Will USCIS looked beyond income in looking at the affidavit of support? Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. I'm making this video to give you one of my strongest pieces of advice, one of my best tips, one of my pet peeves, one of the things that we hear back and fight with clients often, and that is how do you calculate whether or not someone is properly qualified to either be a sponsor or a co-sponsor on the I-864 affidavit of support? I can't tell you how many clients tell us that they've been reading up on the internet, they've been reading up on USCIS's website, and that USCIS lays out nine ways that someone can demonstrate that they have enough assets or make enough money to serve as a sponsor or co-sponsor on the I-864. They're a hundred percent right.
USCIS says that you can use all these other means, like property, or assets, or holdings in the bank, to demonstrate that this particular person is qualified to serve as a sponsor. But in my 13 years of experience as an immigration lawyer and in the hundreds of adjustment cases or overseas visa cases that we've handled, we have learned one thing. The only thing they care about are the W2's and the yearly income, or the 1099's. All they care about is how much the person makes in salary in each of the last three years. Now, if people are self-employed, we can work with that. But what the government wants to know is that there's regular cashflow coming in into the sponsor or the co-sponsor. They are not going to look at your assets. They are not going to look at your retirement account. They're not going to look at any of that stuff. If you send it in, all you're doing is buying yourself months and months of waiting.
What you need to do is make sure that your sponsor has earned 125% of the poverty guidelines in each of the last three years. Not two out of the three, not one out of the three, not the most recent; the last three. If not, they're going to need a co-sponsor, and you're going to have to ask yourself the same question. Does the co-sponsor make enough in each of the last three years? Not two years, not one year, not just this year; the last three years. If not, you're going to need a co-sponsor. I said this literally hundreds of times. I'm making this video to share this information with you. You can do whatever you want. You can file whatever you want. But if you want to get that work authorization, if you want to get your interview scheduled, you need to do it the right way. You need to do it the way that they want it done, even they don't tell you the right way to do it. That is not on accident. That is on purpose.
At the end of the day, if you are filing for a green card for someone else, if you're the sponsor, or if you're the co-sponsor, the only question is, have you made enough money in each of the last three years? Was your adjusted gross income enough? If not, and you're the sponsor, you're going to need a co-sponsor. If you're asking for someone to serve as the co-sponsor and they can't satisfy that, it's not going to work. Nobody cares if you have a million dollars in the bank. That's true if you're the sponsor. That's true if you're the co-sponsor. If you don't have money coming in every year, every month, if you can't show that you have cash coming in to "support" the foreign national, if need be, none of the rest matters. None of it matters.
Again, there's no reason to fight us on this. We've done this hundreds of times. We know how to make your case go faster. This video is for everybody who thinks that they've figured out some alternative way that USCIS will do what they want them to do. You are setting yourself up for failure. You're setting yourself up for frustration. You're setting yourself up for more and more delays if you don't do it the way that I'm telling you to do it. Again, free to do whatever you want, but if you want to get your case approved as quickly as possible, because we all know there's plenty of delays already baked into the system, you're going to need to do it that way. You're going to need to show income, annual income, monthly income, on the part of the sponsor, on the part of the co-sponsor. Otherwise, it's not working.
If you have questions about this, give us a call at (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home. If you like this video, we ask that you please share it out on social and that you subscribe to our YouTube channel. Also, we have an Instagram account, which is @hackinglawpracticellc. We'd love to have you follow us. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
