Operation “Paperwork”

The paperwork has been gathered, at least as far as we can tell. The plan was to apply by mail around April 1st.

Different Spanish consulates have different rules and requirements for visa applicants. Even within the US there are differences. LA will ask for your tax returns for the last 3 years, Chicago will require proof of private school enrollment for kids, another consulate will want a 12 year lease contract. You don’t get to pick where you apply. You have to apply in your consular district based on your residence. Houston is our consulate, and I might say we got lucky. The DC consulate seems to be the most reasonable one, but Houston isn’t bad. For example, it doesn’t currently require any of the above mentioned things. They even used to accept mail-in applications. Until April 1st this year. Which is exactly when we were ready to mail in ours.

All of the visa paperwork goes through BLS – a third-party company – and only through them. You’d think they would streamline and standardize things. But instead, BLS adds another layer of entropy to the whole – already rather confusing – process. It is virtually impossible to make an appointment. They are never available. The scheduling website was built by a 6-grader. In the 90’s. It breaks, kicks you out, doesn’t let you in, has you playing with captchas to do anything, like click a button. There are options like Family Appointment that don’t exist, but show up in the drop down. A great tool to keep families from applying! Any calls go to a centralized call center, and those guys can’t actually do anything, they just repeat the same information like a broken record. They are trying to be helpful though. The Houston BLS email is also responsive and is amazingly unfathomably unhelpful. If they just didn’t respond at all that would be a zero. But they respond and helpfulness of their responses is well below zero. It’s an art.

Anyhow, being obsessive enough we managed to catch an appointment a little over a month later than planned. We dragged the whole gang including grandma to Houston (required) and turned in the paperwork in person. The person to reviewed our application was actually friendly, helpful and patient – a breath of fresh air after months of things not making any sense.

I highly recommend perusing NLV-specific Facebook groups for latest updates, paperwork help, and just comradery of other suckers like you in the same boat. So now we wait. Two weeks after our appointment, a new law went into effect, that slightly changes what financial paperwork is to be submitted and no longer allows to have relatives in the ascending line an dependents on an application. Are we grandfathered in? Nobody knows. We received a cryptic email from BLS, and when we asked for clarification, their response got even more cryptic and negatively useful. So we sent in some additional financial papers and went back prepping the house to be listed. Not listing yet, because are we even going for real? Some Californians report their visas being processed in 2 weeks, but surely we won’t be so lucky.