My girl friend got her tourist visa last year and I remember that it
was valid for 5 years. Is this possible, and what do we need to do
get apply for in order to get back to the USA this year (for about 1 month)
also, is it possible to get married in the USA on a tourist visa?
our marriage visa appplication was submitted in february and they don’t
know when it will be approved.
our congressman has told us to do it this way (tourist visa)—the department
of homeland security is a mess!!! (that was nice to hear!)
Like you heard the rules change all the time, my friend who brought his vietnamese gf to the US had to wait in vietnam for the paperwork to get approved. I do not think you can get married on a tourist visa and stay in the US.
[quote=“grg”]My girl friend got her tourist visa last year and I remember that it
was valid for 5 years. Is this possible, and what do we need to do
get apply for in order to get back to the USA this year (for about 1 month)[/quote]
Have you looked at her passport to see? AIT grants 5 year multiple entry visas in many cases, so if she got one of these last year it should still be valid.
It is possible, however you have to be careful. You cannot apply for or enter the US on a tourist visa with the intention of getting married. If she shows up at immigration saying she’s entering the country to get married and does not have a fiancee visa, they can deny her entry.
If on the other hand she goes to the US to visit and just happens to get married, that’s perfectly fine. Once you are married you can then apply for a change in immigrant status without her needing to leave the country. Just make sure you have your story straight when going through immigration. This is especially true since you’ve already applied for a fiancee visa, so there’s a good chance they will ask.
My wife and I got married in the US after she entered on a tourist visa, and we didn’t encounter any problems.
It’s not that hard to get married in most other places in the US. When we got married in San Jose, CA, we came in to fill out a form, then got an appointment to get married for the following day. About 24 hours from start to finish and we were married. If we’d gotten an appointment in advance we coulda done the whole thing in a couple of hours.
My husband and I got married this way, too. We tied the knot when he was on a 90-day tourist visa (from the UK). Immigration had initially told me before he came over that we had to get a fiancee visa (which may have included up to a year of separation, where neither of us was supposed to leave our respective countries), but a friend of a friend who works for immigration told me that you can get married on a tourist visa and that the foreign spouse can stay in the country. He said that this fact is obviously not advertised, but definitely possible.
In our case, the day after we got married we went to file for a green card, and my husband immediately got working papers within the hour. It was dead easy, no questons asked.
Anybody know if there’ll be a problem with entering the US on a soon-to-be expired US tourist visa? If the visa is good until April, 2007, and the holder goes to the US in Feb, 2007, will she be denied entry? I vaguely remember that a US visa, while is still valid, has to be good for at least 6 months for it to be usable. Can anyone corroborate this? Thanks.
Usually the 6 months restrictions are related to the expiration of the passport. For instance, you can not enter Taiwan visa-free if your passport has less than 6 months left, but you can apply for a landing visa instead.
Thanks for clearing that up, jlick. Now I don’t have to worry about the scenario of my wife getting sent back on a plane to Taipei with me waiting for her all alone next to an empty carousel at LAX.
Question about getting tourist visas for my step-kids. I’m a US citizen. My wife and step-kids are not. Do they need to go through the same process for a non-immigrant visa as everyone else (e.g. ATOS pre-processing of documents, paying the fees, interviews)?
Also, when I asked about this last time I was at AIT (getting a document authenticated), why did the people at the non-immigrant visa information window tell me that it wasn’t like that my step-kids would be granted a tourist visa? We want to go home for two weeks to visit family. My work is here, the kids are enrolled in school here, we have a home and a new car here, etc. We have no intention of staying. Seems a bit off–the people who told me there were Taiwanese employees, not consular officers.
I wouldn’t take much stock in what a window flunky told you. My wife’s sisters and nephews were all able to get tourist visas without much problem. I doubt your step kids will either. You may be asked to prove ties to the community here but it sounds like you don’t have a problem there.
