Dealing with Immigration - In the Beginning

What a confusing mess. It amazes me how many people are out there wandering around with no clue as to how to handle having a love from another country. There are so many people giving advice on how to get the other person over. Who would'a thought, even with 9/11 that there would be so much red tape. I mean, yes, scrutiny is understandable... but a lot of what we have to do was in place well before 9/11. It's like the two countries are both going "mine...mine... mine" and it's laughable.

We did our homework. We researched until our heads hurt. We got so much conflicting information it just got us further and further from having a clue.

Eventually we realized that the only way to get this done was to go to someone (and pay out the wazoo) who knew what it was all about and who had dealt with it before. That meant a (dreaded) attorney. No offense to the attorneys out there... but hey, you know what I mean.

So we went. We called two. The conflicts started immediately. Won't go into great detail here. Suffice it to say we were once again confused.

Sometimes you need to step outside of your situation and present it to an unbiased outsider. That helped. We agreed that out of the two atty's we spoke to, having one local would be better. So we met with him.

Well, while the attorney in California was saying 'Whatever you do, don't get married now." This attorney said "Whatever you do, don't wait too long to get married... do it now"

Sheesh...

But after talking to him at length we did discover that if we married now, John would stay, the paperwork would be filed and he could potentially be working within 3 months of the filing. Well, that was a serious concern (that AND the fact that we dreaded even another day apart!!!)

What really convinced us however was the fact that if John DID go back first and we filed for the K-3 (Fiance) visa, he could be there, unable to even visit me, for a minimum of 6 months and potentially a lot longer. We looked at each other sitting there in the attorney's office and remembered the last time we were apart... 2 weeks... it was hell. Now the attorney was saying 6 months?????????? I don't think so.

It wasn't even up for debate. We squeezed each other's hand and looked at the attorney and just shook our heads. We said "We can't do that."

So the plan then was to get all our paperwork together, get married, file... and wait. This would cause great financial strain... that was the downside. The main one anyway.

First we had to get John's Birth Certificate... it was the only thing we did not have yet that would be required to file... so we had to wait to get married until we had that in hand.