Sports case: Football player from Kyrgyzstan received an EB-1A visa
HOW FOOTBALLER RECEIVED AN EB1-A VISA
- Hello, Svetlana! We congratulate you on your case approval, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, what is your job, your profession, and what are your professional experiences?
- We are from Kyrgyzstan, the city of Bishkek. We applied on behalf of my husband, he is a current player of the national team. He's been playing football since he was 12 years old, and now he's 35. He has experience of performing in foreign clubs. Also, he has more than 20 awards, both local and foreign, at the club level and national team level. Our national team has demonstrated good ratings in the last five years. We were rising in the FIFA rankings. So we decided that we would be able to pass on a talent visa.
- Why did you choose the U.S. EB-1A visa?
- Initially, like every other ordinary person, we tried to apply for a green card. We applied once, but we didn't win. And then my husband started looking for other alternatives and found the EB-1A. We thought, why not? If we have someone like him in the family, why not brag about his accomplishments?
We had one bad experience before when we were looking for information on this area. Then we bought a consultation from an alleged expert. We were not given any information for an hour consultation, i.e. we just paid $100-150 for nothing. And then somehow my husband found Moovert (googled it online), and we decided to join you.
- Tell us your story about preparing the case papers.
- It was a very long story. We thought it would all be faster because we bought the maximum plan. We bought it around October of last year. We read and studied, we thought we'd have it done in about three months. But no, we didn't. It took us about a year to do it all. At first, we thought it was a huge impossible task. We didn't understand who would do it all. We even thought of hiring a special person, because I have a job, and my husband has a job. Then the stage of acceptance came, and we decided to do the preparations ourselves. I have a five-day work schedule, so I could only allocate weekends for collecting documents. I did it every Saturday. We had about one or two tasks a month. My husband did all the paperwork and I did all the writing. That's how we divided up the tasks and together we started to prepare everything.
Of course, at first the volume of documents scares. When you read that the petition itself should be 250-300 sheets, you think: "Where will I find this information? From where?" Then we decided to set ourselves small tasks to reach a huge goal. So we gradually collected all the information we needed.
During the preparation, there were the following difficulties. We had to write letters of recommendation ourselves. I am a journalist, and in the past, I was a marketer, so this was my task. The collection of documents took some time. My husband had to go to great lengths to get all the confirmations, to get all the stamps. We had our documents translated by an agency with a professional translator. By the way, this is the best option, because they officially stamp and write that the translator is really competent. As we have learned, this is very important. The translation took about 2 weeks, and then we translated some documents for another 2 weeks. If we had done the preparations more intensively than we did, we could have done them in four months, but we stretched them out for a year.
- What turned out to be the most difficult and time-consuming thing in the whole process of preparing documents?
- Writing all the letters and getting them all signed, because people were not only from Kyrgyzstan but from the Maldives, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and other countries where my husband played. It was a little difficult to get from there, and everything lasted for a very long time. My husband has a lot of medals and awards – they had to collect everything, and get official documents confirming that he really received them. Most of the time was spent collecting supporting notes and letters. The rest is just sitting down and writing.
- Have you used the services of a lawyer or submitted documents yourself?
- We only used your platform. We had 3 consultations and checked if we were going in the right direction. Also, your chat helped us. My husband was a member there, he read everything and analyzed it all. It's a real thing to do on your own. Your platform gives great support. Everything is explained there. You just go through the points, do it as it is, get feedback and make the necessary corrections.
- Can you give some advice to people who are just going to go this way?
- Several moments can be highlighted. First of all, everything should be really officially documented. The more seals, the more state awards, and letters, the better. We had a presidential award, and letters from the mayor's office. State participation is important, it is appreciated in the USA. The second thing is competent translations, and it is better to have seals and signatures on them as well, seals on the letters. Membership in organizations is another point. My husband is a member of the football players' Union and the Football Federation of Kyrgyzstan. And all of this was confirmed officially and with seals. No need to be afraid of volume. Just write a to-do list and follow it. And the last thing I've been struggling with for a long time is the table of contents. I've probably redone it 3-4 times because you add something, it shifts, and it turns out that all the pages to which you point links need to be changed. This is also a very important moment. I have to have everything beautiful and correct down to the last detail, so I went over everything to make sure everything was perfect, smooth, and proper, without mistakes or unnecessary indentations. We also added QR codes to the section where it was said about the importance of this industry for the US economy with links to American websites. I think it's very convenient. Just took the phone, scanned it, and looked at it. Everything is possible. You just have to do it. And, of course, you need to evaluate your chances well. You don't need to take a lot of criteria. It is better to have 5 criteria closed well than a bad, but 8.
If anyone has any questions about football, we have no problem helping you answer them, because we've already gone through it all ourselves.