What is one important factor in whether a green card case gets approved?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our office here in st Louis, Missouri. I wanted to shoot today's video to remind you that in a marriage based green card case that the most important thing or one of the things that I'm always looking for in a consult is how do I believe the US citizen will perform under scrutiny? What do I mean by that?
Well, in a marriage based green card case, you're generally going to have a sponsor who is usually a US citizen, but sometimes a lawful permanent resident and then you're going to have the foreign national and more and more we're seeing the couples get separated at immigration interviews. And I wanted to make this video to explain to you what I think is one of the most important factors in whether the case gets approved and that is how will the US citizen perform under pressure.
And it's interesting because sometimes they have a consult with both spouses there. I like to have a consult with both spouses there. I don't feel entirely comfortable just meeting initially with the foreign spouse or even with the US citizen unless of course they're overseas. But in this video we're talking about green card cases adjustment here in the United States and it's really important that the US citizen be a fighter, that they be strong, that they be articulate, that they can explain things because if the couple is going to be separated and one of the members of the couple are going to be grilled independently of the other, in other words that they're going to be in the firing line with the officer.
Usually when you have a marriage based case and the couple is separated, in my experience, the officer spends more than twice as much time with the US citizen than they do with the foreign national.
In other words, they're going to spend a lot more time with that US citizen and I've seen US citizens who are deeply, madly in love with their spouse and who know every bitty detail of their immigration status. And then I have seen some US citizens who are very aloof, very sort of hands-off.
Very, Oh yeah. I don't know. I mean, frankly, once I had a lady say, this is unbelievable. The first question from the officer was, what is your spouse's first name? And the spouse was from Nigeria and had a somewhat difficult name to pronounce and the US citizen sort of spat it out and said, "Eh, I don't really know how to say his name." Now come on. That was just ridiculous. And so, what I mean by all of this is that we need to make sure that the US citizen is prepared.
A lot of people think, well, it's the immigrant's case, it's the immigrant's job to get the benefit. And yeah, the US citizen will come down and do their part but that really it's about the immigrant. But with the concern for marriage fraud and with the concern for US citizens conferring benefits on foreign nationals, perhaps for money or other illicit reasons, they're going to spend a lot of time with that US citizen.
And so Mr. or Mrs. US citizen you got to be ready. And that's why I wanted to make this video because it's not just about the immigrant, it's about you too. And it's about how you're going to perform and I just want to encourage you to be overly prepared, even more prepared than your immigrant spouse. I hope you found this video helpful. I hope it helps strengthen your case to improve your chances at immigration.
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