New York on Thursday night.

So, total cost for us was around $2,100. And we didn’t have the expense of hiring a lawyer. Plenty of people, who have more complicated cases than mine, have to get a lawyer to make sure everything goes smoothly.

I was wondering the same thing myself, until it arrived. The front of the card, with my picture and fingerprint and personal details, is basically just white with black writing. The back is mainly taken up by what appears to be a large magnetic or computer-readable strip. But there is a section at the top that is green, and says Permanent Resident Card.

Here’s an image i found on the web.

6

Feh, that’s cheaper than if you moved her to Australia.

Grats on your Green Card!

7

Really? I have a couple of friends (one Aussie, one American) who id the move to Australia, and i thought his Australian residency application was cheaper than that. I could be wrong though.

Also, one thing i never realized before getting the green card is that i am apparently required by law to carry it with me wherever i go.

8

Just as a point of reference, I held a green card for over 20 years - I was only asked for it once, on a job interview. That’s out of probably 20 interviews. The only other times I used it at all was to re-enter the US.

9

Congrats on the green card. :slight_smile:

My wife (Japanese) and I married in '05, and filed about a month later. We consulted very briefly with a couple of immigration lawyers (about 15 minutes each) to get some questions answered, but we filled/filed the forms ourselves. I think I may have had more paperwork to fill out than she did, since I was officially her sponsor. We followed all the instructions absolutely to the letter, including the order of stacking the paperwork, two punch-holes at the top, and a binder. Can’t remember, but I think we even had tabs on the pages. I wish we had taken a picture; it was a nice looking package by the time we were done. In the end, no hiccups at all; she received conditional permanent residence about 7 months later, and last year had the “conditional” removed.

No doubt some people’s applications get waylaid for no good reason, but I wonder how often there’s something the applicant did wrong, whether it’s an honest mistake, leaving something blank (IIRC they insisted that you leave no question unanswered, even if it was only “N/A”), or bending the truth/lying.

10

The cards used to have green wavy lines on them. Here’s what they used to look like. May parents had ones like that.

Congrats, mhendo!