How I learned to stop worrying and love the J1 waiver

This may be of interest or help for those looking for a J1 waiver. Here is my J-1 waiver timeline. I found blogs/websites (see links below) very useful so I'm going to share my story and conclude with some pertinent links, so you can find your own situation among this large sample:)..I made mistakes in the order of sending documents, described below, which you should avoid. Always do the NORI part first and as soon as possible, since beaurocracy (sp?) makes things slow (although it ultimately comes through). Other links have detailed info. on what the waiver is, who needs it etc., so I will not describe that here and you probably wouldn't be reading this anyway if you didn't know what it was. I assume you have to get a waiver and want to know from somebody's personal experiences, how to do it (or rather, how to experience this majestic ride!).

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Apr 28th, 2008: I arrived in US on 7-month J1 program (May 1st-Dec 1st).
I don't think my subject area is on the list that invites an automatic
two-year home residency rule 212(e), but the consular officer will likely
stamp this willy-nilly on your passport if you are from india/china.

July 1st, 2008: downloaded online forms for waiver from US state dept. website.
Got some bar codes for later use. (for 7 month stay, this is already too much delay, as i realized later; 5-6 months is minimum time required to get waiver, that too without errors and beaurocratic delays, so start the waiver process right away, folks!).

July 3rd, 2008: sent DS-3035, DS-2019, passport pages, statement of reason, $315 DD and representation letter to waiver division of DOS. I believe that now all this has to be done online *only*? (please check; in my case, i could still send it by normal mail). There are several examples of statement of reason on the web. Be as truthful as you can possibly be:)


July 15th, 2008: DOS acknowledged receipt of all the above in their waiver online system (the updates seemed pretty prompt in my case but there are exceptional cases as well, as you can read on the web)


August 22nd, 2008: visited Indian Consulate General, Chicago to get my 4 affidavits notarized and gave cheque of 60 bucks; received them back same afternoon (this step, which i did so late, should be done first and asap). This delay from the last step was also because I had to go to Canada for a month, but its my own fault for not taking care of it sooner.


August 25th, 2008: sent 1 copy to Ministry of Education (Shastri Bhavan, Delhi) 1 copy to passport office Delhi and 1 copy to Home department, Tamil Nadu (Chennai office). Please scour the web and the links below for the addresses; wherever you are from in India, some poor blighter has gone through this process before you and collected the correct addresses for your benefit. Mine was the Tamil Nadu case. Here are my addresses:
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(Common to all)
Ministry of Human Resource Development
Department of Secondary and Higher Education
External Scholarship - 5
A-1/W-3, Curzon Road Barracks
Kasturba Gandhi Marg
New Delhi 110 001

(because at the time, I was living in chennai)
Deputy Secretary to Government
Home Department
Secretariat, Fort St. George
Chennai 600 009

(because my FIRST passport was from Delhi RPO)
Regional Passport Office,
Trikoot - 3, HUDCO Building,
Bhikaji Camaji Place, New Delhi 110066

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October 10th, 2008: Policeman came to verify at my home for the Home dept (TN) NORI. Nice guy, met my parents, even refused tea/coffee and said he needed some document saying I was not deserting my parents. So my folks said they would write something up, and he said he would be back in a week to collect it.


October 29th, 2008: Policeman took 3 weeks to come back. Took all documents and went off.


November 22nd, 2008: Got NORI certificate from Ministry of education, Shastri Bhavan. They usually win the race to be first with the NORI. But it is still close to 10 weeks for them to do this, not counting mail time.


November 30th, 2008: My J-1 program ended, I flew back same day to India. Not a good idea to overstay your visa, although you get 30 days past expiry for the J1visa. I didnt know what the rule for waiver was if your J1 program is over and you leave midway through the process. Some blog said its fine to do that, and I trusted that. Anyway, I couldn't overstay my visa, so I just came back and decided to take my chances that it will come through. I had applied for some jobs in the US and was waiting for interview calls in December and January.


December 10th, 2008: I got a telephone interview request by email for a job in the US. Gave the interview via long-distance (US-India) phone on Dec. 19th.


December 23rd, 2008: I got an email saying I was selected for a campus visit in the US on the basis of the phone interview. This was a nice birthday gift:)


December 26th, 2008: I got the NORI from Dept. of Home, Tamil Nadu. They also
sent one to my address in US when i was a J1 visitor. My wife lives there and studies there, so no problem having addresses for correspondence in 2 places. The state usually comes 2nd in race for NORI, provided the policeman they send for verification is not a moron or your address does not read like old this, new that, near such and such sabzi mandi. Maybe your state might be different depending on how your state beaurocracy compares to Tamil Nadu (its OK to Good in TN).


January 2nd, 2009: No response from the Delhi passport office (I got my first passport in Delhi and that's where you need to go, not where you got newer passports from) so I was getting worried about how to trace this damn document. I took the opportunity of attending a friend's baby's function to travel from Chennai to Delhi to enquire about NORI from passport office. My mom's friend, who has contacts in passport office, was kind enough to enquire on my behalf and got a copy of NORI which passport office had faxed to Indian consulate, Chicago in November itself, but not informed me. Neither did the consulate inform me. Apparently, this is standard "procedure", though its extremely stupid on part of the passport office to do this and not inform the applicant. So, please follow up at the passport office, get some inside info on your NORI or ask the consulate where you applied if they received it. Dont wait on your ass to get this NORI, for you never will if you do that. Passport office is usually last in the great NORI race and you dont even know if and when they have reached the finish line!


January 23rd, 2009: Applied for a B1/B2 visitor visa to go to the US again, this time for the campus interview. This is allowed even if you are subject to HRR.
Anyway, the officer was hardly bothered and gave me a 10-year visitor visa without asking anything at all, not even why I was going.


February 1st, 2009: Visited Indian consulate, Chicago and gave them the 3 NORIs. I expected them to object since I was B1/B2 and not J1 anymore, but despite having some group discussion about my passport and visa, during which I stared at big smiling pictures of Manmohan Singh and Pratibha Patil, they gave me the "No Objection" certificate anyway. Hurdle 1 passed. They forwarded the certificate to Indian embassy, Washington. The chap at the counter at the Chicago consulate (he has been there several years at least as far as I know) has always been very nice to me, but he does get rude with some others. For example, when my wife trudged all the way to the consulate in the freezing Chicago winter to enquire about my NORI from the passport office, he refused to do anything without some "receipt" number, which I never got anyway. Anyway, small matter. I believe in swallowing some pride to get important things done.


February 19th, 2009: Returned to India; not fun making back and forth 20 hour journeys every other month, but then it has to be done, and some high-flyers and consultants have it much worse anway.

March 1st, 2009: Got a copy of "No objection" letter from Indian Embassy, Washington. It was sent on February 16th, 2009. Apparently, govt. mail of any kind, even in US, goes on a round trip to the moon before coming back to earth. The embassy sends the original to US dept. of state directly.


March 4th, 2009: Got the tenure-track job offer from the US university. Hurdle 2 passed, I had someone to sponsor my H1-B and GC now, if my J1 waiver got approved.


March 12th, 2009: Department of state gives favorable recommendation. Hurdle 3 passed.


March 13th, 2009: Department of state sends recommendation letter to USCIS, who have ultimate authority on waiver, but agree with dept. of state's recommendation most of the time. ("sent" may mean cleared by their office, and not that the letter is actually in the mail; hence allow for a few extra days for copy of letter to reach you). Also, the approval is sent electronically to the USCIS and this took only a day (proof of this is that DOS recco. was sent on March 13th and USCIS received the approval/updated their system on March 14th). All "no objection" based J1 waivers apparently now go to U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Vermont Service Center, 75 Lower Welden St., Saint Albans, Vermont 05479; Phone 1-800-375-5283.

April 6th, 2009: USCIS sends approval notice to my home in Chicago. So i guess the notice from DOS and the receipt from USCIS is now defunct? You just get the final approval notice from USCIS. The approval notice was "sent" March 24th (in the same sense as above) and received by the USCIS on March 14th, so they took just 10 days to act on it. Pretty good.

April 16th, 2009: The DOS approval letter arrived after the USCIS letter! My guess is this is because the approval from DOS is transmitted electronically to USCIS the very next day and USCIS acts faster than DOS does in mailing the respective document. Anyway, that successfully concludes my J1 story and I hope it is dead and buried. The J1 waiver process is standard, but a pain and in the worst case, can screw up long-term plans.


Epilogue: This story is purposely written in a factual and light-hearted way. Believe me, it was one of the most serious thing in my life for 1 year and it kept me up for some nights. Lots of things had to work for all this to happen in my favor - i had to land a tenure-track university job, which is not easy, i had to deal with timelines and paper chases in both the US and in India and i had to live away from my wife. It was not easy mentally juggling uncertainty about the future, scientific research and a long-distance marriage for so many months. At some point, I just put my head down, focused on my work and on getting a solid job, and left the rest to God. And he/she/they/it (depending on your religion or sect) came through. I was able to get an H1-B in July and left for the US in August. So folks, tension nahin lene ka, be mentally relaxed about it, stop thinking about the future too much while you do this process. Things work out, in the end, if you do what you need to do.


Useful links to other J1 waiver info and personal stories:

http://www.mylawyerwang.com/j-1waiver

http://www.greencardapply.com/j1/j1_process.htm

http://j1.aruppukottai.net/

http://forums.immigration.com/showthread.php?t=250832

http://murthyforum.atinfopop.com/4/OpenTopic?a=tpc&s=1024039761&f=4464060382&m=3971056781&r=8411027781

http://forums.immigration.com/showthread.php?t=142690