{"id":139,"date":"2016-07-16T08:17:33","date_gmt":"2016-07-16T06:17:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/?p=139"},"modified":"2016-07-16T08:17:33","modified_gmt":"2016-07-16T06:17:33","slug":"the-green-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gowest.nilin.se\/?p=139","title":{"rendered":"The Green Card"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello there, remember me? I\u2019m the guy that moved from Sweden to USA almost six years ago and used this blog to tell the world about my journey.<\/p>\n

So what has happened since then? Well, I\u2019m still in sunny California and I still work for Google. I have moved houses once and changed cars twice. I have met a lot of awesome people and I have not been pulled over by the police a single time. And, oh yeah, I just received this little thing!<\/p>\n

\"GreenCardBlurred\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is a Permanent Resident Card, normally known as a \u201cGreen Card\u201d. This means that I\u2019m not any longer here on a visa but rather a lawful permanent resident of the United States of America. And since I was writing a lot in this blog about getting that visa and all the things you need to go through when immigrating to the US I thought I should write a chapter on the process of getting a green card. Even though I haven\u2019t touched this blog in a long long time..<\/p>\n

Being a permanent resident in USA is not the same as being a citizen. I still only have one citizenship, that of the Kingdom of Sweden and I only have a Swedish passport. And although there is no expiry date on my permanent resident status I could still lose it if I behave badly. (And one way of behaving badly, according to the information brochures, is to be a \u201chabitual drunkard or someone who is drunk or uses illegal drugs most of the time\u201d.)<\/p>\n

So how do you get a green card? Well, there are several ways. You could have family members that are US citizens or permanent residents that can sponsor\u00a0you. Or you can marry such a person. If you\u2019re a refugee or seek political asylum you can also get a green card. There is also the \u201cgreen card lottery\u201d where they give out a set number of green cards every year to people from countries that don\u2019t already have a lot of immigration to USA. (Sweden is not such a country.) Since I\u2019m not in any of the first categories and I don\u2019t like the odds of winning the lottery (less than 1% every year, from what I understand..) the only viable option for me was an employment based green card.<\/p>\n

There are several different quotas (or \u201cbuckets\u201d) for employment based green cards named EB-1 through EB-5. EB-1 is for world class athletes and scientists and people like that. Unfortunately I\u2019m not one of them. EB-2 is for people with a Master\u2019s or PhD degree, or for people with a Bachelor\u2019s and at least five years of work experience. Since my Swedish Masters\u2019s degree in Computer Science from KTH only counts as a Bachelor\u2019s when translated to American English (which annoys me to no end!) I\u2019m lucky to have enough work experience to be put in the EB-2 bucket. Otherwise I would still be waiting.<\/p>\n

For an employment based green card you obviously need the sponsorship from your employer. Since this is not the first (or the last) time that Google applies for a green card for an employee they have contracted an immigration law firm that is helping out with all the paper work. They were very helpful and nice to work with through the entire process. I can\u2019t imagine trying to do it by myself and figure out how till fill out all those forms!<\/p>\n

Labor certification<\/h2>\n

The entire circus kicked off in March 2014 and the first step was to do a labor certification, or PERM (Program Electronic Review Management). This is a process to prove that there are no qualified US workers for the position at Google that I have. This is obviously sort of a bullshit process since Google every week hires people to the same position as I have, both US and non US persons. But anyway, that is the game that you need to play. So the first thing we did was that my manager and me wrote up a job description and made a list of the skills that are needed to do the job I\u2019m doing. (Things like \u201cJava programming\u201d, \u201cdistributed data storage\u201d etc) Then I needed to reach out to managers at former jobs and get them to sign an \u201cEmployment Verification Letter\u201d confirming that I had acquired those skills before moving to USA. Thankfully I managed to get in touch with the people I needed and they were helpful enough to sign and send me letters. (Thanks Mikael, Andr\u00e9 and Xavier!)<\/p>\n

With the letters taken care of and some forms filled out it was just a matter of leaning back, twiddle my thumbs, and wait for something to happen. And the first thing that happened was that my case was randomly selected for auditing. Apparently this is something the Department of Labor do on a select number of cases to do quality assurance of their own processes. This didn\u2019t mean that my life would be scrutinized in every detail or anything like that. It just meant that it would take something like 9 months extra.<\/p>\n

In October 2015 (about a year and a half after I got started) they had done all the certification and auditing they felt like they needed to do and my PERM Labor Certification was approved!<\/p>\n

I-140 and AOS<\/h2>\n

Now it was time to file two different things at the same time. \u201cI-140, Immigrant Petition for Alien Worker\u201d and \u201cI-485, Application for Adjustment of Status (AOS)\u201d. I\u2019m a bit fuzzy on why there are two different things and exactly what each of them cover. (Go read on Wikipedia if you really want to know. \ud83d\ude42 ) However, both are needed and they both require a heap of documents to be provided. Among other things I needed to provide<\/p>\n