Sponsoring a Fiance or Spouse for a Green Card

Planning your immigration strategy is as important as planning your wedding -- find out your basic rights and procedural options.

If you are a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, and you are engaged or already married to a citizen of another country, that person may be eligible for a green card. Unfortunately, he or she will have to go through an application process, just like any other person who immigrates to the U.S. for the sake of family togetherness. Fiancés have an extra step in the application process, because they must apply for a fiancé visa before coming to the United States to apply for a green card.

Many people believe, wrongly, that they can just bring their fiancé or spouse to the United States, and the immigrant will be given an instant green card or even U.S. citizenship -- a belief that has led to sad cases of people being sent right home again. In fact, if you are not yet a U.S. citizen, but have U.S. permanent residence (a "green card"), you cannot bring your fiancé to the United States until you have married -- and even then, you can only bring your spouse after he or she spends some years on a waiting list.

No matter what, be prepared for a long wait. Every type of visa application involves several stages, including application forms, a medical examination, fingerprinting, various approvals by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS, formerly called the Immigration and Naturalization Service or INS) in the United States, and separate approvals by a U.S. consulate if the immigrating fiancé or spouse is overseas.

In this article, we'll talk about the eligibility rules for fiancé visas and marriage visas, and we'll introduce you to the application process. Remember, however, that to qualify for a visa, every intending immigrant must also show that he or she is not "inadmissible." The laws contain a long list of ways that a person can become inadmissible, most notably:

• having committed a crime, act of terrorism, or violation of certain immigration laws
• being infected with a contagious disease (particularly tuberculosis or HIV)
• being likely to go on welfare (because neither the immigrant nor the U.S. spouse earns enough), or
• having spent too much time in the United States illegally.

There are many other grounds of inadmissibility.

Eligibility for Fiancé Visas

The basic eligibility requirements for a fiancé visa are fairly simple: The immigrant must:

• intend to marry a U.S. citizen
• have met the citizen in person within the last two years, and
• be legally able to marry.

Also, the immigrant must be coming from another country -- a fiancé visa won't be given to someone who is already in the United States.

As part of the application process, you'll have to prove your intention to marry, by providing documents such as copies of your love letters, phone bills and wedding ceremony contracts. You'll also have to prove that you met within the last two years, by submitting copies of plane tickets, hotel bills, and the like.

This meeting requirement causes problems for many couples. If you simply can't afford to meet, USCIS will say, "Tough luck." If, however, you haven't met because of proven cultural customs or extreme hardship to the U.S. citizen spouse, USCIS may be willing to lift the meeting requirement in your case.

Eligibility for a Marriage-Based Visa or Green Card

To be eligible for an immigrant visa or green card based on marriage, the immigrant must be:

• legally married (it doesn't matter in what country)
• married to a U.S. citizen or permanent resident
• not married to someone else at the same time, and
• not married to someone who has another wife or husband.

Also, the marriage must be the real thing, not just a sham to get a green card.

Within the application process, you'll have to prove all the above things. The legal marriage is usually the easiest to prove, since you simply provide a copy of your marriage certificate -- though people who get married outside the United States sometimes have a little trouble showing the right type of certificate, because the USCIS usually demands that it come from a government office, rather than a church, a ship's captain, or other nongovernmental place that's capable of marrying people. To show that the marriage is the real thing, you'll have to provide copies of documents such as joint bank statements, children's birth certificates, photos of the wedding and afterwards, love letters, and more.

The Application Process

Now we get to the tricky part. How and where the immigrant applies for a green card depends on a number of factors, including who she's marrying, where she is now, and, if she's in the United States, whether she got there legally. (To make things simpler, we'll refer to the immigrant as "she" from now on.) To get a very general sense of what's ahead, see the table below, summarizing the various situations and options, and the approximate time it will take to complete the process.

Be warned. These time averages can change dramatically, based on various factors both within and outside your control.

Just to make things more tangled, the laws now provide an opportunity for overseas married immigrants to apply for a fiancé visa, in order to speed up their entry to the United States, where they'll apply for their green card instead of doing the whole process overseas.

No matter what, you'll need to learn much more about the process. For a highly rated resource on the matter, see Fiancé and Marriage Visas: A Couple's Guide to U.S. Immigration, by Ilona Bray.

If the immigrant used a tourist or other visa to get to the United States for the primary purpose of getting married, see an attorney. The immigrant could be found liable for visa fraud, and denied the green card as a result.