Can I get a British passport?

[homesick_american 1]

My permanent resident visa did not take days to process...it DID take months. The fiance visa took one day to do; the limited leave to remain visa took about six weeks to process, and the indefinite leave to remain visa took 3 months to process but that was partly due to the fact that the Home Office lost my passport while they were processing the visa and it took them a while to find it.

If you are happy to go to Croydon and give up a day you can have it processed in a day. Things may have changed but this is what I did to get ILR (and a married friend did when she changed her fiance visa to LLR). I sat there with a book for the same length of time my husband waited for his K-1 interview (about 4 hours). I have no experience of it, but I believe a spousal visa within the US takes only a few days at the Embassy (or one day if you go in person), so the long seperation is not necessary.

My citizenship took somewhere between 6-8 weeks to process.

I was in York and taking time off work to go to Croydon wasn't something I wanted to do; plus it's not like they were going to deport me while they were processing my visa application. It wasn't a huge deal; I just didn't want people to think that if you put your app in the post on Friday, the visa comes back on Tuesday. However you slice it they do process applications more quickly in the UK...even with the lost passport.

There IS the outside chance of being asked to appear in person at a UK embassy when applying for a resident visa, and the closest UK embassy to me when I lived in Austin was pretty damned far...so I was glad they could process my fiancee visa without meeting me.