Disclaimer: I am not an immigration lawyer. In fact, I am not any kind of lawyer. I do not claim to be an immigration expert. The experiences I describe below are mine; others will vary. US immigration procedures, times, costs, forms, all change regularly. Don’t rely on what I say without checking.
So, in case you haven’t already picked this up from, say, my Mars Bar / Milky Way rant, I’m a fairly recent immigrant to the US. I was born and brought up in the UK, so it hasn’t been a massive jump, but there has been a huge amount of paperwork, bureaucracy and red tape to navigate. While it’s still fairly fresh in my memory, I wanted to document the process that K and I went through, in the hope that it may help others avoid any of the pitfalls along the way. It’s quite a lengthy story – we’re two years in at the moment, and still have a fair way to go – so this will be a short series of long posts (or a long series of short posts, depending on my mood). I’m not a big fan of these multipart posts, but I don’t really fancy writing the whole thing in one go, and this might make it look like I’m blogging slightly more actively…
Our story begins in the UK, in late 2007/early 2008. K is studying for her MA at Durham, where I am in the fourth year of my bachelors degree. We meet through mutual friends and hit it off. Skipping forward some time, K returns to her native Pittsburgh to do another MA (although this turns into teaching) while I stay in the UK, job hunting. We Skype, we talk on the phone, we visit each other. But we can’t live together. Sometime during this period, we got engaged – we knew we wanted to be together and weren’t strong enough to do the long-distance thing for too long. We set a preliminary wedding date of June 2010, on the basis that 2 years would give us time to work out the logistics. Where would the wedding be? Where would we live afterwards?
Skip forwards a year to Summer 2009. K has a job teaching high school history in Pittsburgh. I have a job as a web developer for a local firm (albeit with global aspirations) in Nottingham. By this time, it’s fairly clear to us that we’re going to get married and settle in Pittsburgh: for K to do what she does in the UK, she would have to retrain, whereas my skills are more transferable – I can do web stuff anywhere I have a laptop. So we need to work out how the immigration thing would work. I visit K for a week at the end of August, and we make an appointment with an “Immigration Information Officer” at the USCIS field office in Pittsburgh (USCIS = United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security [DHS], formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS], and but the first of many acronyms we shall encounter). The office is in the new Homeland Security building downtown, so there are the inevitable airport-style strip-searches to go through, but once we get into the information room (for want of a better word), we are seen fairly quickly. We are called over to a window (the room is just like a bank or post office – about a half-dozen window, with a screen telling you which to go to) and a pleasant young man introduces himself. We explain our situation, and ask how he would approach it. He explains to us that there are two ways we could get married and stay in the US, one long but safe, one easy but risky. Fair play to him, he didn’t have to tell us about the latter – but he wanted to make sure that we were fully informed and understood all our options.
Long but safe: K “petitions” for permission for me to apply for a K1 visa, which would allow me to enter the US once as a non-immigrant and get married within 90 days of entry, after which I would have to apply for an “adjustment of status” to become a permanent resident.
Easy but risky: I enter the US as normal under the Visa Waiver Program (that’s the green form that EU citizens fill out on the plane have to complete before flying, allowing them to visit the US for up to 90 days without a visa). We then get married and I file immediately for permanent residency as the spouse of a US citizen. The danger here is that under the VWP, I could not enter the country with “intent to remain”. If USCIS found out that I was entering to get married, I would be deported and refused residency.
It seemed obvious to us that the first was the way to go. We didn’t want to risk any lengthy immigration appeals or worse. The route with the least longterm hassle was the one that seemed immediately daunting. We ask the immigration chap about timescales, and he tells us that while he can’t speak for every embassy (each is different), six to nine months is a good estimate. That fits perfectly into our plans – we have about 10 months before the wedding.
Part the Second, Petitioning for Alien Fiancé: coming soon.