Family Petitions For Immigration Into The United States
There are several issues that must be considered when you decide to petition for family members to Immigrate to the United States. The problems you may face will depend upon your relationship to the family members.
Immediate family members
These include your parents, biological children, and your foreign born spouse. Your stepchildren under twenty-one years old may accompany your spouse and must be included
Immediate family members need not wait for a visa number to become available, but may
Issues with marriage based petitions
Because of a high incidence of fraud in marriage based immigration, the couple must go to great lengths to prove that their love is real and their marriage genuine.
Any kind of proof that can be gathered, such as shared property or bank accounts, wedding pictures, and correspondence, should be collected and sent with the petition. Even then, the petition can be denied by USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services), the immigration arm of the Department of Homeland Security.
Another potential problem is that although the petitioner can sponsor any stepchildren under twenty-one years old, the marriage must have taken place before the children reach the age of eighteen. This footnote may not be noticed by the petitioner and their spouse, and may cause heartbreak if they decide to postpone marriage and immigration until a child graduates high school in their home country.
The foreign born spouse is then forced to choose between staying with their young adult child or emigrating to be with their spouse in the United States.
Non-immediate relatives
These
- Adult children over twenty-one years old. Married adult children of the petitioner may bring their own spouses and children.
- Brothers and sisters of the petitioner may also bring their own spouses and children. Siblings of petitioners have
the longest wait times.
The problems with long wait times
Longer wait times may affect both the petitioner and the non-immediate relatives.
The petitioner must file an Affidavit of Support when the time for their relatives' interview approaches. This is a legally binding guarantee of financial support for each individual family member. Assets can be seized if the petitioner fails to honor the agreement. While the petitioner may be financially able to honor the agreement when the original petition is filed, the passing of a decade or more may find their financial situation vastly different.
The family members may also experience difficulties, because if their children reach the age of twenty-one while waiting for the petition to be granted, they age out and can no longer accompany their parents and siblings.
All of these issues should be discussed
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