My husband and I are moving back to America in July. He has overstayed by several months due to a nightmare of miscommunication, bank acct. theft, and a bunch of other BS that I’d gladly fill you in on if you really wanna know. You might have already read my past threads trying to combat some of the sh*t that the universe has thrown our way.
ANYWAYS
We already know we have to pay a $10,000 NTD fine, and that he’ll probably be banned from the country for a year.
Our question is this: Should we just head to the airport on our departure date early to pay the fee and deal with immigration? Or is there some reason we should check in with immigration before hand? We just don’t want to risk immigration holding us at the airport and us missing our flight or something.
Go to the immigrant police, show the right amount of shame, pay the fine. When you go to the U.S. make sure you have all the paperwork. Especially your marriage cert. and the paperwork the police give you.
Before. At an office in your city. They’ll give you a date to leave by, like 6 days maybe? Pays to call ahead instead of going in to find out. Better than sweating a possible missed flight out.
If you ask me, I’d seek out advise from AIT. I wouldn’t just walk into an immigration office and say ‘this guy has overstayed’, without having some idea what they will do. Good luck.
They could arrest you or detain you but unlikely as you are not blue collar workers right?
You must take care of it before you go to the airport or they will not let you leave
I was one day past my visa and they wouldn’t let me leave
I had to miss my flight and go take care of it at the Taipei office
I’m a teacher, he came here as an unemployed spouse. BoCA wouldn’t process his visa with mine as my spouse and that’s where all the trouble began. Thanks for the info!
If you guys will visit NIA a few weekdays before your departure date with your tickets, I guess there would not be much trouble to solve the situation.
NIA is the immigrant police in my addled brain. One of my students calls himself an immigrant police - officer, it’s possible I picked it up there. Sorry for any misunderstanding.
Btw, I think you can consult to NIA on your situation by phone anonymously. They might give you information on what you should do and how many days you need.
If its more than 90 days you (he) has to go to the NIA office first to basically hand himself in. As his wife you’ll probably need to make a statement that you supported him. There will be forms, there will be passport copies. Do not under any circumstances mention work of any kind including volunteer work. Do mention tai chi in the park and other cultural activities, hiking, photography etc. if asked. You’ll need air tickets in hand. Take everything with you, bank books, tenancy lease etc.
Do not take this too lightly but also not too seriously if you get my drift. But don’t rock up to the airport with NTD10,000 in your hand, you’ll likely not get on the plane.
Your response makes me feel a lot more confident, thank you. We’re prepared to face financial consequences and face some angry people, we just want to make sure we aren’t going to go to jail or something.
I was actually wondering that. It’s been really frustrating because it is literally BoCA’s fault that all of this happened. There’s no accountability though, so we’ve just been rolling with the punches knowing that leaving the country would involve some intense begging to NIA.
Since we can afford the fine and we’re not planning on coming back for a few years (minimum, we’d like to return some day) we aren’t really interested in fighting the government. We just wish that back when this was a small visitor visa error, BoCA would have just fixed their mistake.
To get a spousal resident visa for your husband without going out of taiwan, most probably you two should have applied for the resident visa at the same time. If his application was submitted separately, and so was not accepted, overstating after his visitor visa expiration is not boca’s mistake.
This happened because the clerk at BoCA told us to do it this way. I asked him about this specific situation and he said it would be fine if my husband applied separately.