Sponsoring a Family Member for a Green Card

Whether you can bring other family members to the United States depends on your citizenship or residency status and how the family member is related to you.

Many people in the United States have family members living in other countries. U.S. residents often want to know whether they can bring these relatives to America.

It's a myth that if one immigrant settles in the United States, she can bring in her whole extended family, and that those family members can then bring in all of their family, and so on. The truth is both more limited and more complex.

Family Members Eligible to Immigrate

A person can petition to bring family members to the United States only if that person (the petitioner) is already a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident (green card holder). Even then, the petitioner can only bring in two types of family members, including:

• immediate relatives (who can get green cards without worrying about numerical limits or waiting periods), and
• preference relatives (who are subject to yearly numerical limits and waiting periods of between one and 21 years, depending on the family relationship and what country the immigrant is from).

The following chart briefly summarizes what types of relatives a petitioner can sponsor and which category the relatives qualify for.

Notice who is not on this list: grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, parents-in-law and other extended family members. The chain of sponsorship is not very long.

However, if allowed to immigrate to the United States, most of the people on this list will be permitted to bring their own spouses and children with them. And it is true that once someone has a green card, they can sponsor other people on the list. But because of the waiting periods, this often takes too long to be of much help, and can lead to long separations between parents and children.

How Long Must Sponsored Family Members Wait?

If you sponsor a family member who is an immediate relative, there is no waiting period before a visa becomes available. However, due to the time it takes for the U.S. immigration authorities to review and approve an application, actually getting that visa is likely to take at least a year.

Preference relatives, however, may have to wait from one to 21 years before being allowed to apply for and claim their visa or green card. After you, the petitioner, submit a visa petition on Form I-130, your preference relative is put on a waiting list. Unfortunately, no one can say exactly how long each applicant will wait. A certain number of people in each category are allowed green cards each year. It's impossible to predict how many people will apply in a given year.

Also, only a certain percentage of the green cards go to any one country each year, so people from certain countries, such as India, Mexico, and the Philippines, end up waiting even longer than others. As a result, the waiting immigrant can only estimate when he or she will get a visa, based on how long it took for the people who applied before to get one.

As a general rule, applicants in higher preference categories wait less time. The average wait these days from most countries is as follows:

But again, the wait will be longer if the immigrant is from a country such as Mexico or the Philippines, because of the numbers of people who apply from those countries. Siblings of U.S. citizens from the Philippines currently wait a staggering 21 years.

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Strategies for Success

There are some important steps you can take to speed up your family member's progress toward a green card and to make sure that the process goes smoothly.

Apply for U.S. Citizenship

If you are a U.S. permanent resident, not a citizen, you can help your family member by applying for citizenship as soon as you are eligible. The waiting time for eligibility is usually five years, but there are exceptions: For example, the wait drops to four years if you received political asylum, and to three years if you got your green card when you married a U.S. citizen (as long as you're still married and living together).

As soon as you become a citizen, your family members can move to a speedier immigration category. For example, your spouse, who was a preference relative, becomes an immediate relative; your parents go from having no rights to being immediate relatives; and your children become immediate relatives or move to higher preference categories, depending on their age and whether they are married.

Warn Your Waiting Children Not to Marry

Married children have it tough when it comes to immigrating. They have no right to be sponsored by U.S. permanent residents, and are way down in the third preference category if sponsored by a U.S. citizen. Unmarried children, on the other hand, can be sponsored by U.S. permanent residents, and are either immediate relatives or in the first preference category of people who can be sponsored by U.S. citizens.

If you have children who have not yet married, and they want to immigrate through you, make sure they know that getting married will probably add years to their wait time. It won't matter that they were unmarried when you started the immigration process for them; they have to be unmarried when they pick up their immigrant visa or green card, or they may not qualify for it.

Have Different U.S. Family Members Sponsor the Same Immigrant

Hopeful immigrants (beneficiaries) shouldn't pin all of their hopes on one petitioner. If something goes wrong -- for example, the petitioner dies or divorces the beneficiary before the beneficiary's waiting period is over -- the green card opportunity is, in most cases, lost.

Many hopeful immigrants have more than one family member in the United States. There is no harm in having more than one (or all of them) file visa petitions for the waiting immigrant. For instance, both parents could file for a child, to insure against the death of one of them. Or a person married to a permanent resident could have both their spouse and their U.S. citizen parent file a visa petition for them. That way they would be on two waiting lists and could see which moves more quickly.