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Comment by ralfruns | Hacker News Reader

I went through the green card process last year. From my experience, it is nearly impossible without a lawyer.

I wonder how much of the delay can be attributed to lobbying from the immigration lawyers that profit from the complicated, paper based process.

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I remember taking my wife for her medical exam as part of her green card process. What a joke! The doctor--who he has to select as someone on a small approved list--was basically retired and using his position on that list as a way to make extra money. I don't think he did a thing to examine her. He just chatted and told us stories about when he was fighting in Korea and accidentally stepped in a kimchi pot. Very nice fellow, but clearly just milking the process.

Had the same experience during my visit. Some older Russian doctor who chatted with me for 15 minutes, telling me that America was ok, that green card medical visit were pretty much all she was doing now, 3 half-day a week and that was plenty for her to make good money. She pocketed the $600 and gave me the sealed envelop.

I have no problem with not passing any cost to the American taxpayers (and even that could be debatable, yes I'm an immigrant but I've never been unemployed and I believe I create wealth so it's a full net win for the country), but the system is really hostile and dysfunctional.

Honestly, I don't care if you create wealth for this country. Having a diverse population to interact with and bring their point of view to things is a net benefit to the whole society instead of cultural homogeneity.

My "doctor" from the list also was an old guy. He examined me in his living room with 4 cats wandering around and jumping on tables. Very bizarre situation.

The medical exams are a really odd requirement. You can live on an H1-B for 10 years, but they still have to check if you cough funny before granting a greencard.

We had a similarly absurd experience with fingerprints.

Would you believe that the NY State Police aren't a certified fingerprinting service for INS? (or at least they weren't 20 years ago)

My wife had her prints done by the state police, but Immigration rejected them on that basis. Instead, we had to drive an hour to a camera shop that had the appropriate certification, where the clerk - an Indian immigrant himself, by appearance - took her fingerprints.

It boggles the mind that they'd prefer a clerk in a camera store rather than the state police. It seems clear that the goal isn't proper documentation or security or anything like that, but more along the lines of collecting certification fees and perpetuating the bureacracy.

I filed:

* A permanent residency application based on my marriage.

* An application to remove conditions on said permanent residency

* An expedited naturalization application

We didn't bother getting a lawyer: the paperwork was easy. The problem isn't that the paperwork is hard. The problem is that there is so much paperwork to file.

My wife and I are going through the same thing for her Adjustment of status, she's here on an F-1 visa. It took us a little while to get the paperwork all in order(she was away for work for a few months and we needed to sort out a number of things to give us the highest chance of getting approved). For us, the hardest part was sorting through all the tiny little details and that a lot of the I-xxx forms kept expiring every couple of months during this past year. I got laid off and had to start a new job during the process, but then I had to wait a couple months to have a few paychecks to prove I can support her, but oh wait, the paychecks have my filing status as 'single' because HR screwed up, now I have to wait a few more months to get some checks with the correct tax filing status... Everything that I've read and seem makes it seem like any single incorrect detail can tank the entire application process, so we octuple-checked our forms.

Have you undergone the interview yet?

I did the interviews 8 years ago (as part of a K-1 visa and then for permanent residency). It really wasn't a big deal. The guy barely looked through our supporting evidence and seemed more interesting in asking general questions about what my home country was like.

I think you're overstating it slightly. "Easy" is not the word I'd choose to use.

I too decided not to get a lawyer. It went fine. But it was not "easy" it was long, painful, and trivial to make an error (the paperwork is extremely poorly designed, we used online guides instead of the official instructions to avoid tons of gotchas, in particular with the financials).

People just need to be extremely careful without a lawyer. It isn't "easy" but it isn't so hard that you NEED a lawyer either (which could cost thousands).

True. It is definitely not easy. Another problem is the waiting periods these days is frustratingly long - so if you made a small mistake then it adds anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to remedy it, to an already lengthy process. This is why most people hire attorneys. The ironic thing is that attorneys make mistakes too - happened to me and a handful of people I know.

> The ironic thing is that attorneys make mistakes too - happened to me and a handful of people I know.

I commented on this above, but it nearly happened to me, too. We picked an immigration attorney to look over our paperwork, just to make sure we didn't make any glaring mistakes. While we did get some good suggestions, they missed something pretty big that we found on both the official government documentation and a number of forums, and had decided not to go with their services anymore. Luckily we caught it prior to submission.

I agree completely, having gone through this with my wife. It's easy to see how someone for whom English isn't their first language could have the best of intentions, yet still accidentally wind up on the wrong side of the law.

Went through the same thing years ago. We weighed all the paperwork submitted and it was just shy of 5 pounds.

Marriage-based PR is probably the easiest and most straightforward PR path there is.

I have a few friends that have done it without lawyers and others that have. I would not say that a lawyer is needed but if your case is not straight forward you better get you a lawyer or suffer the consequences(deportation with a multi year wait for your paper work to go through)

Care to elaborate? Family-based immigration (the overwhelming majority of cases) only requires 3 to 5 forms and a lawyer can't help much as you have to provide all the infos and documents yourself. And for employment-based immigration, most of the burden is on the employer.

I finished the EB-1 process this year. As thankful as I may be for how it worked out eventually (and knowing that most employment based petitions do not fall in this category), I still regularly show people the picture I snapped of the 6 pounds of documentation I had to prepare and send to support my case. Maybe they just did a good job convincing me of their worth, but I can't imagine doing this without lawyers.

Thanks! Just would like to precise this is the exceptional category for 'alien with exceptional abilities' [0] who need to prove their exceptional abilities; all other employment-based petitions are filed by employers.

[0] http://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent-workers...

Mine was employment based / EB1. It was not the number of forms, but the structure that made it complicated. The final package we submitted was over 150 pages total for me and my wife. This is in part because the same information is required multiple times, since the different steps get reviewed by different departments.

I went through it 8 years ago (via a K-1 and then as part of the permanent resident process) and didn't find it that onerous. There was a lot of repetition and some hassle with having to travel to another city for an interview and waiting for an employment authorisation document, but at no point did we consider involving a lawyer. I suspect the type of visa and country of origin make a huge difference.

I wonder how much is the result of lobbying from the vastly larger contingent of people who simply don't want immigration into the U.S.

I think this is a bigger part of it. There are occasionally scandals that get media attention where someone got through the immigration system when they arguably shouldn't have (past involvement with organized crime, etc.), which produces public pressure to add another check to make sure it doesn't happen again. So the system is oriented around an adversarial sort of approach: we think there's a good chance you probably shouldn't be here, and you need to go through this complex process to prove otherwise. The system is designed to find dozens of reasons to exclude the applicant (since voters demand excluding people for those reasons), so there are a ton of pitfalls. Which is where the immigration lawyers then come in, since an individual immigrant with no idea how the system is designed or what it's looking for has a high likelihood of stumbling into one of those pitfalls.

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