Ordinary Nothing

I’m planning to go on a trip to the US, with a friend, on September.
As Israeli citizens, we need a visa to be allowed into the US. I have
an old non-immigrant B1/B2
visa, and my friend doesn’t have any. So I wanted to make sure mine is
still in order, and my friend needs to get a new one.

My own visa was issued in 2000. I
was working for a start-up company, which at some points decided that
they may want to send us (anyone on the development team) to the US for
whatever reasons. So they urged us all to get US visas, and dealt with
all the costs and bureaucratic process themselves. All I needed to do
was say yes, so I did.
Of course, as happened to most start-up
companies, it didn’t quite manage to sustain itself, and I never did
went to the US, but the visa remained.

It’s a 10 year visa, so officially it only expires on 2010. I do
know, however, that in the last few years the Americans have changed
the process of issuing visas, and have much more stringent demands, so
I wanted to ensure that the visa is indeed still valid. It would have
been a very unpleasant surprise to land there, only to be sent away
since my type of visas were globally cancelled.

The current requirements include things like fingerprinting, more
in-depth interviews, and facial pictures sized 5×5 cm, with the ears
visible. Yes, the ears have to be visible on this non-standard sized
picture. If you have a picture with your ears covered by hair, or
hidden due to a slight angle of the photo, it’s no good. Don’t ask me
why. Maybe they intend to use it for some never-effective facial
recognition system at some point.

In any case, I didn’t have any of these things, so thought it
prudent to make sure I don’t need them, and that the Americans will
stand behind the old visa they gave me.

I went to the list of all US embassies,
found the site for the Israeli one, and went in hunting for
information. Things were pretty confusing, and I didn’t find anything
that seemed very clear cut to me (at least not enough to face the risk
of making the wrong decision), so I decided to ask them. There was a
contact page, listing a phone number, and the hours for calling. Only
two hours per day, four days a week, but two hours are more than enough
to make a phone call.

As an interesting side note, they don’t work Sundays (probably since
it’s still weekend in the US), and they don’t work Fridays (since it’s
weekend in Israel). So they have a short week. Sweet deal.

OK, back to the story. So I called, and called, and called, but
nobody actually answered the phone. Instead of trying the next day, I
decided to try and send an email.

Funny thing, on their email lists, there are addresses @state.gov
which are official email addresses for the State Department of the US,
but the general-purpose email address is named ac5 (??) and
under a local Israeli ISP account. Still more odd, another email
address is at an Hotmail account. Not very inspiring or professional.
But the one for non-immigrant visas was an official State Department one, so I sent an
email to that.

I had another possible problem, my passport is only valid for about
half a year after the planned trip. Which doesn’t sound like it should
cause any problem, but there are places where they want a passport
valid for longer times in the future, so I had to make sure the current US isn’t one of them.

I sent an email about the two questions, detailing the condition and date, and asking if the visa is valid, and if I will need to increase the valid term of my passport before the trip.

I received a very quick response, which arrived on the next day. Which contained, apart from the polite pleasantries:

If you have a valid visa, simply carry the old passport with the valid visa
on it with the new passport and present both passports at the port of entry
to the US. Your length of stay will be limited by a validity of your
passport.

My
passport is, like I wrote to them originally, still valid on the time
on the planned trip, so there won’t be a second one. And I wasn’t sure
if "If you have a valid visa" is enough of a confirmation that the
expiry date on my old visa is enough to make it valid. So I sent
another message explaining my concerns and asking for more details.

The response included:

The new fingerprints requirement from the U.S. Department of State, which
became effective Monday December 1, 2003 applies to those applicants, who is
planning to visit the United States and have no valid visa in their
passport. The above requirement is implemented by all American posts
worldwide and does not waive visitors of providing fingerprints at a
port-of-entry into the United States. Therefore, if you have a valid visa of
an appropriate category, which covers the purpose of your visit to the U.S,
you are not required to provide fingerprints at the U.S. Embassy prior to
your visit.

Which
I believe does answer my question. My visa is good. They will still
take my fingerprints when I land, but they won’t send me back due to
lack of valid visa.

I sent them back a thank you, and that’s the end of this story.

Basically, they lose
points for not answering the phone, and for not paying exact attention
on the email, but gain more points by responding to the email quickly,
and giving me the answers and information I needed pretty soon. Not sure that this isn’t a case of low expectations, but they did surpass whatever expectations I had, so that’s good.
Considering that this is holiday season, and they’re swamped with visa
applications, I think I received a pretty good service in the email
part.

April 13th, 2005 at 12:55 EET | Categories: Miscellaneous | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.