How can I get visas for my foreign spouse's children?
The number of Americans who marry foreigners is growing every year by thousands. The U.S. citizens are moving away from the conventional American dating system and are involved in contemporary e-mail marriages. The fact that more than eighty percent of these e-mail marriages become succesful aids this purpose. If you are an American who has married a foreigner, you can bring your foreign spouse to the United States of America with the help of marriage visas issued by the Immigration Department. These marriage visas include the IR1 or CR1 visa, the K-3 visa, and the K-1 visa. The first two visas are spouse visas while the last one is a fiance visa.
If your foreign spouse is a widow, widower or a divorcee, then it is imperative that they will want to bring their children with them to the U.S. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Department has made provisions so that Americans can bring the children of foreign spouses into America, provided they satisfy certain requirements. You can bring the children of your foreign spouse, by getting them one of the derivative visas - K-2 visas and K-4 visas. These visas are called derivative visas, because they are derived from the marriage visas K-1 and K-3 visas respectively.
Let us first look into the details of the K-2 visas. If your foreign fiance has unmarried children or child under the age of 21, then they are eligible to avail the derivative K-2 visa, with repect to their parent's fiance visa (K-1). Another eligibility criterion is that they should not possess any criminal record. These unmarried children can immigrate into the U.S. along with your fiance or within one year from the date of issue of the K-1 visa.
If an American is already married to a foreigner, then the children of such foreign spouses can enter the United States of America on K-4 visas, which are derivative visas of the K-3 visas. The eligibilty criteria for K-4 visas requires that the spouse has unmarried children under the age of 21 without any criminal record.
For both K-2 and K-4 visas, the U.S. citizen need not file a separate K-1 or K-3 visa for the spouse's children, because these visas come under derivative nonimmigrant classification. However, the U.S. citizen spouse should not forget to mention the unmarried children's names in the petition for their parent's marriage visa.
The U.S. citizen spouse should file a separate I-130 form for each of the unmarried children of the foreign spouse, in order to adjust their status to permenent residence. The reason for this is because, once the foreign spouse becomes a permanent resident, the K-4 or K-2 visas will no longer hold good and the children may lose their lawful status to reside in the United States. This issue can cause serious problems, and they might even be deported to the country they immigrated from.
In order to help you avoid such circumstances, USAMarriageVisas.com has come out with an e-book that provides all the necessary information with regard to bringing the unmarried children of your foreign spouse to the U.S. This e-book throws light on all the dos and donts involved in filing for the derivative visas of your spouse's children.
