Sometimes, you'd almost think that the US government didn't want people coming to their country.

I came to the US to work for a new employer, so I was granted an H1-B visa. This visa says, more or less, that I can work for the named company in the specified location doing the defined job. No moonlighting allowed. Getting the visa took time - the original application took three months to process - however once I had the papers I obtained the necessary stamp in my passport within a week. Despite that delay, my visa was dated as starting from the time of initial application and was valid for three years (no H1 visa can be valid for more than six years). My visa expired in October last year.

Obviously I needed to have a renewal since I was still working for a US company, and indeed plan to live here indefinitely what with having married recently and so on (let's just not talk about the green card thing right now).

My employer filed for a renewal of my visa in September last year. The fact of this filing meant that I was legal to work, but not having any approved visa in hand meant that although I could easily leave the US, I would be unable to get back in. This obviously made our travel plans a little fragile - we had wanted to visit Britain for Christmas last year, then we were planning on going over around about now, but having no travel documents meant that we could make no plans.

The approval notice finally came through earlier this week; that's six months to process the renewal. "Hooray!" I thought. "We'll be able to travel in the summer!"

Ah, but an approval notice is not a visa. Oh no. As before, I need to send off my passport for the stamp to be inserted into it, and there is no way at all that I will get the passport back in a week this time.

You see, the last time I applied for a visa stamp was in early 2001. Since then, there's been some changes in the attitude of the authorities here to foreigners coming to their country, regardless of whether they're already here or not, what with this whole "war on terror" thing going on. And so I need to send my passport and the accompanying paperwork (more on that in a moment) to a preprocessing centre in Missouri, where it will be tagged and sent on to the actual processing centre in Washington DC, where the application will work exceedingly slowly through the bowels of the machine until a newly stamped passport will pop out of the other end. This whole process is expected to take 12-14 weeks. Not days, but weeks.

This frightens me, because it means I will be without my passport for over three months and the advice to non-US citizens is very firmly to have your passport readily available. I'm obviously not expecting to get into trouble or anything, but if anything were to happen (or indeed if I needed to travel urgently) then I would be, in the common parlance, screwed.

And then there is the matter of the paperwork required.

I remember getting quite stressed in January 2001 when I was filling out the form for my visa application. The form seemeed complicated, but that was as nothing compared to the process today. Then, I needed to send five things. Today, I am required to include ten distinct items.

All of this rather histrionic bureaucracy leads me to wonder whether anyone has been caught because of these measures, or whether the only effect has been to discourage legitimate visitors.

I know I'm looking at the option of citizenship in a whole new light, though. Regardless of my feelings towards some of the directions this country is going in, if becoming a citizen means not having to jump through stupid hoops every few years then it might be worth it.

Posted by Dunx at March 24, 2004 11:07 AM