What should I do if I can't get married in my boyfriend's home country?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. I had a great question from Robert in our Immigrant Home Facebook group.
By the way, if you're not a member of our Facebook group, you should join. It's called Immigrant Home. We have a lot of good questions in there. People are asking things all the time. It gives me good ideas for videos, just like this one. And we also post the immigration news of the day.
Robert is in a same-sex relationship with someone back in the Philippines and that individual and Robert are not going to be able to legally get married in the Philippines.
Robert has gone to visit his boyfriend many times and is wondering, what's the best way to get my boyfriend here in the United States for us to live together and get him a green card? They want to get married and they're wondering.
Of course, if Robert can't go to the Philippines and marry his lover, they're going to have to do a fiance case. So as long as Robert can prove that at some point in the last two years that Robert has gone to the Philippines or some other country and been in the same physical place in the same city, the same town.
So he's going to want to get proof that he was in Manila and that the boyfriend was in Manila or that they met in Tokyo, or they met in Hawaii, wherever. And then they're going to have to prove that they've been at each other's physical presence at some point in the last two years.
They're also going to have to prove by signing an affidavit that within 90 days of arrival, Robert's boyfriend will marry Robert and then they'll apply for adjustment of status.
That's how you do a K-1 visa. So they'll file an I-129F with USCIS, that'll take seven or eight months to get approved. Then it'll get sent into the National Visa Center so that they can do a processing, further processing.
And then eventually they'll schedule him, the boyfriend, for an interview in Manila. And so they're going to want to submit all the evidence about the relationship, about how that all, how they met, the time that they spent together, why they decided to get married, how they're in love, all those things.
So when you can't get married in the home country due to religious rules or any other kinds of civil rules that don't recognize same-sex marriages, you're most likely going to have to do a fiance case. So, that's one of the nice things about the I-129F is it allows you to do that without actually being married.
Fiance cases are a little bit tougher than spouse cases, but parts of it are faster. And of course here, if they can't actually get married in the Philippines, they're either going to have to get married somewhere else, or they're going to have to do the fiance case.
So hope that answers your question, Robert.
Thanks for the question in the group. Glad you're in Immigrant Home.
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