When someone comes to the U.S. on a K-1 visa, or a K-3 visa, they arrive as non-immigrants. The person MUST go through the adjustment or change of status in order to become an immigrant Permanent Resident. This, is a messy process, often more stressful and involved than doing a visa petition. Those going through a concurrent marriage filing, apply for adjustment of status at the same time as petitioning for immigration.

Fees and other notes can be found at one of these two links: K1 or K3 visa if not already an Apex Full Service member..

Persons arriving in the U.S. on visitor, tourist, student and many other kinds of non-immigrant visas are not permitted to change their status to permanent resident unless that person marries inside the U.S. during that visit. See more details on this..

Those arriving on Relative visas, are already permanent residents and do not need to change their status. However, keep in mind that a Relative visa's total processing time amounts to about 2 years.

This information doesn't cover many other situations since we are reserving our practice to Family visas.

The process requires that the arriving person be eligible to permanent residency. K1 and K3 visa holders are eligible. The immigration form, I-485 is the principal document that belongs to this process. There are other ancillary forms and a lot of support documents required as well as evidence of the medical exam performed by a physician who is approved by the U.S. State Dept. Panel of Physicians.

If and when approved, the new visa issued is either a CR-1 or IR-1 visa. This is often called a "green card" but is actually a Permanent Resident card. It's a credit card looking form called an I-551 which bears the evidence of being a Permanent Resident of the United States of America. It is NOT citizenship.

Generally an application for a work permit is filed along with the adjustment of status in order to obtain legal employment. The work permit also allows a person to obtain a Social Security Number, and thus function as any legal American worker.

U.S. Citizenship can be applied for AFTER 3 years of being married to the same person the alien person married the U.S. Citizen visa petitioner (K1, K3, Relative or Concurrent filer). All others must wait 5 years after getting Permanent Residence.

The process is not more detailed here because it's quite messy and situation dependent. It also involves a lot of support documents as required "evidence." We handle these cases on a per situation basis.

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