Your visit visa can screw up your immigrant visa case. Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our offices in San Diego, California and St. Louis, Missouri.
In this video, we're going to talk about visit visas. And one of the great things about being an immigration lawyer, and being as busy as we are is, we don't handle visit visas. And we don't handle visit visas because they are a pain in the butt, many of them are denied, clients ended up getting angry at us even though we did everything possible to get the visit visa approved.
The fact is, the state department has so much discretion, and the denial rates are so high that there's really no reason for us to get involved in visit visas. But we do get involved in visit visas because visit visa can come back and bite you in the butt. And what do I mean by that? Well, we have seen case, after case, after case, where USCIS, or the state department, are going back to look at prior visit visa applications filed by the beneficiary. And we see this sort of in two general situations.
The first is when there's a foreign national who's trying to come to the United States on an immigrant visa. That is, they have a US citizen spouse, or a lawful permanent resident spouse. That petitioner has filed for their spouse who's back in the home country to come to the United States on an immigrant visa and to get a green card. And when the time comes for the embassy interview, what we're seeing are embassy officials going back and looking at the prior visit visas, if any, filed by the foreign national, and these can be problematic because sometimes people say things in their visit visas that are not true.
I had an example of this the other day when I was talking to a young man who told the embassy official that he was a medical doctor, and that he was coming to the United States to get a medical degree. And now, he's in the United States, and he's married a US citizen, and he's all set to get a green card. This is the other way that it shows up in adjustment too. He's going to have a problem, and he now has to get a waiver because when he said that he was a medical doctor and was coming to attend a medical conference, that was all false. And now he's going to have to go through some hoops to show extreme hardship to his US citizen spouse if he's forced to go back home.
So those visit visas can screw you up with adjustment here in the United States. They can also screw you up if you're going in for that immigrant visa. So, we've had people who apply over, and over, and over for a visit visa, and they might not say anything that's false in their applications, but that simple fact of applying for a visit visa over, and over, and over, telegraphs to the US embassy official that the foreign national really, really, really, really, really wants to come to the United States, and makes them think that this person is so desperate to come to the United States, that they might even enter into a sham marriage.
So, visit visas can be very problematic, especially now, even here at USCIS, they're going back and requesting the visit visa documents from the state department, and the state department is transferring that stuff over actually pretty quickly. The officer can get that in just a matter of weeks. Sometimes if your interview gets canceled, that's sometimes the reason why, because the officer wants to go back and get those visit visa records. So, when we are doing consults now, we make it very clear that we need to know about all the prior visit visas. We need to go over all that information. And most importantly, we need to know if things were stated in there that were false.
Now, a lot of times, these mistakes or miss statement of fact that come about in visit visas come about because the person using Notario, or a form filler, or a visa expert back in their home country. And sometimes these people fill out the paperwork for the beneficiary altogether. So the beneficiary never even really sees the paperwork so you never even know what was said or what's in there. And that's because these people are lying to get a visit visa so that the person can come to the United States, and that's a real problem. So, you need to think long and hard about any prior visit visas that you've applied for, any B-1/B-2 visas that you've applied for because they can really impact your case.
If you have questions about this, or if you're worried about any prior visa applications that you made, you should give us a call at (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, that's called, Immigrant Home, we'd love to see in there. And then we also have our YouTube channel that you can subscribe to whenever we get a new video out, which is every single day, you'll get an alert. And you'll also get alerted on Tuesdays and Thursdays when we go live in our Facebook group and our YouTube channel answering as many immigration questions as we can on the Immigration Answers Show.
Thanks. Hope to see you there. Take care. Buh-bye
