Newbie post: Visa when moving back to the US for foreign spouse's professorship

[awaywego 28]

Hi all,

My husband is a German citizen, and I am a US citizen. My husband plans to apply to American tenure-track assistant professor positions for the 2015-2016 school year. We will move if he gets a position and will stay here and try again the next cycle if he does not. From what I understand, typically offers go out in April-June for positions starting in August/September. By the time of the offer, we will have been married 3 years and have lived in Germany for the last 2.5.

Our visa options, from what I can tell, are:

1) Apply Direct Consular Filing through Frankfurt once my husband has a job offer. (If it matters, we will not be relying on this income for our I-864, and I don't think we can use it anyway.) This is what we prefer to do because of the speed and relative ease. However, the timelines posted in the DCF Frankfurt thread (link) make it sound like threeish months might not be enough time.

2) The university provides my husband with a work visa (H-1B?), and we file for Adjustment of Status after we are back in the States. This will take longer and cost more for everyone involved. (There is some debate on applicant sites about whether the visa is a detriment, but it's impossible to know if that's the case.)

3) Start DCF before finding out whether my husband will have a job and have a green card either way. (What happens if he does not get a job, and we do not move back to the States? Do we have to either move or start over again the next year?)

I would greatly appreciate recommendations on which way we should go. Any suggestions, words of wisdom, or other helpful information that I could give?

[lost_at_sea 995]

DCF is a pretty good route. It's fast and reliable. The visa he'll be issued will be good for 6 months from the date he does his medical (and getting the visa should take 3-5 months), so you could time things to give you a cushion to best fit your plans.

If you wouldn't be planning to move until August, you'd have plenty of time for that path.

If you don't ever go to the US, then I think he has to reapply for a new visa once it's expired. If you do go to the US but don't stay (like you leave for Germany to stay for more than 6 months), he should apply for a reentry permit, else he could lose his green card, and again have to start over.

If he got the visa, he'd only have to enter once to trigger GC creation, so it would be worth doing even if you are not sure you'll stay.

Or, you let the university take care of getting him there, but as you say... Then you would be looking into adjustment of status if you plan to live there for good (do you?).

Edited December 23, 2013 by lost_at_sea

[awaywego 28]

DCF is a pretty good route. It's fast and reliable. The visa he'll be issued will be good for 6 months from the date he does his medical (and getting the visa should take 3-5 months), so you could time things to give you a cushion to best fit your plans.

If you wouldn't be planning to move until August, you'd have plenty of time for that path.

If you don't ever go to the US, then I think he has to reapply for a new visa once it's expired. If you do go to the US but don't stay (like you leave for Germany to stay for more than 6 months), he should apply for a reentry permit, else he could lose his green card, and again have to start over.

If he got the visa, he'd only have to enter once to trigger GC creation, so it would be worth doing even if you are not sure you'll stay.

Or, you let the university take care of getting him there, but as you say... Then you would be looking into adjustment of status if you plan to live there for good (do you?).

Thank you for your response, lost_at_sea! (I'm not sure how to tag on here. Hopefully quoting does it.)

We do plan to make the US our permanent home and, as such, will end this process with residency for my husband. I should have included that in my original post. Sorry about that.

From what I understand in your post, you think that the best plan is to apply DCF early enough to be able to move in August, even if there's no job offer yet when we apply. The fallback plan if he does not get a job and we have to stay in Germany for another year would then be to keep the GC current until we do move.

This is a possibility we had not considered. Can one do the first entry with the GC, not establish a residence in the US, and return a couple weeks later to another country if one intends to return to the US and make one's permanent home there later? If so, this is good to hear - I had thought we would need to move when his GC was approved lest it go to waste. We visit my family in the States twice a year and, if my husband is going through the application cycle again, he would be traveling for in-person interviews. Would that be enough to keep the GC current?

[lost_at_sea 995]

You should look up re-entry permits if you want to go down the GC route but not necessarily stay once he receives it. Not maintaining your US domicile as a GC holder can mean they will revoke it, which is what re-entry permits can help to prevent.

Also, as you are in Germany, you as the US citizen also need to show you either have US domicile or will be reestablishing one to satisfy the form I-864 (Google for the instructions) if you want to go down the spouse visa route. This would be easy enough to achieve if you're planning to move back, but it sounds like you're not making any plans so far. Do you work? Do you file your US taxes?

[Boiler 45,514]

h1b should not be subject to the cap, they might want to go J however.

[awaywego 28]

You should look up re-entry permits if you want to go down the GC route but not necessarily stay once he receives it. Not maintaining your US domicile as a GC holder can mean they will revoke it, which is what re-entry permits can help to prevent.

Also, as you are in Germany, you as the US citizen also need to show you either have US domicile or will be reestablishing one to satisfy the form I-864 (Google for the instructions) if you want to go down the spouse visa route. This would be easy enough to achieve if you're planning to move back, but it sounds like you're not making any plans so far. Do you work? Do you file your US taxes?

I am a student at a US university working on my degree in Germany. I (we, really - "married, filing jointly") file US taxes and state resident taxes (discussed with our accountant), and I vote absentee as temporarily abroad via FVAP. We maintain cars, credit cards, and bank accounts in the States. The I-840 info did not seem to require a physical address to which we will be moving but more evidence that my stay in Germany is temporary. Hopefully the above and my husband's job applications - by that time there should have been interviews and maybe/hopefully offers - will be enough to show that we plan to reestablish a domicile in the US.

We do hope to buy a house, and I will be looking for work, but unfortunately we cannot start on any of that until we know where we'll be moving, since it could be anywhere in the country. It's also difficult to tell exactly when, as my husband's line of work is extremely competitive - even more so with recent budgetary cuts to the sciences and education - and even highly qualified applicants might not obtain positions in a given hiring cycle. (I know, special snowflake blahdiblah, but we wouldn't be posting on this board if our case were more cut-and-dried.)

We have looked into the re-entry permit. Thank you for that suggestion. My husband is worried, though, that it is only one piece of evidence that he intends to maintain US residency and that he could still lose the GC if the entry point inspector makes the determination that he does not fulfill residency requirements. He worries that this could especially be determined if he got the GC and then left without establishing a physical residence in the US.

A couple new questions:

We will hopefully know about the job by the time we get the NOA2 and our packet 3 is requested (according to others’ timelines for both Frankfurt DCF and the academic hiring cycle and if I understand this all correctly). I assume that it is not possible to delay the application if there is no job; would canceling and refiling the next year if there is no job offer be a bad move? Another option would be to finish the application, try to find some random job in the States, and then have to move yet again after a year.

At what point, if any, in the DCF application process would my husband have trouble entering the US (normally on the VWP)? If we start the process before he has a job, he might still be entering for interviews.

[lost_at_sea 995]

1. You can peddle a bit to pad things out, but a whole year may be tricky. Keeping in contact with the embassy in Frankfurt may make that possible. You could contact the embassy now and enquire about how long they are willing to extend validity of a petition approved at their field office.

2. If you did cancel and refile, it should not cause any issues. Plans change, no big deal.

3. He can travel during the DCF process. They'll want to hold his passport after interview - but this is normally only for a few days to affix the visa.

Edited December 26, 2013 by lost_at_sea

[awaywego 28]

1. You can peddle a bit to pad things out, but a whole year may be tricky. Keeping in contact with the embassy in Frankfurt may make that possible. You could contact the embassy now and enquire about how long they are willing to extend validity of a petition approved at their field office.

2. If you did cancel and refile, it should not cause any issues. Plans change, no big deal.

3. He can travel during the DCF process. They'll want to hold his passport after interview - but this is normally only for a few days to affix the visa.

Thank you so much for your responses! We're definitely glad to hear #3. We will talk with the consulate when we get closer and will look to go DCF hoping that there's a job offer or some alternate plan of action by the NOA2.