Stage 1 Complete

Ok for any keeping track. Date paperwork was received into the system was December 21st. Date petition was approved is March 21st. 3 months. Now first off I am rather happy that it has been done however what exactly has happend here? The papwerwork has been vetted but no visa has been approved. Nope, now we have the right to get one from the consulate. But first the paperwork has to go the the NVC. National Visa Processing center. Now out of curiosity... why didn't the inital request go to the national visa processing center? Ah well logic. Anyway now it will take 2-4 weeks for the NVC to receive our approved petition and to get us set up in their system before forwarding our request on to the consulate where the interview will be held.

Why the processing of creating the visa case needs to be forwarded on to another center for more processing is something that baffles me. Why hasn't the case already been created as part of the petition review process? It sounds like the actual physical paperwork is now having to travel from california to new hampshire so that someone there can punch it into a computer, assign it a case number and forward it on to the appropriate consulate.

The longer I deal with this process the less sense it makes. The USCIS approves the petition but does not handle the actual visa processing. That is the job of the NVS. Only the NVS dosn't really handle it either... it just serves as some kind of administrative hub for tossing these cases out to the consulates who perform the interviews and ultimately grant or deny the visa's while the border folks have the final say so on whether the US will actually honor a visa it has issued to someone. Checkbox after checkbox after checkbox. Sillyness.

Anyway a good hint I ran across said that at this point it can be a good idea to contact your local consulate about the petition approval and ask for the first packet of information and requirements to be sent then. It can let you get a leg up on the process by allowing you to be prepared by the time the paperwork actually shows up rather than waiting for it to show up first and then doing all the things that need to be done.

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