Permanent residency
It seems like a very long time ago now that we started the process of getting permanent residency in the US. My work was prepared to sponsor me through this process, so late in 2011 I met with the people in International Services who would be handling the application. This is the one time where having the H1-B visa instead of the E-3 was beneficial, as there is a natural path from H1-B to permanent residency but not from the E-3.
The first decision to make was what process to use. There are a couple of options for someone in my position. One is to go through the National Interest Waiver, which involves getting a number of letters of support to say that the US would be significantly worse off if the applicant could not stay in the country. The other is known as PERM, which involves proving that there is no-one in the US qualified and available to do the same job as me. The NIW process seemed to be targeted at people with advanced degrees, which I don’t have, so I elected to go down the PERM path.
Another option that we’d been trying was the Diversity Visa process, better known as the Green Card Lottery. Each year we could both enter the lottery, and if either of us were successful, we’d both be eligible for permanent residency. We were fortunate as Australian citizens to be eligible for this lottery; citizens from some other countries (UK, Canada, India, China) are not eligible due to the large numbers of immigrants from those countries. We tried for a few years, but never picked a winning ticket.
The PERM process required me to get letters from previous employers which went well beyond the standard statement of employment that is usually issued in Australia when leaving an employer. In addition to the normal period of service and job title, the letters needed to describe skills and responsibilities of my role. Luckily I still had contacts at Caltex, Qenos and the Australian Synchrotron who remembered me and were able to help out with getting these letters. It also required an assessment of the quality of my Australian degree to ensure that it was equivalent to a US bachelors degree.
The next step was the Labor Certification from the Department of Labor. This needed the supporting documentation from my previous employers showing that I had the skills and experience required to do my job, as well as justification that there was no-one else in the US qualified and available to do it. Getting to this stage took quite a while, so it wasn’t until early 2013 that the application for the Labor Certification could be submitted. The Labor Certification takes around six months to get approved, assuming it doesn’t get audited, which adds another nine months to the process. In July 2013 we finally got notification that the Labor Certification had been approved and was not going to be audited.
One downside of the process taking as long as it did was that we needed to renew our H1-B visas. They are issued with a three year duration, with one three year extension available. The renewal process has to be done outside the US. We decided to do this on a work trip of mine to the UK. We made appointments at the US Embassy in London on the Friday before my week of work in Oxford, submitted the application for the renewed visas, and left the embassy without our passports. The hope (and expectation) was that the visas would be processed quickly and our passports shipped to us in Oxford during the week. This ended up working out fine, with our passports arriving in the Wednesday, well ahead of our departure date.
The next step was the submission of the paperwork for adjustment of status to USCIS. This was actually the most straightforward part of the whole process. There was a short window in which we were not allowed to leave the US. Leaving the country in the period between submitting the application and receiving the notification from USCIS that the application has been received can be considered abandoning the application. We had to be careful with the timing of submitting the application to USCIS as I had a number of international work trips, but we found a window that we hoped would be long enough. Fortunately the receipt notification came back before I needed to get on a plane for my next trip. The actual document needed is called ‘Advance Parole’, which is permission to leave the country during the adjustment process. This also arrived before I needed to travel. Doing a bit of research also suggested that the leaving the country during the adjustment process from H1-B to permanent resident is not usually considered abandoning the application, but it was better to not take the risk.
We also had to get medical exams done, which was mainly an assessment of vaccination history and some basic checks for things like tuberculosis and other diseases. Another step in the process was biometrics, so we made trips to the USCIS office near us to get fingerprints take and go through a short interview.
The receipts arrived in mid-August 2013, followed in early September by the Advance Parole card. The Advance Parole card is combined with the Employment Authorization. Having this meant that Kim was now allowed to work in the US for the first time.
The next step was getting notice of the approval of the Immigrant Petition for Alien Worker from the USCIS. This meant that they had accepted the Labor Certification and other application documentation. This occurred in early October, 2013. After this was the wait for approval of the permanent residency application. We were initially told that this could take one to two months, but it was a matter of days before we received notification that the permanent residency application had been approved, with cards being sent out within seven days.
Around this time was the infamous government shutdown due to the politicians’ inability to approve a budget. Fortunately the permanent residency application is a ‘fee-for-service’ process, so was not affected by the shutdown. Our permanent resident cards arrived in mid-October.
One of the significant benefits of permanent residency for me has been much quicker re-entry into the US from overseas. Prior to getting permanent residency, I had to use the visitor line at immigration, which could take anything from five minutes to nearly two hours, depending on how busy things were. Many airports have a separate line for permanent residents, which is usually the shortest line.
Even better than this shorter line though was that permanent resident status made us eligible for the Global Entry program, which is the US Trusted Traveller program. After going through some additional background checks and a short interview, we became Global Entry members. This has to be one of the best $100 I’ve spent. Electronic kiosks for doing the immigration checks and expedited customs queues make the re-entry process remarkably quick now. The slowest part is now waiting for the bags at the luggage carousel. It was particularly valuable in Miami when we returned from Costa Rica, where the main customs queue was probably 90 minutes long, but the Global Entry queue less than 2 minutes. We would have missed our connecting flight had we not had the access to the fast lane.
Other benefits of permanent residency are that Kim can now work in any capacity, and I am no longer tied to my job at Brookhaven. The H1-B visa was directly tied to employer sponsorship, so if I’d left Brookhaven for any reason, we would have had to leave the country.
