As you can see from my timeline, my wife came to the USA on a K1 about 18 months ago, but left unmarried. While she was here, IMBRA was enacted into law, although we never heard of it.
We are an older couple – I don’t mind admitting that I just turned fifty. My wife is my age, more or less. I think it might be more difficult for an older person to move to a completely alien culture than for younger individuals. And she wasn’t looking for a husband, much less a foreigner, when we met and fell in love. So, she needed to reflect very carefully on whether she wanted to marry and leave her homeland – and found that she needed to return home and continue to reflect on it.
Soon after she got home, she made a final decision to marry and immigrate to the USA. So, the question became, how to do it.
We wanted to get married on a beach in Florida. But with IMBRA, we weren’t sure whether we would get a waiver. In those days, a year ago, nothing was clear. She’s the only woman I ever petitioned, and I would have married her in a heartbeat had she agreed, but she was the one with very reasonable hesitations. Initial USCIS statements on grounds for granting waivers were not encouraging. We didn't know what to do.
We consulted with two lawyer’s, and got two different opinions. (Imagine that !
) Both seemed to think that we didn’t need a waiver, but one was concerned that we might have a bit of a problem: would USCIS grant a second K1 to us without asking all sorts of questions? This attorney, Laurel Scott, was reasonable, convincing, and economical. She gave reasonable sounding advice and, essentially, refused to take our case because it wasn’t “difficult enough” and she thought that we could handle it on our own. I first heard about Ms. Scott here at VJ and in my opinion she deserves the good reputation she has. I want to thank her here for the help she gave us.We considered marrying in Russia – but bureaucratic issues in the way ZAGS runs where she lives made that option not tenable. We considered getting married in Cyprus – which would have had the advantage of a tropical or subtropical beach – but in the end we decided not to do that either. In Cyprus, there’s too much Russian mafia. She didn’t want to mess with it. Laurel Scott then suggested a proxy wedding. I’d only heard of them in history books.
I did some research, and found that Montana allows dual proxy weddings. I found a fellow in Pennsylvania who runs an internet business faciliting dual proxy weddings in Montana. These days, most of his clientele are military couples, separated by deployment, who don’t want to wait to get married. But he also has some international couples whose weddings are complicated by international borders, like ours. I contracted with this fellow. My wife and I put together lots of documents to satisfy a judge in Montana that we were free to marry and wanted to marry each other. We got married November 10, 2006. Neither of us have ever been to Montana!
So, someday, we’ll have to go on vacation there.
Now, the I-130 states that if one of the partners of a marriage is not present at the wedding, the marriage cannot be used for an immigration benefit unless it is subsequently consummated. So, we needed to show that I visited her in Russia after November 10, 2006. I went to Novosibirsk for awhile, and then we made a point to go to St. Petersburg for a brief honeymoon. So we got three airplane legs (Novosibirsk to Moscow, Moscow to Petersburg, Petersburg back to Moscow) with adjacent seats and boarding passes. I kept luggage tags that had my surname and her surname on them. We had the hotel receipt. Previously, we’d set up joint checking accounts. One is just for her use; I pass money into it. She has an ATM card from my bank with her name on it. We made a point of making small withdrawals with her card and my card, back to back, at the same ATM, both in Novosibirsk and St. Petersburg. In Petersburg, I took a photo of our ATM cards sitting together. I provided bank statements showing how withdrawals from her account always occur in Russia and withdrawals from mine are in the USA or Russia, depending on where I am. I got a letter from a bank officer stating that we had joint accounts and that withdrawals were made with our ATM cards at times indicated on the bank statements. For fun, we got a few photos of ourselves together in St. Petersburg. But, even though the dates of our visit were Jan 3 – Jan 8, there *was no snow in St. Petersburg*! I worried that this might draw an RFE – in the form of “you really want us to believe you were in St. Petersburg Russia in January and there was no snow!”
Apparently our post-nuptial documentation was adequate. Both the I-130 and I-129F were approved May 16. We look forward to passing NVC soon and, hopefully, getting the visa by September or so. I really hope she can be here, in Denver, for our first wedding anniversary.
