Obtaining an immigrant visa with parents after being 21

Quick disclaimer: I am not an immigration attorney or an immigration expert by any means. All the information listed in this blog post are based on my own experience. I decided to write about this issue because it's not well covered on the internet and I felt lost when I was going through the process.

Many young women and men from all over the world wonder whether they will be able to immigrate with their parents, who are going through long family based immigration to the US, after surpassing the age of 21. This blog post will discuss in details a law called CSPA (Child Status Protection Act) which helps many derivative beneficiaries obtain an immigrant visa with their patrents after aging out under some circumstances.

First, What is CSPA?

CSPA is a law introduced in 2002 that allows a derivative beneficiary to obtain an immigrant visa with his/her parents after they age out as long as they meet three requirements:

1. The CSPA age of the derivative beneficiary should be below 21.
2. The derivative beneficiary should seek to acquire an immigrant visa.
3. The derivative beneficiary should be unmarried.

1. What is CSPA age and how to calculate it?

The CSPA age simply your age with the time taken by the USCIS to process your immigration case deducted from it (Age at Time of Visa Availability - Pending Time = CSPA Age). What confuses a lot of people in this equation, and I was a victim of this confusion, is that many people think that the pending time is the whole period from filling the petition to the date the visa becomes available. Unfortunately, That's not true, the pending time is the time taken by the USCIS to approve the petition.

In order to understand why some family based immigration cases take this long time we need to go through the process as quickly as possible and I will use my case as an example. first, a petition is filed to the USCIS which takes some time to process the case and approve it. However, after approval the USCIS transfers the case to the national visa center which manages visa issuing. Since many family based immigration cases has an annual limit of visa issuance, the NVC issues visas to cases by a simple way first come first served. So, you need to know two important dates for your case the priority date, which is related to filing the petition, and the date of approval. In may case the priority date is October 2004 and the approval date is November 2009 which makes my pending time 5 years and 1 month. However, my visa became available in June 2018 which makes my wait time 13 years and 8 months.  (My case is a forth category, siblings of US citizens)

2. What action should you do when your priority date becomes current? 

This created a lot of confusion to me when I was going through the process. First the NVC recently split the visa issuance process to two steps to make it faster. when you look at the visa bulletins the last two years, you will realize two tables one for filing and the other for final action. Simply when your case becomes current for filing you file form DS-260 to the NVC and pay the fees so that the NVC can process it before your case becomes current for final action which is the final visa interview.

Fortunately for me and unfortunately for the reader, when my case was current in may 2017 for filing I was 20 years and 10 months old. So, I was able to file form ds-260 with my parrents normally with no issues. However, by the time my case was current for final action in June 2018, I was 21 years and 11 months. As a consequence to this,  my name was missing from the interview letter.

I sent the embassy of the United States in Cairo in Email explaining to them my case and why I believe to be eligible for CSPA. In one or two business days they responded to me that I was indeed eligible for CSPA and that I can come to the interview to have my visa processed with my family. On the day of the interview My mom, the direct beneficiary, went to the officer and explained my case to her. She made her calculations then I was interviewed by the consular officer with my family at the same time and I obtained the visa with them.

If you aged out before the filing date I advice you to contact the NVC to know what should be done.