yes on the unification. I have a friend who met and married a woman from Colombia who was here on a visa. This was LONG before immigration was such a debated issue. They cheerfully thought that the marriage meant she could stay, and for years just lived like a normal couple (no kids; they were older and on second marriages). Then she wen…
yes on the unification. I have a friend who met and married a woman from Colombia who was here on a visa. This was LONG before immigration was such a debated issue. They cheerfully thought that the marriage meant she could stay, and for years just lived like a normal couple (no kids; they were older and on second marriages). Then she went back to Colombia because her mother was dying. And couldn't get back: it took several years and untold attorney fees to let her back into the country. She is back now: I don't know the arguments that succeeded. But it was a rude shock for both of them. She wasn't particularly interested in becoming a citizen herself and so never looked into how to get that status. The overstayed visa almost destroyed their marriage from the outside.
I know, it's outrageous. The US now has a temporary visa that let's the foreign spouse join the American spouse in the US - if it's approved - for all the months until the permanent visa is also approved. That's just dumb.
By way of comparison, I married my Brazilian husband in July of 2017. The next week, we took our Illinois Marriage Certificate to the Brazilian Consulate General in Chicago, registered our marriage, and applied for my spousal visa. A week after that, I went back to the Consulate to pick the visa up. My husband went home to rent us an apartment, and I joined him in November. I went to the Federal Police on the next business day to request my resident ID Card, and had it in less than a month.
Other countries have figured a lot of this stuff out years ago; not all of their solutions are scalable, but many are. We don't HAVE to reinvent it all ourselves!
yes on the unification. I have a friend who met and married a woman from Colombia who was here on a visa. This was LONG before immigration was such a debated issue. They cheerfully thought that the marriage meant she could stay, and for years just lived like a normal couple (no kids; they were older and on second marriages). Then she went back to Colombia because her mother was dying. And couldn't get back: it took several years and untold attorney fees to let her back into the country. She is back now: I don't know the arguments that succeeded. But it was a rude shock for both of them. She wasn't particularly interested in becoming a citizen herself and so never looked into how to get that status. The overstayed visa almost destroyed their marriage from the outside.
I know, it's outrageous. The US now has a temporary visa that let's the foreign spouse join the American spouse in the US - if it's approved - for all the months until the permanent visa is also approved. That's just dumb.
By way of comparison, I married my Brazilian husband in July of 2017. The next week, we took our Illinois Marriage Certificate to the Brazilian Consulate General in Chicago, registered our marriage, and applied for my spousal visa. A week after that, I went back to the Consulate to pick the visa up. My husband went home to rent us an apartment, and I joined him in November. I went to the Federal Police on the next business day to request my resident ID Card, and had it in less than a month.
Other countries have figured a lot of this stuff out years ago; not all of their solutions are scalable, but many are. We don't HAVE to reinvent it all ourselves!