STUCK @ NVC for AP

[Y's_habibitk 2]

Thank you very much Lisa and uscandual,

when I call the NVC

603-334-0700

English press 1, next you can choose to talk to the operator by pressing 5. If you wait you will hear some other choices the next first choice you hear... Information on your immigration visa press 1 do this and they will ask you to enter the first 3 letters of your case number. In our case it is KEV. The recording will ask you if what you have entered is correct? I had to press 2 for not correct and then the recording corrected its self from KEW to KEV then I entered the rest of the numbers. Do not worry your only pressing numbers and not the letters. Again in our case it was KEV this is 539 on the dial pad on the phone. Next they will tell you about your case : ) I hope this helps you : )

aha! this is why there was no info when you called...the prompt is for immigrant visas(cr-1 ect) i did that for the first 2 calls to nvc and thought i was going nuts and our case wasnt there yet.

i finally waited to hear all the choices and got "k visa"(option2) and talked to someone. heh

well, congrats again and i hope you guys have a bump free ride the rest of the way

Lisa

[luck-e and Kookie 0]

I was introduced to a family friend who works in immigration in the US and since i am on AP im really frustrated about my case I emailed her for help. She said that there is really this administrative process that they are doing right now to check if both of us are really single. Usually it takes them a month or two. I am on my 25thh day right now and she said that if i haven't heard anything from them in 10 days to contact her. Im not sure if that can help me further. but i hope it will becuase this is prolonging my agony..

does she work at the NVC? there are various points in the process from USCIS through NVC to the embassy at which you can go into AP and I would scream if the reason we got held up for 6 weeks was to do something as simple as that!

that im not sure if she is from NVC or USCIS because when we were introduced last year when she was here in manila, they said she works for the US immigration. I gave her my case number on my email and i guess that's the reason for us because my fiance just got divorced in guam, maybe they are checking on that. But she said to contact her again after 10 days if i havent heard anything from them yet.

[cdneh 3,112]

K1 visa's are not in the automated system. If you want info on those you have to speak to an operator.

[cdneh 3,112]

I was introduced to a family friend who works in immigration in the US and since i am on AP im really frustrated about my case I emailed her for help. She said that there is really this administrative process that they are doing right now to check if both of us are really single. Usually it takes them a month or two. I am on my 25thh day right now and she said that if i haven't heard anything from them in 10 days to contact her. Im not sure if that can help me further. but i hope it will becuase this is prolonging my agony..

There is quite a lot of things NVC check for. In fact this can happen at any stage of the process.

http://www.usaimmigrationattorney.com/Secu...tiveReview.html

[Badgerella 5]

We finally have a real interview date! April 8th at 10:30.

The embassy lady actually called me today on my cellphone to, basically, tell me that she had rescheduled our interview and... her vacation days... to make it all work. Or I assume so, considering our first today's conversation..

[Talyss 0]

We finally have a real interview date! April 8th at 10:30.

The embassy lady actually called me today on my cellphone to, basically, tell me that she had rescheduled our interview and... her vacation days... to make it all work. Or I assume so, considering our first today's conversation..

great news - congrats!

[cdneh 3,112]

We finally have a real interview date! April 8th at 10:30.

The embassy lady actually called me today on my cellphone to, basically, tell me that she had rescheduled our interview and... her vacation days... to make it all work. Or I assume so, considering our first today's conversation..

Congratulations

[Badgerella 5]

Thank you!

Now we start worrying about getting denied........ just two days before our petition expires. March 12th, the original interview date, would have worked a lot better, in that case, but it just didn't work for us. Fiance wants to be here for the interview and he just can't make it before April 1st.. ish.

[Natan 0]

hey cdneh... i cant seem to find a good thread about what's to be done now after i got the visa and before i go to states and after,,,i will be leaving in 5 days and i gathered some documents that i found out that i need...i have a new birth certificate written in romanian, french and english...and i have a proof that i had no car accident in last 12 months so i can drive my fiancee's car... you know stuff like these...

We finally have a real interview date! April 8th at 10:30.

The embassy lady actually called me today on my cellphone to, basically, tell me that she had rescheduled our interview and... her vacation days... to make it all work. Or I assume so, considering our first today's conversation..

Congratulations

[cdneh 3,112]

When is your interview Natan? Have you had the medical and all?

There are some reviews of the consulate here:

http://www.visajourney.com/reviews/index.php

And some Embassy info here:

http://www.visajourney.com/consulates/inde...p;cty=Bucharest

[Natan 0]

no...i already got the visa 4 days ago...im leaving in 5 days... i asked you cos i thought you already started the papers or something for the next level...

When is your interview Natan? Have you had the medical and all?

There are some reviews of the consulate here:

http://www.visajourney.com/reviews/index.php

And some Embassy info here:

http://www.visajourney.com/consulates/inde...p;cty=Bucharest

[cdneh 3,112]

no...i already got the visa 4 days ago...im leaving in 5 days... i asked you cos i thought you already started the papers or something for the next level...

When is your interview Natan? Have you had the medical and all?

There are some reviews of the consulate here:

http://www.visajourney.com/reviews/index.php

And some Embassy info here:

http://www.visajourney.com/consulates/inde...p;cty=Bucharest

Ooooo!! Congratulations...I shouldn't post before coffee!

I haven't even looked at that. I have just finished up work yesterday, yay!!!...and am leaving here in 17 days. I am right now just finishing up some loose ends, and packing. I'm not even going to look at that until I get where I am going

[Badgerella 5]

Aaaaa.

Everyone seems to be leaving so soon.

I have yet to get my visa (well, we hope that I just will..), but I won't leave right after that either. There's so much that needs to be done before I am ready. Some exams, thesis and getting rid of my current job, as well. Packing and such.. ugh. Don't even know how one goes about that, haha.

[cdneh 3,112]

Packing. *ack* Hate packing. With a passion. Man the stuff I have kept without reason beggers belief

Got the papershredder going flat out.

[scandal 951]

All right gang, well I finally got around to compiling some stats on our NVC wait. I'd been meaning to do this for a few weeks.

To show you just how PATHETIC is the life of a guy waiting for his honey's visa so they can finally be reunited ..... yes, I actually am spending my Valentines night doing this!

How's that for a guy with literally no life???

Some technical details, for those so inclined...

First of all - there is A LOT of data in the Visajourney database. As we all knew by looking at Igor's page, it is possible to get great stuff from this database. Igor has obviously mastered the ability to run a cron-based job to automatically pull the dataset hourly. He seems to run SQL queries directly against the VJ database, Perhaps he's figured out the VJ http syntax to format his queries via the webserver but it doesn't look to me as though that's what he's doing.

Anyway, I don't have direct SQL access to the db and I'm not smart enough to decipher the http parameter strings. So I just hacked it manually.

Instead I just used the built in query builder on the VJ website itself. That kind of sucks because it's pretty weak, I can't run the queries I'd really want to. It lets you hide columns, but the row filtering was not helpful. I just grabbed all rows in the database for which "NVC Received" was non-null. That was 7113 rows out of a total 16,310 in the database. After playing around to narrow my data range as best I could, I just grabbed the resulting html pages manually and cut/pasted the raw data into Excel.

I then spent hours tonight working with Excel DCOUNTA and DAVERAGE functions to get the stats I wanted. Excel is garbage, imho. I should have done it in all in Perl, it would have taken me far less time. I don't know what possessed me to do it in Excel. Oh well.

Unfortunately VJ does not have a field on our timeline data for "AP at NVC". So it's not possible to know explicitly which applications got stuck in NVC AP.

What our timelines do have is the Date Entered NVC and Date Left NVC. Even then, unfortunately, not all VJ members recorded both of these fields. In many cases they record only one or the other or neither, so I can't compute the time spent at NVC.

So what I did was compute the time spent at NVC for those who recorded both values.

The earliest record with 'NVC received' date in the database is 8/23/1995 That's got to be a typo. The 'NVC left' date for that record was in 2008. What, they spent 13 YEARS in NVC??? Um, I doubt it. So ok, that prompted me to toss all records for which NVC Left-NVC entered was too big (I picked 1000 days, that threw away all the junk like this one).

I then compared the time spent at NVC to a threshold value which I felt was large enough to indicate that any application which spent that long at NVC probably got stuck in AP. I picked the threshold at 15 days.

That's important to remember!!! If you pick a different threshold (10 days, 20 days), you'll get different results! Caveat emptor.

The data generally covers the period 2003-2009, which seems to be the period VJ has been operational. There are some data from < 2003, but very few, and I suspect they are typos. As you'll see I focused most of my attention on the past year, 2008.

Anyway, based upon a 15 day threshold I then computed break-down stats for K1 and K3 filings, and I did that month-by-month for 2008 to see if things trended worse at the end of last year. Guess what - no surprise to all of us stuck at NVC, they ARE trending worse!!!

OK, here are the results:

Total number of rows in VJ database: 16,310

Number of rows that have a 'Start NVC' date: 7,113 (=== this is the total number of raw data rows imported into Excel spreadsheet)

Number of rows that are K1s : 5,002

Number of rows that are K3s: 836

Number of rows that are IR1/CR1: 1,275

Well, that's not really so interesting. We really care about rows that have BOTH start and end NVC dates:

Number of records that have start/end NVC dates 4,696

Number of records that don't have start/end NVC dates 2,417

Number of K1s that have start/end NVC dates 3,520

Number of K3s that have start/end NVC dates 603

Number of IR1/CR1s that have start/end NVC dates 573

OK, now here things start to get interesting. These are the average times (in days) for each visa category spent at NVC over the entire database history (2003-2009):

Average time in NVC for all records 20.349

Average time in NVC for K1s 6.918

Average time in NVC for K3s 10.121

Average time in NVC for IR1/CR1s 113.621

As we always knew, K1's generally get in and out quickly - an average of 6.9 days. K3s are a bit longer (10 days), and IR1/CR1 stay MUCH longer because that's where most of their processing occurs.

Right. Next.

Here is the K1 data, broken down month by month since Jan 08:

               Num K1/month    Avg NVC time    Num K1 > threshold    Avg NVC time > threshold    % K1 in month > threshold
Jan-08    111                    6.414            7                            35.4286                            6%
Feb-08    126                    5.651            7                            26.2857                           6%
Mar-08    125                    4.744            5                            21.2000                           4%
Apr-08    56                    4.714            4                            19.7500                           7%
May-08    78                    4.795            2                            28.5000                           3%
Jun-08    46                    4.761            1                            32.0000                           2%
Jul-08    95                    4.137            4                            19.0000                           4%
Aug-08    58                    6.448            4                            31.0000                           7%
Sep-08    71                    5.577            6                            24.3333                           8%
Oct-08    69                    4.710            3                            26.6667                           4%
Nov-08    64                    10.125            11                            43.2727                           17%
Dec-08    73                    12.452            15                            44.0000                           21%
Jan-09    116                    3.845            0                            #DIV/0!                           0%
Feb-09    13                    2.231            0                            #DIV/0!                           0%

Here's how to interpret this. Look at the first row for Jan 08, for example. In that month there were 111 K1 visas that entered NVC and also exited at some point. Those 111 applications spent an average of 6.4 days at NVC. Seven of those visas spent 15 days or longer at NVC, and they each spent an average of 35.4 days at NVC - good chance that they were 'AP' cases. 7/111 is 6%, so that's approximately the percentage of all Jan08 K1s which got stuck in AP.

Ignore the Jan/Feb 09, since those contain records which have entered NVC but not yet exited > 15 days ... That's US FOLKS!!!! STUCK NOW AT NVC!!! Hence those rows have 'zeroes' for Num K1 > threshold, and #Div/0 for the avg time > threshold.

OK, so now if you look down through the months we see something disturbing. In Nov and Dec 2008, BOTH of the last two columns jump up.

Suddenly in Nov/Dec the average time that the 'long' cases (those > 15 days which we suspect are AP) are spending an average of 43 or 44 days at NVC which is considerably higher than previous months. And it gets close to our current anecdotal evidence on this VJ thread that the wait is about 50 days.

Also, we see in Nov/Dec that 17% and 21% , respectively, of all K1 cases are waiting more than 15 days and so are suspect of being AP.

That tells us two things:::::

There seem to be MORE AP cases happening. And when they happen, they are stuck in AP longer.

Sigh.

Well, at least now we know it's not our imagination. It's really happening.

I did a similar analysis for the K3's but since there's much less data, the statistics are less relevant (law of large numbers etc.)

I've attached 2 charts showing this end of year trend in the K1 data.

I tried to attach my Excel file with all the data - all raw data, calculations, and the charts of the K1 2008 data. However VJ does not seem to allow me to update .xls files.

If you would like to see this file, just PM me and I will email it to you.

Happy Valentines all.

Looking forward to getting out of NVC HELL