I-864 and a joint tax return with intending immigrant

[rutabaga 209]

I am the intending immigrant and I was legally working in the US during the last tax year and had filed a joint tax return with my wife who is my sponsor. We are at the NVC stage now and I'm wondering if she needs to submit her W2 due to the joint tax return or not since I'm the one she filed jointly with (and I'm obviously fine with her using my income to qualify).

I cannot file an I-864a as I do not qualify according to the instructions of that form (neither of the two things under How Can the Intending Immigrant Be Considered a Household Member? applies to me).

Any thoughts?

[aleful 1,905]

hi

yes she does, she needs to put her individual income on the i864 and the W2s are proof of what she made herself, individually from you

[rutabaga 209]

Thanks for the response, aleful!

[rutabaga 209]

Oh, just to bring this matter to a conclusion if anyone ever stumbles upon it: what we ended up doing is we put the number from the joint return into total income (closely following instructions for the I-864 as we understood them to be, so we didn't separate her portion out in part 6), but we wrote an explanation to that end in part 11 additional information (explaining that the return was filed jointly and that the total income reflects that, but that we attached her W2 for the year where they can see my wife's portion of the income) and we attached her W2 for the year in question. That seemed to be the way to go in our case as we completed the process without a checklist or anything, but of course, YMMV.

[grad_student 11]

Oh, just to bring this matter to a conclusion if anyone ever stumbles upon it: what we ended up doing is we put the number from the joint return into total income (closely following instructions for the I-864 as we understood them to be, so we didn't separate her portion out in part 6), but we wrote an explanation to that end in part 11 additional information (explaining that the return was filed jointly and that the total income reflects that, but that we attached her W2 for the year where they can see my wife's portion of the income) and we attached her W2 for the year in question. That seemed to be the way to go in our case as we completed the process without a checklist or anything, but of course, YMMV.

Great. thanks for posting about what u actually did and it was not checklisted by the NVC. Good job