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| London, United Kingdom |  Review on October 14, 2009: |
Traci - Andrew
Rating:  | Review Topic: K3 Visa
This was the second visit to the london US Embassy for me, the first time around it was for my K1 visa interview, this was a very bad experience for me personally as I had an interview with a young woman around 24 with an obvious chip on her shoulder, both my Fiancee (at the time) and myself had both been married before a couple of times, this woman made comments about how this must be true love as we have been married several times between us, she tried to upset me and get a angry reaction, which I did not respond to, she was very abrupt and gave me a refusal notice with a smile.
So you can imagine my anguish when I had to go back to the Embassy after getting married and applying for a K3 visa, our visa now requires a waiver of extreme hardship to overcome the 2 points that they have against me, a crime of moral turpitude and for not ticking the box on the visa waiver form on my visits to the USA now they have added immigration fraud... So I went armed with a bag loaded up with every form and every original document and several copies with lots of backup evidence of our relationship, after arriving at 8am and then waiting until 10am to pass over my orignal documents & copies to a chinese woman who could not speak english very well, I was then told to go sit back down, during which time the US Ambasador has some engagement with the queen and a procession of carriages arrived to pick him and his wife up and several other high reanking officials, of course the interviews ground to a halt as all the staff were expected to go outside on the ebassy steps to cheer him on his way, after about 30 minutes things returned to normal and the interviews started again. it was now 1pm and the waiting area with about 150 people had gone down to about 20, again the interviews stopped as the Ambasador returned by royal carriage, another 30 minute wait, I am still looking for my number to appear on the screen, up to now they have sort of gone in order of arrival, however my number gets skipped and eveyone else gets seen to and the room empties by 2pm, I am now feeling that they have lost my paperwork or the system has forgotton that I am still waiting, for K3/CR-1 visas they use windows 13 to 16.
I started to get up as I have been waiting 6 hours by this stage and decided to find someone, as I did so, the number I was holding was called out to go to window 16, at last, but now I remembered my last visit and thought about the young rude woman that I got before, however as it turned out i was greeted by a nice middle aged woman whom was very plesant, she asked me several questions about when and where we met, about what I plan to do if I get the visa and why I chose to marry an American, but these were answered well and the conversation was kept light and even a laugh or two was exchanged. this made me very comfortable, I was armed with a very heavy bag of pictures, emails, text messages, telephone bills, MSN messages, receipts and every other piece of paper that showed we had a genuine relationship, however this lady asked for nothing... absolutly nothing, I was amazed? she told me in a nice way that I was still being refused entry based on the same two criteria, however I had a waiver to hand over so the lady passed me over to the gentleman whom deals with the waivers, he was in fact the waiver supervisor, he was a real gent as well, kind and knowledable, he adised me that we were missing a couple of forms from the waiver and explained everything to me so that we can get the waiver sent back in with the correct forms attached... also a bit of a shock was the fact that we went in applying for a K3 but ended up applying for the CR-1 which is in fact a better visa to get as it saves the need to then apply in the USA for permission to work and saves about $2000 and a lot of time and effort to obtain an adjustment of status. Our Lawyers believe that this has happened due to the extended time the application has taken, therefore the Embassy is being helpful? I will leave that open to your own opinion... 
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Consulate / USCIS Member Review #5083