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US Visa and Immigration Law: What Is The National Visa Center?

Transcript of the above video:

In this video, we're going to be discussing the National Visa Center. The National Visa Center, NVC, plays an integral role in the processing of immigrant status, immigrant visas, immigrant benefits as well as non-immigrant visa benefits for those wishing to travel to the United States.

The National Visa Center it should be noted, we're going to be talking about this specifically within the context of family based immigration so fiancée’s, marriage visas, that kind of thing; also the stepchildren of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.

So what are we talking about here when we're talking about NVC? Well after the initial adjudication of a petition with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service and let's talk about this in terms of a K-1 visa for now, the USCIS goes ahead and adjudicates the K-1. That K-1 then needs to be routed to the proper embassy where it needs to have the visa application that runs concurrent to the petition adjudication; it needs to go to the proper embassy.

So essentially NVC is a sort of clearing house and sort of kind of in its own way sort of a mini post office within the Department of State, and NVC operates under the auspices of the Department of State, this entity acts as a sort of a post office to make sure that the visa application gets to the right embassy. The NVC is slightly different in the cases involving immigrant visas because NVC plays a much more active role in the gathering of documentation which pertains to immigrant visa benefits. So NVC will undertake fee payment and fee scheduling and they will go ahead and undertake gathering of various documents associated with the application for a U.S. visa from a U.S. Embassy or U.S. Consulate abroad. For that reason, NVC processing in an immigrant visa case is quite a bit longer when compared to a K-1 visa case because the K-1 applicant really doesn't undergo any sort of document gathering functions with respect to the NVC. The NVC just goes ahead and sends the case file on to the appropriate embassy or consulate. But the NVC is rather important. I've dealt with NVC rather frequently.

The other thing to think about with NVC is, NVC is also the agency which goes ahead and assigns preference numbers as quotas get hit with respect to visas for lawful permanent resident family members, family members of a lawful permanent resident. The other thing with respect to NVC is NVC in certain cases may undertake what are called administrative closure proceedings with respect to K-3 visas where it's determined that the K 3 visa application needs to go ahead and be administratively closed because the underlying immigrant visa is processing at a pace fast enough that it no longer warrants the need for the K-3 to process. There's a specific video on K-3 administrative closure on this channel. I suggest those who are interested in the K-3 go check that out but to sort of conclude this video, NVC with respect to certain types of visas has a very active role, whereas with other visa categories, the role was far more truncated.