Where's your wife? Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer, practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. Or more specifically, where's your spouse? It could be, where's your husband? And I'm shooting this video because something occurred to me when I was having a consultation today with a really nice couple. And when I say, where's your wife? What I mean is that it's unusual for one person in a relationship to contact our office and want to talk to us without the spouse or the proposed spouse or the fiance on the call. It makes you stretch your head a little bit and makes you wonder, why is this person calling without their spouse? And maybe the couple aren't on the same page. Now, sometimes you have to do that in scenarios like where it's time to file for an I-751 to get the conditions removed and we're only going to be representing one part of the couple.
But, just overall, when you're dealing with an immigration lawyer, I think you want to come fully open and transparent and I think you want to be able to do that with your spouse. We're going to be able to file a much stronger case and a much more solid case if both parts of the couple are involved from the beginning. Now, of course, sometimes one of the spouse member is overseas and you got to do it all on video and that's fine. But I think there's a correlation between the degree of interest by both family members, the spouses, the U S citizen and the non-citizen spouse, as opposed to situations where just one person comes in. We've had some squirrely situations where people come in by themselves. And I think this theory also extends to immigration. For instance, when you apply for naturalization, if you apply on the five-year rule, you don't need your spouse to be there, but if your spouse comes, I think that sort of demonstrates a little bit level of caring and concern about your spouse.
So it's always good if you're doing anything related to marriage or if you're trying to prove up the marriage, if the relationship is solid that the couple go through it together from start to finish. And I've seen this sort of spill out even at USCIS itself, so I think officers like it when they see the U S citizen who might not be the beneficiary is involved and is paying attention and wants them to win. And certainly we here at the office can tell the difference and it just makes a big difference when the couple is fully engaged and they really want to win and they're doing everything that they can. It doesn't mean you still don't get adverse decisions, doesn't mean that if your case is denied that your marriage isn't valid, I just had this overall sense that I wanted to share with you that when everybody's involved and everybody's fighting and everybody's rowing in the same direction, it really, really helps the overall case.
I hope this makes sense, I hope it's not too preachy. If you have questions, 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. And if you liked this video, we ask that you please share it out on social and you subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you get updates whenever we make videos just like this one. And be sure to check us out on Instagram @hackinglawpracticellc. Thanks a lot, have a great day.
