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The following chart briefly summarizes what types of relatives a petitioner can sponsor and which category the relatives qualify for.
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Notice who is not on this list: grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, parents-in-law, and other extended family members. The chain of sponsorship is not very long.
However, if allowed to immigrate to the United States, most of the people on this list will be permitted to bring their own spouses and children with them. And it is true that once someone has a green card, they can sponsor other people on the list. But because of the waiting periods, this often takes too long to be of much help, and can lead to long separations between parents and children.
If you sponsor a family member who is an immediate relative, there is no official waiting period before a visa becomes available. However, due to the time it takes for the U.S. immigration authorities to review and approve an application, actually getting that visa is likely to take at least a year.
Preference relatives, on the other hand, may have to wait from approximately one to 23 years before being allowed to apply for and claim their visa or green card. After you, the petitioner, submit a visa petition on Form I-130, your preference relative is put on a waiting list. Unfortunately, no one can say exactly how long each applicant will wait. A certain number of people in each category are allowed green cards each year. It's impossible to predict how many people will apply in a given year.
Also, only a certain percentage of the green cards go to any one country each year, so people from certain countries, such as India, Mexico, China, and the Philippines, end up waiting even longer than others. As a result, the waiting immigrant can only estimate when he or she will get a visa, based on how long it took for the people who applied before to get one.
As a general rule, applicants in higher preference categories wait less time. The average wait these days from most countries is as follows:
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But again, the wait will be longer if the immigrant is from a country such as Mexico, India, China, or the Philippines, because of the numbers of people who apply from those countries. Siblings of U.S. citizens from the Philippines currently wait a staggering 23 years.
There are some important steps you can take to speed up your family member's progress toward a green card and to make sure that the process goes smoothly.
If you are a U.S. permanent resident, not a citizen, you can help your family member by applying for citizenship as soon as you are eligible. The waiting time for citizenship eligibility is usually five years, but there are exceptions: For example, the wait drops to four years if you received political asylum, and to three years if you got your green card when you married a U.S. citizen (as long as you're still married and living together).
As soon as you become a citizen, your family members can move to a speedier immigration category. For example, your spouse, who was a preference relative, would become an immediate relative, and the waiting period goes from five years to zero. Your parents would go from having no immigration rights to being immediate relatives, and your children become immediate relatives or move to higher preference categories, depending on their age and whether they are married.
Married children have it tough when it comes to immigrating. They have no right to be sponsored by U.S. permanent residents, and are way down in the third preference category if sponsored by a U.S. citizen. Unmarried children, on the other hand, can be sponsored by U.S. permanent residents, and are either immediate relatives or in the first preference category of people who can be sponsored by U.S. citizens.
If you have children who have not yet married, and they want to immigrate through you, make sure they know that getting married will probably add years to their wait time. It won't matter that they were unmarried when you started the immigration process for them; they have to be unmarried when they pick up their immigrant visa or green card, or they may not qualify for it.
Hopeful immigrants (beneficiaries) shouldn't pin all of their hopes on one petitioner. If something goes wrong -- for example, the petitioner dies or divorces the beneficiary before the beneficiary's waiting period is over -- the green card opportunity is, in most cases, lost.
Many hopeful immigrants have more than one family member in the United States. There is no harm in having more than one (or all of them) file visa petitions for the waiting immigrant. For instance, both parents could file for a child, to insure against the death of one of them. Or a person married to a permanent resident could have both their spouse and their U.S. citizen parent file a visa petition for them. That way they would be on two waiting lists and could see which moves more quickly.
To read and printout a copy of the Form please link below.
Checklist: Documents You Will Need if You Are Obtaining Permanent Residence
You can download a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader here.
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