Visa Form I-864

...continued from previous post...

After about a month I got the receipt from Homeland Security for the $170 processing fee that was submitted with the Form I-129F fiance petition. A couple of weeks after this, I was mailed another bill, asking for a $70 processing fee for them to send me the affidavit of support paperwork.

This would have been a complete surprise to me, except that I had helped Steve fill out his affidavit of support paperwork a month earlier. He really is a crystal ball. I see what he has to do, and then I know what is coming next for me - much more reliable than calling USCIS with visa questions.

Before I go any further, it should be noted that the affidavit of support for those of you doing a fiance entry is different from what those of us doing the spousal visa must fill out. We have to do a very detailed Form I-864, whereas those doing the fiance visa have a more simplified form. I think it is called I-364, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

Anyway, when I got the bill for $70, it was paid promptly, and a couple of weeks later I recieved US Immigration Form I-864 - Affidavit of support. This form is essentially a contract where the petitioner (myself) agrees to be financially responsible for the beneficiary (foreign spouse), and is also a contract with the Government where you agree that if the spouse should ever require means tested benefits (such as unemployment), that you will be accountable and have to repay these funds to the Government. It is a complicated set of papers that is basically meant to make sure the spouse will not be a burdon on the US economy, which is a good thing I suppose.


White Water Rafting On the Davao River - Guess which one is me
The I-864 form is a follow up to the Form I-130 that was originally submitted for the spousal visa. When you get the form, it says that this form is issued when your spousal visa is in the upcoming que, which they define as being available at some point in the next 12 months. This is really when I began to realize that the Form I-129F is really just a scam to get my $170, but what can you do.

Remember, they say you do the 129F to get your spouse into the country while you wait years for the 130 to be processed, but here we are only a month later being told that the 130 is in the que. What a mixed up money guzzling system, but at least things are progressing. Actually, it is progressing quite fast for us. Steve had submitted his paperwork before we were even married, and now we're somehow only 30 days behind him, so I can only take that as a good sign.

It took me a couple of weeks to complete the Form I-864 and to get it mailed in, but this is purely because it is next to impossible to get in contact with the National Visa Center to get answers to even simple questions.


Lapu Lapu is a delicious fish named after the Visayan indian who killed Magellan
In order to meet the requirements of the form, your income must exceed 125% of the defined poverty line (100% if you are active duty military). In order to prove this, they ask you to submit a tax transcript from the IRS. I had a problem here, because I had been abroad since before tax time, I had a 6 month extention and my taxes were not due until Oct 15 (about two weeks prior to getting the form), and the IRS said they would not be able to get me a transcript until the end of the year.

I wanted to know if a photocopy of my tax return was sufficient. I tried calling the National Visa Center many dozens of times. No operator was ever available. It would tell me to call back after 6pm and then disconnect, but if I called back after 6pm it was no different.

Finally I emailed them, and after waiting more than a week I got a reply that told me if I did not file taxes I would need to. That didn't answer my question, so I wrote again, and after another week got another nonsense answer. All this time I continued trying to call, unsuccessfully. Once it did say that it was transferring me, but after listening to the phone ring off the hook for 15 minutes I hung up. Another time I did reach someone, who said they could not hear me and hung up. You would think that with all the money they are charging they could at least be available, but they are not, and if you need to ask them a question I wish you luck in getting an answer.


A trip to the Philippines is not complete without the occassional Lechon (Roasted Pig) feast
I finally discovered that a copy of the tax return is sufficient, so after almost 3 weeks I had the form filled out and mailed in. For those who worry if they do not meet the poverty guidelines, do not worry about that. If you have 5 times the difference in savings or other assets, then you qualify, or if you can have someone be a joint applicant (sort of like being a co-signer on a loan), then you're good.

About the same time I received the bill for $70, my wife had also received a form asking if mail should come directly to her, or if she wanted to name someone else as her agent. We marked it to send directly to her. At the time I was getting ready to mail in my Form I-864, the National Visa Center sent me an email mentioning this. They confirmed that they had just received her form and would be sending me the bill for the next step in the process.

So, a few weeks pass and we received a bill for $380 for the processing fee for the next form. The form is available online. I do not see why I can not just print it, fill it out, and send it in with the fee to get a jump on things, but they implicitly state to not do this because it will cause delays. Go figure.

We literally just mailed in the $380 payment, and are now waiting to receive Form DS-230, which I believe is the last form in this mountain of paperwork. Steve received his in about 2 weeks time, but with the holidays and new year, etc, I do not expect to receive mine so quickly. But I can always hold out hope.

Visa Form I-129F

By mid-July, I had received a receipt from USCIS for the $190 processing fee that accompanies Form I-130. This was what I was waiting for, because you have to include this as proof of payment when you submit Form I-129F, which is the next step in the process of the visa application.

Basically, the Form I-130 is the petition for a spouse to immigrate to the United States. However, since it can take a very long time for this petition to be processed, they also instruct you to fill out the Form I-129F (petition for a fiance to enter the US) so that your spouse can enter the country while you wait for the 130 to be processed. Kind of a crazy way of doing things, but hey, it's the Government, and they are not known for efficiency.


A scenic field outside of Tagum City

Actually, what I've come to realize is that it's basically just a step to collect more fees from you. For one thing, it's basically the same as the Form I-130. It asks for all of the same information, which is nearly identical. In fact, both forms also ask you to include a Form G325 Biographical Info Sheet for each person, and that is 100% identical in each case (so make a copy when you submit the first form).

I have wondered why they must take the time to make you resubmit identical information, rather than making a photocopy and circulating it to the other department. The reason can only be that they just want the extra $170 fee that you send in with the Form I-129F; either that or they just like killing trees. Actually, the fiance visa is obsolete in my case anyway, as the spousal visa was processed fast enough that the 129F wasn't even needed.


A family of goats roams the neighborhood.

At any rate, I am beginning to trail off topic, so I will leave that topic for the moment. The basic fact is that by the first week of August I had submitted the Form I-129F and the $170 fee that is paid with it at that time.

Now, according to what the USCIS had told me in January, I should have two more months and then I'm done. But then I was thinking, wait a sec, my neighbor Steve has been here since October, married in February, so if it's only 3 months to process everything then why is he still here. So I asked him about it, and the result I got was a lot of laughter. It was at this point that I realized that I was in for a much longer wait than I had originally been led to believe. Nearly 11 months into my stay here in the Philippines, I wish I had that guy's name and extention so I could call both him and his supervisor and ask what the fubb they were talking about.

More to come...

Visa Form I-130

Having completed all of the requirements to marry in the Philippines, we were married on April 5th. I got kind of lucky with these days. My anniversary being 4-5-06, and my wife's birthday being 5-6-78, I'm all but guaranteed to never forget an important date. ;)

We had a nice outdoor reception at Nanay and Tatay's house, and it was a real bargain compared to what the same ceremony would have cost in the US. For $200 we had a caterer provide all of the furnishings, decorations, enough food and drink for almost 100 people, and that even included 6-8 guys serving everyone. I was really amazed at the value. Filipinos work very hard for very little. Most of the time I feel bad for them on this point, but in this case, it really worked to our advantage, so we also made sure they were all well tipped. It was a very nice ceremony. Even the Mayor and local judges stopped by. They are old family friends because Nanay worked at City Hall for many years.

Now that we were married, we were finally able to start the process of her visa application for the United States. We didn't do this for the first few weeks. This was partially because we needed to wait for the official marriage license to be available at the NSO. I was in no hurry at this stage anyway, because as far as I knew at this point, what that USCIS employee had told me about the 3 month processing time was the truth, so I figured there was plenty of time to get around to it.


I'm not sure why, but this shot really appeals to me

During the time we were waiting for the marriage license to be available, we moved away from the White Mansion and on to our current apartment, which is much larger, and also much less expensive. There's no pool, but in two months time I never once used the pool at WM anyway, so no loss there. Besides, I can always go to the beach resort and for a very low price have my choice between the ocean or a very large pool, so I'm happy to be where I am.

When we moved here, we met our neighbor Steve almost right away. He has started the same process with his wife a few months ahead of us, so he has been like a crystal ball for me, because I get to see what the next step in the process is and prepare for it before it happens to me (thanks Steve).

He has only steered me wrong once, and as it happened, it was with the first visa form, the I-130 spousal petition. He had told me that when he sent his in, he paid an extra $5 and they sent him a check back for the excess amount. I do not know why he would make this up. Maybe they just changed the process between the time of his filing and mine, but that wasn't the case for me.

When I filed the form I-130 with USCIS at the beginning of May, I noticed that the fee was $190. I had purchased money orders in advance, prior to leaving the US, and somehow my money order was for $195, so I was over. At first I thought about making it out to my dad, and asking him to cash it and get one for the lower amount. I really should have done that, but didn't want to add complications for him, and I remembered Steve's story, so I went ahead and mailed in the forms with the payment for $195. That extra $5 turned out to be a big mistake.


The house lizard (actually it's a Wall Ghecko) is a common site in the Philippines. They're amazingly fast.

Let me quickly interject here that when I filled out the form, I used my dad's address in the US, and Fedex'd the paperwork to him to mail so that it would have a local post mark. I remember how insistant that knucklehead at USCIS had been about returning to the US, and everyone kept saying they really want you to file your paperwork from the US, so this way I could be here and appear to be there at the same time. Nothing illegal about it or anything. Just food for thought should anyone else be starting this process. All of my forms now get mailed to my dad's address, and he passes them on to me.

Moving on, about a month after I mailed in the Form I-130 my dad contacts me and says there's a problem. He said that the whole package was sent back to me and that he's going to Fedex it to me to look at. Boy, that was the longest 5 days ever waiting to see what was wrong. When I open it up, there is a letter saying that I did not pay the correct amount and they requested payment in the form of $190. My money order, which had been endorsed, was also included, stapled to a letter from the Department of Homeland Security instructing the issuer to refund the purchase.

This was an expensive lesson to learn. It cost me $48 for my dad to Fedex that package to me, $30 for me to Fedex the new package back, $12 to cancel the old money order, plus a whole month of processing time. I would have been much better of for them to just pocket the $5. I can not stress this enough - MAKE SURE YOU PAY THE RIGHT AMOUNT - NOT EVEN ONE PENNY OVER!! So anyway, by the middle of June my I-130 visa form was finally starting to get keyed into the system, so the immigration process has officially started. Hooray. :)

More to come...

Legal Capacity To Marry

Before we could start the never-ending stream of paperwork for the US Visa, we first had to get married. As I found out, in the Philippines, getting married requires jumping through a few hoops. This is partially because there is no such thing as divorce here, so they want to make sure that you are truly ready for such a big step. It wouldn't have been so bad if we could have learned all of this in advance and taken care of some of the steps quicker. It was more of an inconvenience than anything.

To begin with, we were both required to obtain legal capacity documents, which is essentially an official document to say that you are not already married and are legally able to be married. In my wife's case, this meant a trip to the National Statistics Office (NSO) to obtain the letter.

I've been there with her on a few different occassions, and it's always a dreadful experience, at least if you are an impatient person like I am. Basically what happens is that you stand in line for an hour just to get inside, then you stand in another line for 30 minutes to have some guy look at your paperwork so that he can tell you what line to get in. Two hours later you present your papers at the window, and are instructed to get in another line for the cashier, who tells you to come back on X day to pick up your items. I've never seen a more inefficient system in my life, and if I was the one in charge of the NSO, I'd be very ashamed of myself and view it as a complete embarrassment.


A Tricycle. You can ride these things around like a taxi for just a few cents

For me, obtaining the Legal Capacity meant a trip to the embassy in Manila. I could have also went to the Consular in Cebu, which is closer, but we thought it would be nice to see her brother again, so we chose Manila.

Since there is no centralized record of marriage and divorce in the United States (it is left up to individual States), they can not issue this legal capacity document. What you obtain is a letter/affadavit in leu of the Legal Capacity document, which basically has a consular sign a document saying that it is ok for you to marry. It is a much quicker process than the NSO. We got to the embassy gate at 6:45am and we were back out again by 8am.

The main thing was that it was a bit of an inconvenience to track all the way back to Manila only a couple of weeks after we were last there. If we had known about this in advance, I could have gotten the letter when I was already in Manila the first time. So take notice, and if you're getting married in the Philippines, make sure to swing by the embassy to get this letter at your earliest convenience. I can't recall what the exact fee for it was, but believe it was something like $20.


The Jeepney, also called The King of the Road, is a Philippine invention. This one is very old and plain. They are usually highly decorated.

Having obtained the legal capacity documents, we next had to obtain proof that we had attended some family planning consultation. This was the biggest joke I've ever seen. Basically, we had a consultation with a health care worker, who taught us the male and female reproductive systems, and discussed different forms of birth control. I felt like I was in a Junior High health class. I had to pay the equivelant of $30 USD for this 30 minute crash course on safe sex. I suspect that is the real motivation behind this requirement - that it has less to do with population control and more to do with finding extra ways to pull a little more money from your wallet.

Having completed these steps, we put the paperwork together with a lengthy form (each) listing all of our personal information, parents personal information, and a signed request for a marriage contract. Since my wife is from the Philippines, she also had to include a photocopy of her birth certificate and a couple of more documents. We took this packet to the city hall in the city of Panabo, which is where her family is from and where we intended to marry. They submitted it and a week later the contract came through, the one that is presented at the time of the ceremony. You get a more formal one later from the NSO.

Finally, now we're ready to get married so that we can get on with the visa application...

On To The Philippines

I left Las Vegas on February 9, 2006. After passing through Los Angeles and Seoul, I landed in Manila on February 11. I was met at the airport by my wife's younger brother, who is a singer in Manila. He came with a friend of his from the National Bureau of Investigations (Philippine version of the FBI), so we went right through everything very quickly. My wife arrived on her flight from the Emirates a few hours later.

We spent the first few days in Manila, getting acclimated to the Philippines before continuing on to Davao. She had been working abroad for a few years and I had actually never been here, so we wanted to get use to things a little. Plus it gave her time to visit with her younger brother before leaving the island of Luzon. So, we stayed through Valentines Day and then continued on to Davao.

When we arrived in Davao, we stayed at "White Mansion". It is a nice place, but costs about twice as much as it should. But it was easy to find online and to book from the US, so I figured it was ok for a couple of months, which would give us a chance to find something for a longer-term stay. If you will be coming to Davao, post a comment to let me know and I'll give you some info on better places to stay.


This is the chapel that was across the street from our first apartment

We did not do anything about arranging our wedding plans for the first couple of weeks. Our time was spent settling in to our new place and visiting a never ending stream of relatives, her parents, Kuya (older brother) and his wife, aunts, uncles, and enough cousins to fill a fleet of greyhound buses.

When it did come time to start making all of the arrangements, we found that our initial obsticles were not from the US Government. They would give us plenty of visa headaches later on. The initial obsticles came from the Philippine Government, but I will cover all of that in my next post, since this one is already so lengthy.

More to come...

In The Beginning

In the beginning, I was living and working in Las Vegas, and my wife was living and working in Dubai. Her formal training was as a Physical Therapist, but she somehow ended up with a job there managing the personal affairs of one of the wealthiest people in the UAE.

We made this work for a while, but ultimately decided that managing things long distance was too much of a strain on us. Our choices were to go our separate ways, which was really never an option, or to take our relationship to the next level.

We evaluated the options, and debated back and forth about a K-1 Fiance Visa vs. a K-3 Spousal Visa, attempting to determine if we should get married in the Philippines and process the full visa from there, or if we should do just the more temporary visa and get married in the US. We ultimately decided to marry in the Philippines, so we both put in our letters of resignation and began planning to meet up in Manila, before going further south to Mindanao, where she is originally from.

Having spent quite a bit of time researching the visas, I knew the basics, but still had many unanswered questions, so I decided to call the information line for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to get some further information on the matter. This call should have given me some clue as to things to come, but I was still new to the process and really did not know better.

To begin with, USCIS was very insistent that after I marry I return to the United States. The reason they gave was that there would be deadlines for the forms they send, and if they aren't filed in time I will have to start over. I wasn't concerned with this because my intention was to have them sent to my dad, who could fedex them to me, and I would fedex back, which is exactly what I did.

I told him that I can't believe that people are willing to separate from their spouse for up to a year, since their web site said the process takes 6-12 months. He replied that the process doesn't take a year. So I said I can't believe they would leave them for even 6 months, and he replied that the process doesn't take 6 months. So I asked how long it takes. His response, in as close to word for word as I can get, was to say:

"First you file the form I-130. A month later we send the form I-129F. You send that in, and in about two months you're done."

Mind you, this was an actual official at USCIS, so I thought the information he was giving me was correct and accurate. As you will see in coming posts, he was far from correct. In fact, not one thing he said was true. The process is much more complicated than those two forms, and considering that I have been here almost a year now, I think it's safe to say that he was wrong about the time frame as well.

Sadly, no one else I have spoken to at USCIS or the National Visa Center has been much more helpful than this, so be prepared to receive information that is flawed at best. And if someone tells you what this individual told me, do not believe them for a moment. Fortunately I had more than 3 months of living expenses with me when I can here.

Until next time...

Immigrating To The United States - My Story

I wish I had taken the time to start this blog a year ago, when I first started the process of marriage in the Philippines and processing the never-ending stream of paperwork that is required for my Filipina wife to immigrate to the US under a Spousal Visa.

The process has been a very long, frustrating, and expensive ordeal, and looking back on the path I have taken, I have to say that it would have been much easier and less frustrating if at least a single person at the USCIS or National Visa Center had any idea what they were talking about. A little information would have gone a long way.

As such, I felt that the least I could do is to share my experiences and the knowledge I have gained with others via the world wide web, in hopes of making the process clearer and easier for someone else. While my experience deals with the Philippines specifically, the process is the same for virtually everyone obtaining a spousal or fiance visa, so hopefully I will at least help a few people.

It will take a little time to recount the entire experience from the start, so I will do it in installments, beginning with my next post. I will try to do this as quickly as possible, even though my time is a bit limited these days.

Until next time...