Why Legal Immigration Is Impossible for Nearly Everyone
Why Legal Immigration Is Impossible for Nearly Everyone
There is an illustrated flowchart for various pathways to legal immigration in the U.S.
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This doesn't appear to even touch on the topic of cost for the process. The fees on paper may only be a couple hundred dollars, but if you want any chance of actually getting through the process correctly without missing paperwork or deadlines resulting in a denial from the bureaucratic machine, you'll essentially need an immigration attorney, and they are not cheap.
When my dad married a woman from the Phillipines about 9 years ago, it ended up costing around $20k for her and one child. That process took almost 5 years to complete... and this was after they'd already been in the US via a Visa and decided to get married here. So ostensibly a bunch of relevant requirements had to have been already verified with the previously approved Visa.
That's worse than my story, sorry they had to go through that.
I married my wife while I was living in her country, Georgia. Then I came back to the U.S. and started the process for her to come. It took 17 months. I didn't need a lawyer for it. We did later try to get a visitor visa for my mother-in-law and it got denied. I always say that if I had it to do over again, it would have probably been cheaper and quicker to fly them both to Mexico and then cross the border.