Immigration Law Article:
Bringing a Foreign Fiancée or Spouse to the United States:
Starting the Process
NOTE: (This article was written by an attorney at The Solomon Law Firm, P.C. in Houston, Texas ( www.thesolomonlawfirm.com ) who has personal experience in going through the process of bringing a foreign fiancée to America. We think you will find it very enlightening.)
So you met a woman who lives in another country, fell in love with her and either married her already or want to bring her to the United States and marry her here. The reverse situation could also be true, where you are an American woman and your fiancé or spouse is from another country. If that is the case, please bear with me and understand that the focus on American men and foreign women in this discussion is solely for ease of presentation. Quite frankly it is also because the number of American men who marry foreign women tends to be higher than the number of American women who marry foreign men.
Let’s address a couple of issues right up front. You will quickly learn that your fiancée is called an alien by our government. That’s right, an alien. Not a foreign fiancée, but an alien fiancée. Don’t be offended. Alien is just a word. She is still your sweetheart. And while we are discussing the meaning of words, let’s talk about another one that you will see repeatedly if you are looking at marrying or have married a foreign woman: Petition. Don’t let this word throw you. It is a word that lawyers use a lot. You can think of it as meaning “application” when used in the context of applying (petitioning) for a K-1 fiancée visa or a K-3 marriage visa.
There may be others issues that are on your mind as you start this process. Maybe the love of your life has children who you and she want to bring to the United States with her. Maybe the child or children can not accompany their mother when she comes to the United States, either because of school or other reasons. Does that mean they can never come later? Is the mother making an irrevocable decision to leave her children behind in order to be with you?
These are legitimate concerns, and you probably feel like you have a million other questions swirling through your head. You don’t know where to turn for help. It is so confusing. What must you file, where do you file whatever you need to file, what does it cost, how long will it take, what are the rules? One very important question is whether you are you even eligible for whatever process might be out there for people just like you? I know how you feel. I have stood in your shoes.
This article is written by a lawyer, but it does not provide legal advice. It will, however, provide some general information that will help you get started with the process of bringing a Foreign Fiancée or Spouse to the United States by filing a petition for a K-1 fiancée visa or a K-3 marriage visa. It will also provide practical information from someone who has already gone through what you are facing.
If you want legal advice you should contact a law firm to obtain it. Because of the experience the author of this paper went through in obtaining a K-1 fiancée visa, his law firm now has a section that specializes in immigration law. Not new people; people who have been doing immigration work for many years. If you are interested you can read more about that on the law firm’s website, which you can find HERE, or at www.thesolomonlawfirm.com . But before you do that, I suggest you continue reading this article. You might decide that you don’t need a lawyer, although I will remind you again that no legal advice is being provided in this article. Every situation is unique and must be evaluated before legal advice could be given.
Later, you can read other articles on this website that discuss the next steps in the process. I have also written a book on the subject, which will be published around the end of 2008. The book is called No Price Too Great, and once published, it can be found at its own website, which is www.NoPriceTooGreat.com. It will also be available through all of the major book outlets, but on the book’s website, there will be a blog by the author that provides updates that you may find to be of interest. The other articles and the book No Price Too Great were written for the same purpose, which is to provide general information, not legal advice.
If you are like most people and wonder whether you can possibly have a successful relationship with a woman from another culture, the book No Price Too Great addresses those concerns as well. But what about the child or children who will accompany my fiancée or spouse, you ask? How have other children done when they made the move to America? Fortunately, you can also gain some insight on that topic in the book No Price Too Great and from the author’s blog that will provide continuing updates at www.NoPriceTooGreat.com .
So let’s get started.
Probably the first question you should ask yourself is whether you want to try to do this (apply for a K-1 fiancée visa or a K-3 marriage visa) on your own, or hire an attorney who specializes in immigration law. That is the same question I asked myself when my Chinese fiancée (now my wife) and I decided we wanted to get married. At the time, neither I nor other attorneys in my law firm were knowledgeable about immigration law.
Now if I can be a bit immodest, I believe it is fair to say that I am no dummy. I graduated ranked first in my class from undergraduate school with a degree in business. I graduated ranked second in my law school class. I was a student editor on the law review. After law school I practiced law as a partner in two large law firms, and even managed the Houston office of one of them. I could read the forms and the instructions that pertain to applying for a K-1 fiancée visa or a K-3 marriage visa as well as anyone.
But I made the decision to hire a law firm that specializes in immigration law to help my fiancée and me. Not just a firm that specializes in immigration law, but one that specializes in K-1 fiancée visas and K-3 marriage visas. I justified that decision by telling my fiancée that if someone tried to hire our law firm (at that time) to represent them in applying for a K-1 fiancée visa, or a K-3 marriage visa, we would not accept the case. We were not qualified to represent them at the time.
As it turned out, that was my first mistake. What!! You are a lawyer, and you are saying it was a mistake to hire a law firm that specializes in K-1 fiancée visas and K-3 marriage visas when you were applying for a K-1 fiancée visa? Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Let me tell you why. But first let me tell you that I am not saying it would necessarily be a mistake for you to hire a lawyer. I am also not saying that I would feel like I made a mistake if I had hired a different law firm.
I do know that I hired the wrong law firm, and I feel that we paid an unreasonably high fee for what they did for us. What I also believe, based on my experience, is that I did not hire a law firm that had the knowledge that was necessary to help us through the process of actually obtaining a K-1 fiancée visa or a K-3 marriage visa.
Why do I believe that? Because at the most critical stages, when everything had gone awry, the law firm did not help us one bit. In fact, the lawyers at the firm never got involved, despite my email messages to the paralegal they had assigned to handle my case. That is right. A paralegal. That is all the help this law firm ever provided to us. I am now convinced that the lawyers in this law firm did not help us as promised because they had no idea what to do.
The law firm charged a huge flat fee, payable up front. Now why would I agree to pay such a large fee? Because the promises on the law firm’s website made it seem like their services would be well worth the fee. They would do all the work, not us, they promised. There would be a shorter waiting period if we used their services, they promised. They promised to complete all the forms necessary for filing. They promised to assemble the K-1 fiancée visa petition package and submit it to the appropriate government agency. Finally, and most important to us, they promised to guide our visa petition’s progress to the successful completion and issuance of the visa. These are the words of the law firm, not my words.
Almost every single promise that the law firm made to us on its website in order to induce us to pay its huge flat fee was not true. I am telling you about this so you will hopefully not be mislead as we were when we hired a law firm. Let me tell you what the law firm did, and what my fiancée and I did, and you can decide if we were lied to or not. You can decide if this is the kind of experience you would want to have or not, and whether you believe what the law firm did was worth the fee it charged. You decide if what they did for us was worth a fee of more than $2,000.00.
First, the law firm assigned a paralegal who gave us some forms to fill in with background information about us, and told us what documents we needed to obtain to support the K-1 visa petition. Well, as I said before, I am no dummy. I already had copies of these forms and the instructions because they are available for free in many places, including on the website of the government agency that handles K-1 fiancée visa petitions and K-3 marriage visa petitions. The forms and the instructions that we already had tell a person everything that the law firm told us. Granted, those forms can be very confusing; so many people do what to hire a law firm to represent them in the process.
Some of the documents we needed to obtain were in China. The law firm was only able to give us vague information about what to do for the things we needed to obtain in China. We did the research on our own and found much better sources of information than the law firm to which we paid so much money. The bottom line is that we scrambled to locate and obtain all of the documents that were needed to support our K-1 fiancée visa application. The law firm did nothing to help us.
We also filled out all of the forms to support our K-1 fiancée visa petition. All the law firm did was have someone type the information in the spaces in the forms. The forms would have been just as acceptable to the government if we had turned them in neatly printed. “Type or print legibly in black ink.” That is what it says right in the instructions for completing the K-1 fiancée visa petition.
The paralegal or a secretary at the law firm prepared a cover letter (just a form letter) that merely listed what was attached. A lawyer at the firm signed the letter, and the K-1 fiancée visa petition was sent to the government agency for processing.
The law firm would not even have sent us a copy of what was filed if I hadn’t insisted on receiving a copy. As a lawyer I know that the law firm was required to provide a copy to us, but their usual procedure, they told me haughtily, did not include giving their clients (yes, the clients who also paid that huge upfront fee) a copy of what they filed on their behalf!
I can tell you from personal experience that the law firm’s usual procedure also did not include allowing clients to speak with the lawyers. Not only that, but it was almost as difficult to get the paralegal who was assigned to our case to speak with us on the telephone. She was willing to talk, I learned, but the law firm had a receptionist whose job it was, in my perception, to make sure that clients were not allowed to “bother” the lawyers and paralegals who were being paid what I now believe to be an unreasonably high fee to work on their case. I was eventually able to communicate effectively with the paralegal by using email.
So, my fiancée and I did most of the work to get our K-1 fiancée visa petition ready to file, not the law firm. The promise on its website that the law firm would do the work and not us was not true. That promise was not true with respect to preparing and filing our K-1 fiancée visa petition, and it was even less true once our K-1 fiancée visa petition had been filed.
I should also tell you about another promise that was made by the law firm and not kept. The upfront fee had to be paid half when the law firm was hired, and half when the K-1 visa petition had been filed. Because I live in a different state, the easiest way to pay the fee was using a credit card. I was promised that the second half of the fee would not be charged to the card until after the K-1 visa petition had been filed. Then the paralegal told me that one of the attorneys had taken the credit card information and charged the second half of the fee against it anyway, before they completed their “work” and filed our K-1 fiancée visa petition.
And what about the shorter waiting time we were promised? We were sent a letter after our K-1 fiancée visa petition had been filed. You can expect to receive approval for your K-1 fiancée visa petition within eighty days, we were told. If you don’t have approval by then, let us know so we can take care of it. We had no approval in eighty days, so we promptly notified the law firm as instructed. They did nothing except send an email to us saying that they were projecting it would actually take longer, basically admitting there was nothing they could do about it. They said they would notify us once it had been approved, but no action was required at this time. This is the point where I started to suspect that we had been mislead by what the law firm had promised it would do for us. I got actively involved, doing my own research about K-1 fiancée visa petitions and K-3 marriage visa petitions. I did both legal research and practical research, and I learned a lot more than what the law firm was telling us.
I learned that many other people who filed their petition when we filed received a letter approving their K-1 fiancée visa petition in about eighty days. Some took a little longer, some took less time. Some, like ours, were taking a lot longer. It became more and more disturbing when we learned that many people who filed weeks, and even months, after we filed, had already received a letter approving their K-1 fiancée visa petition or their K-3 marriage visa petition.
What was most troubling was when I learned that some of the people I am talking about were handling their K-1 visa petitions and their K-3 visa petitions themselves without using a law firm. These couples filed where the instructions told them to file. The law firm we hired tried to beat the system, or thought they were extra smart, so it filed our K-1 fiancée visa petition in California instead of in Texas, saying that it would just be transferred to California for processing anyway.
The people who were not as “smart” as the lawyers in the law firm we used just followed the rules and their K-1 visa petitions and K-3 visa petitions were on average approved much faster than ours was approved. It took one hundred twenty four days for our K-1 fiancée visa petition to be approved. So the law firm was not truthful when it told us that it would be faster if we paid its exorbitant fee.
So is that the end? I just said that our K-1 visa petition was approved. Isn’t this all that the law firm promised to accomplish for us? Not by a long, long, shot. Here is the promise again. I cut and pasted the law firm’s promise so you wouldn’t have to go back and find it. The law firm promised us on its web site that it would guide our visa petition’s progress to the successful completion and issuance of the visa. By the way, the law firm no longer makes that promise on its web site. I made a stink about its false promises. There will be more discussion about this later.
But first, while it is fresh on your mind, let’s talk about the difference between the promise the law firm made to us and what had been accomplished so far in our case. This is important. It is important that you understand the difference, because there are law firms that advertise that they have a 100% success rate in getting K-1 fiancée visa petitions and K-3 marriage visa petitions approved. Big deal; and very misleading if you don’t know what they are talking about – and it is quite likely that most people don’t know what they are talking about!
Here is what you need to know and understand. Almost all K-1 fiancée visa petitions and K-3 marriage visa petitions are approved. All it means when a K-1 fiancée visa petition or a K-3 marriage visa petition has been approved is that it has passed the first stage of the process. All you have established is that you are eligible for the benefit you are seeking. The most difficult part is still ahead! The part where you will most likely wish you had a good lawyer to advise you and help you still lies ahead.
One question you need to ask a lawyer if you decide to hire one is whether your lawyer or law firm will do anything more for you than file the K-1 fiancée visa petition or K-3 marriage visa petition for you in exchange for the fee it charges. A related but more important question is whether your lawyer or law firm is even capable of doing anything more for you than merely filing your K-1 fiancée visa petition or K-3 marriage visa petition.
You may not know enough yet to understand why I am emphasizing this point, but it should become very clear to you as we go through this learning process together. If this article has caught your attention, you may want to read the other articles. You may also want to read the book No Price Too Great. You can find it here once it has been published around the end of 2008: www.NoPriceTooGreat.com . In the meantime, you can read what others had to say about the book HERE. And you can read the Prologue from the book HERE.
© 2008 Lee Solomon
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