If an immigrant comes to the US, if someone who's not a US citizen comes to the
US, either on a tourist visa or on a visa waiver program, a lot of people refer to that
as ESTA because that's one of the forms they fill out to get that visa waiver, can they get
married and apply for a green card in the US?Is that a good strategy? We see that batted around
a lot online and that's possibly our top question of all time about marriage-based
green cards, wouldn't you say? Definitely. Absolutely. With this question, we
know that there's a lot of online forums you might have had friends or other individuals that
have said that they have done it this way. But the reality is that if you come on a
on a tourist visa, tourist visas are what they call non-immigrant intent, which means
that when you receive that visa and when you travel to the US on that visa,
you're telling immigration that you have the intent to come here for the purpose
of travel, short-term, not to live here, not to get married, and not to file your green card.
You can't come to the United States with a tourist visa or ESTA with the intent of getting married
and filing your green card application because immigration doesn't want you to circumvent the
normal process that's involved with individuals who are living abroad. You want to expand on that?
I would just say because the normal process is so annoying and time-consuming,
that's kind of what makes people want to try that option. I would just say that for some
people, they come into the US with non-immigrant intent and then something changes once they're
here. A perfect example is what's happened with Coronavirus. We had people who were
they were doing their case a different way, they were gonna do a spouse visa or maybe a fiancé
visa but they happened to be inside the US in March when a lot of this hit and
international travel was shut down. A lot of things became very difficult. For some of those people,
they ended up getting married or they were already married. Because they didn't have
the intention of staying when they first came in with their visa waiver or with their tourist visa,
but the circumstances changed quite drastically, they actually are legally permitted to change
their strategy at that point and just go ahead and file the case inside the US. We did have a lot
of people who end up taking that route. Sometimes we see other situations where someone came
in on a student visa or a tourist visa and they met someone and fell in love and it just wasn't
forseen. The problem is if you have this plan that's like, I'm gonna sell all
my belongings and like put my wedding dress in my suitcase and fly to America with my ESTA and then
get married and stay. That's what's not allowed. It's a very fact-specific situation. I think
that's really important, it depends. I think one more thing I would want to say about that
because you're right, this is the sort of thing we could probably talk about for a long time.
I know people who have done this is under different policies, different
administrations. And this particular thing, where people are coming in as tourists and then
getting married and staying has been singled out for additional scrutiny.
It's not as easy as it used to be to do that. It's true that maybe in the
past, officers have looked the other way. But now, we're seeing
significant pushback. We've seen actual changes in some of the written policies
that the government has for the workers who assess these cases.
If you did it in 1990, it's a little different now or even three years ago, it's different now.
People, look out. You don't want to risk your whole life on that.
We've seen some cases get kind of complicated from that.