Jenni_Harkonen

My aunt's nephew and his Bulgarian girlfriend did the same--she came over on a tourist visa, they got married, she stayed and got a greencard. The difference may be he is a bank president--and I'm not. I don't have untold thousands of dollars to hire an attorney should the USCIS decide to pick on us and neither does my fiance. So, I will go the K-1 route and hope for the best. It is still the safer route. If we had lots of money, maybe we'd try to challenge the system, too, but we don't. So much for "liberty and justice for ALL."

Just out of curiosity...

I keep hearing about the "Come over to the states on a tourist visa (or in this particular case an H2 visa), get married and just get to stay here and apply for green card" cases. My mother has a client who is attempting to do something like that, and that's literally the advise that their lawyer gave them. The guy is an H2 holder (diplomatic visa) and the lawyer told him that after the wedding here in the States he can just apply for green card.

Does that even work? If so...why the hell do K1/K3 visas even exist?

Or does the process go something like:

Wedding in the US

Apply for K3/CR1

Stay in the US until current visa runs out.

Leave country for interview (or when visa runs out)

Get back after visa is granted.

It's too late for us, but if this works it beats the "wait indefinitely while we process all the other visas" approach at VSC, so that other people could use it.

Happy 4th, have BBQ and drown your sorrows.

Andrei.

I don't know what state you live in, but here in Minnesota if you don't have a driver's license, you can get a state-issued photo ID card. You can get them from the Department of Motor Vehicles and some county offices. I'd check into that if I were you.

Trina, I dated a man for two years who was Muslim, but not particularly religious. I have always been a regular church-goer. It did not work out for us when we started discussing marriage and children. Like you, I could not see raising my child any religion than the one in which I was raised. I did not really like the idea of my children going to a mosque. And even though my boyfriend didn't think at the time that it would matter, deep down it did. He would also have wanted to show him what Islam is about. It was difficult at the time, but eventually I decided to go my own way and to break up with him. In hindsight, it was the best thing I could have done in this situation. Also, you have to understand that for a man to believe its POSSIBLE and permittable for a man to have more than one wife, also brings forth other issues you may have not thought of. If its possible for a man to have more than one wife, it is also possible for a man with a current wife to flirt or look at other women--even if its not legally possible in the USA for him to marry another. In other words, he morally has his options "open." Do not take this lightly, for unless he is an extremely orthodox muslim, cheating is somewhat culturally more permissable for a Muslim than for a Christian. Mohammed had many concubines as well as wives, and having a concubine, from what I understand, is permissable in some people's interpretation if Islam. A concubine is nothing more than a mistress. I have known of at least a dozen Christian-Muslim partnerships over the last 15 years, and only two are still functioning, and many of them broke up due to the wife's discovery of her husband's infidelities. I do not know you or your fiance, so I cannot judge your personal situation, but since you asked for feedback, I am giving it to you. I am now engaged to a Swedish national, and we too have religious differences--he is athiest although he was baptised Lutheran, which is the Christian faith I follow. We both have teenage sons, and we've agreed not to interfere in this matter with our respective sons.