JFRV question (a few) with a twist

Legal Legal - Marriage
1

Ok, so great site! I have found a lot of useful info here. I do have a question or two that I cannot find the answer to though. Any help?

Ok, so here it goes…

me: American
fiance: Taiwanese
situation: We are getting married (in about 5 days) and we have a baby on the way. Like most people on here, the marriage is not a problem, but the visa may be. My problem is that I was not too smart about my entrance. We were living in Japan, and when we decided to come back to Taiwan, I enetered on a “landing visa” which is actually “visa-exempt” which I guess technically means that I don’t have a visa. We talked to BOCA and the guy at the counter said that I need to returm to America to change my visa. So…

my questions are:

  1. Do I need to leave Taiwan and apply for a visitors visa…re-enter Taiwan with that and then get it changed to a JFRV if all goes well?

or

  1. Can I apply for a resident visa when I leave since we will be married?

and

  1. The BOCA rep. said I HAD to go back to AMERICA. Why not Korea? Would Guam be okay since they are a US territory and have a Taiwan Consulate?

Finally,

I did teach here in 2005, so my passport has a visitors visa that was changed into a resident visa. Will that cause me to have problems securing another visitors visa if that’s the route I need to take?

Please, any help would be great. I know I asked a lot of questions, but like many before, the various offices involved all give me different information, or no information at all.

2

Yes. Your current visa-exempt status cannot be converted to a resident visa. Only extendable visas (generally those applied for in advance of a visit) are convertible to a resident visa inside Taiwan.

Yes, however representative offices often make it difficult to apply for resident visas, especially JFRVs, while applying for a visitor’s visa is usually much more straightforward. Most people, if they can, apply for an extendable visitor’s visa at a representative office and then convert it to a resident visa at BOCA in Taipei.

You can apply at any overseas representative office. (For some citizens of certain south-east Asian countries there are restrictions on where they can apply.) I assume from your intro that you are getting married here, so you won’t need to get your marriage certificate authenticated in the US, however you will need to obtain your clean criminal record document and get it authenticated at the representative office for that territory. While it is possible to do this by mail, you may find that it would be much faster to make a quick trip home to take care of this requirement in person.

It shouldn’t. As long as you didn’t have an overstay your previous visa status shouldn’t matter.

3

Thank you.

Guam it is :slight_smile: