Lawyer's Turn

Finally it was my lawyer's turn today to advise me to get married!

For the past year or more, pretty much everybody I know has advised, requested, ordered or scolded me to get married. My wedding is the most common subject people bring up with me in conversations - whether it is in casual parties or office rest rooms. I am not exaggerating about the rest room part - I have lost count of the number of people who casually ask me when I am going to get married, when they run into me in the rest room, of all the places! WTH!

Today my immigration attorney advised me to get married as soon as possible. Here's the background: The latest visa bulletin from the US State Department states that the priority dates for all categories of employment-based immigration visas (read green cards) are 'Current'. Just last month, the priority date was four years ago! What this means is that the waiting period to get the green card has been reduced from about 5 years to about 1 year for people like me.

This is a huge leap forward. An important life-changing event for thousands of Indians who are in the green card queue in the US, freeing up their employment and travel potential. This is one of those extremely rare occurences in the history of US greencard processing for Indians. It is as rare as a particularly auspicious planetary alignment.

Everybody who is affected by this is overjoyed and scrambling to get their green card process jumped forward as quickly as possible. Everybody that is, except single Indians like me. I am one of the very few people this month, who must have asked their attorneys to not go forward with their green card process. You see, if my green card gets processed for me as a single person, it will be extremely hard for my future wife to join me in the US from India. It is always advisable for green card processing to be done along with the spouse (and kids, if any).

So my attorney's advice was for me to get married as soon as possible because they don't know when we'll have a chance like this again.