By Victoria
Welcome! We're Victoria and Colin, an international, long-distance couple from the United States and Northern Ireland, respectively. We met in June 2012, got engaged in October 2013, and now we're working on getting Colin over to the U.S. on a K-1 Visa so we can get married and finally be together permanently! We've set up this blog to keep track of our own process and keep family and friends informed of our progress.
What is a K-1 Visa, though? The K-1 is also known as the Fiancé(e) Visa. It's a visa that allows the foreign non-citizen fiance of a U.S. citizen to enter the country, get married, and then stay as a permanent resident (after submitting more forms). Once the non-citizen -- Colin, in this case -- is granted the K-1 Visa and arrives in the United States, he has 90 days to legally marry me, the U.S. citizen, or else the visa expires and he has to go back to Northern Ireland. As long as we're married within that window of time, he can stay in the U.S. That's stage 1. After getting married, we have to submit a Change of Status application to make sure he's registered as a permanent resident, which the Federal Government will then accept, but only on conditional terms. That's stage 2. Stage 3 is then submitting more forms to have the conditional status removed, at which point Colin becomes a permanent resident of the U.S., period.
The U.S. Department of State has a really good step-by-step description of just the stage 1 process involving the K-1 Visa. The actual visa application paperwork and such is located at the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website though, because the Government likes to be confusing. You'll note that the K-1 Visa is officially considered a nonimmigrant visa because the K-1 itself does not grant permanent resident status.
We'll probably go more in-depth into the K-1 process itself in a later post, but that's the summary. We're getting started on our own materials-gathering and will be submitting the initial petition application at the end of April, so stay tuned! We'll be posting updates from here on out as we get the ball rolling.
