I'm at my wit's end here so I figured maybe reddit can help?
My (Chinese) wife and I have been married for eight years. We met and currently live in Japan. When covid hit it destroyed our small guest house business. I got a better offer for work in the US so we decided to start preparing to shut everything down here and move to the States.
We applied for her IR1 visa in august of 2020. I even decided to hire an immigration lawyer just so I wouldn't mess anything up. Everything went fine until it came time to submit civil documents to the National Visa Center. I gathered all the proper documents per my lawyer's instructions and had them professionally translated.
I submitted the documents this March. In May we get a notification that her birth certificate has been rejected and I need to resubmit. No guidance as to why it was rejected. Okay. I confirm with the attorney that these are the correct documents, double check myself online. Rescan them a little straighter, maybe something was cut off in the original scan? Resubmit.
At the end of July I get a notification that the birth certificate has been rejected again. I'm freaking out at this point because I'll need to return to the US soon as the plans for my new business are pretty far along. The attorney fires off strongly worded letters to the NVC and the embassy here in Japan stating that we've done everything correctly and should be granted an interview. He gets someone at the NVC on the phone who says they don't know why we were rejected, and gets our case moved up to some escalated priority that apparently has a 6 week response time. I rescan the documents again, and have the translation redone as I noticed the original translation missed the first 2 digits of a number at the bottom of the page. Resubmit.
While all this is going on I buy my plane ticket back to the states for myself and my oldest daughter so I can start my business and she can start school. We're leaving at the end of the month and my wife and two year old will be staying in Japan waiting for the visa. I check my email in the middle of the night every night hoping to hear something. We hear nothing for 11 weeks until tonight when I checked my email at 1 am and saw that the case had been updated by NVC. I log into the system and... rejected again.
I just want them to tell me WHY it's being rejected so I can fix it. As it is I feel like I keep changing things every time I submit it and I might be making it worse.
I have no idea what to do. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I feel like I'm for sure going insane. How can it be this difficult for a US citizen to bring their spouse to whom they've been married for eight years and with whom they have two US citizen children to live in the US??? If anybody has gone through a similar thing and figured out how to fix it I'd love to hear about it.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/immigration/comments/q42lvj/applying_for_ir1_visa_my_wifes_chinese_birth/