Finger Prints
Angelika Before one receives the Green Card, the American immigration authority wants to ensure that the applicant has not committed any crimes or is listed as a wanted terrorist. Just as one applies for a certificate of conduct in Germany, fingerprints are taken in America. For the Green Card, the FBI uses fingerprints to check whether one has been and is a law-abiding citizen. In practice, it works as follows: After our lawyer sent the required documents (and a few more) to the Immigration Office, we patiently waited for the confirmation of receipt. However, we had to bite the bullet again, as countless applications flooded the responsible immigration authority in California, causing week-long delays in opening the incoming mail and thus also adding delays to sending out the confirmation of receipt.
Just so you believe me: Our documents for the third step were received by the immigration authority on July 23, 2001, and the confirmation of receipt was sent out by the authority on September 6, 2001. Weeks later, we received a letter with the appointment date (November 30, 2001) for taking our fingerprints. Everyone eagerly is awaiting this letter because it indicates that one's file is not gathering dust in a large pile and that something is happening. By the way, the FBI does not take the fingerprints directly; instead, the immigration authority sends the applicants to a designated third party processing center. The fingerprinting is done digitally: no annoying ink on the fingers. The fingerprints appear immediately on the screen and are promptly sent to the FBI. The FBI works quite efficiently in this regard and sends the results back to the immigration authority relatively quickly.
After the fingerprint procedure, it's back to waiting. The immigration office is sometimes not technically stuck in the Stone Age, as there is the possibility to call and check on the progress of your case. To do this, you dial into an automated system, listen to announcements for several minutes, and eventually enter your case number to finally hear a computer-generated voice. In January 2002, we heard the voice saying that the results of our fingerprint check were available to the immigration office and that our case was being processed further. The system sounds brilliant, doesn't it? However, there's a catch: firstly, the phone lines ares busy all the time (you can usually get through well at 2 a.m.), and the announcement is not always up to date. At some point, we've had long received our Green Card approval by mail, yet the phone announcement was still stuck at the fingerprint stage.
