mamunrony

Hi All,

It will be great if someone can suggest what should I do in the current situation while my immigration visa (F4, sibling category) is under processing and got a PhD offer from Arizona State Uni. My F4 visa application was submitted only 2 years back by my brother. Meanwhile, I have completed my MS from Uni Melb of Australia and got PhD offer in USA. I am very much interested to accept that offer, but wondering if my ongoing F4 processing will have any impact on my F1 visa application. Any suggestions/ experience sharing will be highly appreciated.

regards,
Rony

ian-mstm

Applying for an F-1 visa will have no impact whatsoever on your current family-based process, and your family-based process will have no impact whatsoever on your F-1 visa application. You are allowed to have multiple visas processing concurrently. Besides... you don't yet have a family-based visa processing, since you can't actually apply for the visa until your priority date becomes current (about 11 years from now)... so as far as US immigration is concerned (with respect to your family-based visa), well... you don't yet exist!

Ian

civilservant

Make sure when you attend any interview you take evidence of ties to your home country, since it will be more difficult to overcome the presumption of immigrant intend when you clearly intend to immigrate long term - else the officer may determine you are attempting to use the F1 to wait in the US for your priority date to become current (even though it won't)

Steve_

It'll be a lot longer than that, USCIS aren't even bothering to process the I-130s anymore, they're just warehousing them. This month's visa bulletin says they're at August 2001 and a year ago they were at March 2001, so that is five months' worth in a year. So on that basis, 29 years wait but there's a CRS report I posted on here somewhere that reckoned 40 years for a petition filed today.

So no, getting an F-1 isn't going to cause a problem. CBP aren't even aware of the existence of the I-130 at the POE unless they go looking for it.

mamunrony

thanks!! that sounds great...

mamunrony

yap, or maybe after immigration reform law it will be infinite waiting time...
so far I heard they will revoke this F4 category and will make for 11 million illegal immigrant already present there. That will be a big blow for the people who are eagerly waiting in the line for a long time.

mamunrony

That's the hardest part I believe when someone have already show their interest to immigrate their permanently, no matter what ever tie you have left in your country.

Steve_

If it were to pass (and it won't) the immigration reform bill would take the backlog, divide it by seven and then process it through starting in 2015, so if your petition was filed two years ago, you would get a visa around 2020 or 2021.

But at this point the chances of that happening are pretty much nil.

S Folinsky

OP's question is one of those indeterminate ones.

BTW, to avoid confusion, the informal convention is to refer to the sibling immigrant visa category as "FB-4" for "family based fourth." [I still think in the old pre-1990 "preference" system and non-immigrant visas categories stopped at "L." The sibling category was in the "Fifth Preference" so we could say "F-1" and "P-5" and it would be perfectly understandable. But I digress].

The F-1 classification does have a home abroad with no intent to abandon requirement. However, for graduate studies, that is often quite attenuated.

Also, the home abroad requirement is not that strong for Aussies since Australia is not a bad place to return to.

Generally speaking, the idea of "If the law allows me to stay, I just might. But that is in the future. Look at that waiting list."

BTW, your notation of an MS degree indicates that your PhD might get you in sooner!