Travel after getting Permanent Green Card?

[areyaar 0]

Hello, my wife came to the US on a K-3 visa and we just got her Permanent Green Card (i.e., we had the Conditional Green card, applied to get the condition removed, and she got her Permanent Green Card).

I believe the next step is filing for naturalization, which I was planning on doing sometime in the next few weeks. My question is, we want to travel to France and Italy next month. I am a US citizen.....is she allowed to leave the US? Do we have to go through any extra hoops?

Please help, since we need to book tickets ASAP if we plan on making this trip.

Thanks!

[NickD 203]

Hello, my wife came to the US on a K-3 visa and we just got her Permanent Green Card (i.e., we had the Conditional Green card, applied to get the condition removed, and she got her Permanent Green Card).

I believe the next step is filing for naturalization, which I was planning on doing sometime in the next few weeks. My question is, we want to travel to France and Italy next month. I am a US citizen.....is she allowed to leave the US? Do we have to go through any extra hoops?

Please help, since we need to book tickets ASAP if we plan on making this trip.

Thanks!

Well, you both need a passport, yours will be a US, your wife, from some foreign country, they don't issue US passports to permanent resident card holders here that can put you between a rock and a hard place as that foreign country may not want to issue or renew that passport with some silly idea, why should they, you are here and not there.

Then there is the questions of visa to visit a foreign country, many countries do not require a visa if you are from the USA with a US passport, but may require a visa from some other country and that depends highly on where your wife is from.

You can get most of your questions answered here http://www.state.gov/

Not an equal system, as a US citizen could visit both Colombia and Venezuela without a visa, but anyone living there needs a visa to come here and some are nearly impossible to get. We did travel last year with an expired green card and a one year extension notice and got back in with no trouble. Good thing you are traveling with your wife, my wife's lady friends coming back alone were given a very hard time coming back into the good old USA with several getting a strip search. LOL, I was ready to kill if they touched my wife.

With all those horror stories, tossed my photo ID veterans card down with my passport, put my arm around my wife and kissed her and said, this is my precious wife, he treated her with great respect, no problems. But they still had to play with our underwear in our luggage, foreign countries we visited, didn't care about that.

[Staashi 371]

Hello, my wife came to the US on a K-3 visa and we just got her Permanent Green Card (i.e., we had the Conditional Green card, applied to get the condition removed, and she got her Permanent Green Card).

I believe the next step is filing for naturalization, which I was planning on doing sometime in the next few weeks. My question is, we want to travel to France and Italy next month. I am a US citizen.....is she allowed to leave the US? Do we have to go through any extra hoops?

Please help, since we need to book tickets ASAP if we plan on making this trip.

Thanks!

She can travel...just make sure she doesn't require any specific visas for the country she is entering. When she comes home all she'll need to do is present her greencard to come back to US.

Have a super time!

[AusCal 3]

She can travel...just make sure she doesn't require any specific visas for the country she is entering. When she comes home all she'll need to do is present her greencard to come back to US.

She will also need a current passport from her country of citizenship.

[lucyrich 20]

A few issues regarding travel before naturalization:

Be sure and keep track of the travel dates. Passport stamps, boarding passes, etc. can do this. Write down the dates immediately after the trip and keep it in a place where you'll be able to get at it readily as you prepare to fill out your N-400. In fact, you might want to start downloading and filling out that N-400 now, at least as a first draft in pencil. You'll need your travel dates to demonstrate that you meet the continuous residence and physical presence requirements for naturalization. If you travel after filing the N-400, continue to keep track of travel dates and bring the updated info to your interview or oath ceremony.

Basically, ordinary vacation travel of a few weeks per year doesn't even come close to presenting a problem for naturalization. If none of your trips are longer than six months, and your total time out of the country is less than half of the required period of continuous residence, you're ok. If you're filing for naturalization based on 3 years married to a US Citizen, you would have to have spent at least half that time, or 18 months, actually inside the US.

You can travel before or after you fill out your N-400. You've got to be back in the US for your interview, which they will schedule for you, probably at an inconvenient time. You've also got to be back in the US for your oath ceremony.

The day after you take your citizenship oath, you are a US citizen without a US passport. So you can't travel until you get that US passport, even if you still hold other valid passport(s). Allow a few weeks to get it before scheduling any travel.

There's also the obvious issue that you've got to find out if your existing foreign passport is adequate to allow you to visit your intended destination(s).

[rclouse 0]

We had to get my wife a Schengen visa when we visited Paris in February 2007. We could have gotten one at the airport but didn't want to be stuck there for a long time so we got it here before the trip.

Have fun! Bring lots of money, it's even more expensive there now.