January 20, 2004 — Last year, after I married a lovely Ukrainian citizen, we began discussing whether to pursue a visa or change of residency status to the United States for legal and practical reasons. Since I am a U.S. citizen with residency in there, and we were at the time expecting our child — who is now also a U.S. citizen by birth — it was clear that we should pursue some kind of legal status for our family. We had no idea how complex the immigration and visa procedure was, but in the following weeks and months we soon found out.
Our first consideration was what rights and responsibilities we wanted to gain to meet our needs: in our case we wanted my wife to be able to work, for us to be able to travel freely in and out of the United States, and to have a legal right to live in the U.S. indefinitely while we are there. A tourist or work visa does not fit these considerations, and although they are relatively easy to acquire we decided to go through the more lengthy process of gaining an immigration visa, or Green Card.
Upon learning that the U.S. embassy in Kyiv does not process spousal immigrant visas we thought about filing a visa where we could both live and work in the U.S. while the application was finalized by the immigration services in the states (now known at the USCIS, a bureau of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security).
We knew that a regular spousal immigrant visa would include a trip to Warsaw, Poland, with our infant daughter, and it wasn't a happy option.
But the consular officials here in Kyiv said that this particular visa (K3) wasn't the best way of going through the process, and said it was a much better idea to do it the regular way and submit a Petition for Alien Relative, or form I-130. So that's what we did, along with the copies and translations of all of our official documents, which include biographical data forms - and a $110 fee.
Collecting the documents and putting together the completed application was a nail-biting experience. I was so afraid of making mistakes, and causing the paperwork to be turned down, that I went through multiple drafts. I spent hours surfing immigration message boards asking questions like, Should we translate Ukrainian or Russian place names into English, and, Can my wife use her birth certificate issued by the U.S.S.R.? The U.S. government forms aren't very clear, but overall we found that we could direct questions to the visa services department at the consulate in Kyiv by phone, and later by email to the consulate in Warsaw.
I was a bit perturbed that we would still have to go to Warsaw for our interview, and to pick up my wife's visa. Warsaw is a twenty-four hour train trip from Kyiv, over 500 miles (about 800 km), involving a four-hour border crossing and as of October 1st, a requirement of a Polish visa for Ukrainian citizens. But this affects thousands of men and women in former Soviet countries — including Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine - who must travel to Warsaw for a two-hour interview just to get their visa for the U.S. It was especially surprising to know that the U.S. consulate in Kyiv started processing immigration visas for fiances in January of 2003, and they might not start doing them for spouses until February of 2005.
In recent history, there were more spousal immigrants admitted in the U.S. from Ukraine than almost any other country — nearly two thousand of them in 2002 - who must have had to go through Warsaw, unless they took the trouble to do a K3 visa. Overall, Ukraine had 21,217 people who immigrated to the United States in 2002, compared to only 12,746 from Poland.
In preparation for our interview in Poland, we were told that we'd have to get a medical exam (involving chest x-rays, a full physical, and possibly vaccinations). You can only refuse these inspections based on strong moral objections. We got to spend an entire day at the clinic of the Oil Ministry, waiting for our turn to be poked and prodded. I met a little Afghani girl there, who with her family was waiting for a similar medical examination in order to get where she was trying to immigrate to.
Finally, I had to prepare and sign an extensive document proving my financial responsibility for my wife. As someone who has been living on Ukrainian-style wages for the past couple of years this wasn't easy - I had to list my relatives as co-sponsors. It all seems a bit extreme, and clearly shows the U.S. government's unwillingness to pay for the medical insurance or welfare benefits of new immigrants. It was funny for me to read that if you are a U.S. soldier, you only have to prove that your income meets the poverty line, rather than in my case at 125% of the poverty line. Why should soldiers get any special privileges should they decide to marry a foreign spouse? At least everyone pays the same $335 for an immigrant visa.
The trip wasn't actually that bad. We spent a lovely day in Warsaw going to cafes and doing some Christmas shopping. Our interview at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw lasted about 5 minutes, although we did indeed have to wait for a couple hours in line.
Now that we have our visa and all of its attendant documents in hand, we have bought our tickets and are going 'home' in March. My wife is not looking forward to being made to carry her chest X-Ray on the airplane to show the immigration officials when we arrive in the U.S., nor is she happy about new rules about finger-printing and photographing visa holders from poor or non-western countries. We know why it's being done, but it seems more and more that the U.S. is not the bastion of freedom it purports to be, and is much more closed and paranoid than is needed.
Ukraine has its own maze of burdensome immigration routes, but that story will have to be for another day, and perhaps another author. One thing I do know is that Ukrainians sometimes are harassed and penalized for not acquiring a so-called PMZh stamp, or exit visa, from the Ukrainian authorities when they emigrate abroad. This leftover from the Soviet days seems to be another way of saying, "And don't let the door hit you on the way out!"
www.brama.com/novakhvylia- Message Board devoted to Immigration and Visas
http://britishexpats.com/forum - International Message boards about Immigration and Visas
www.usinfo.pl - US Embassy in Warsaw, Poland
http://kiev.usembassy.gov/visa_immigrantvisas_eng.html - US Embassy in Kyiv
Editor's Note
Normally no editorial comment is added to an article. The views of the author are his or hers and not the UO's. However, one answer to Dan's question, "Why should soldiers get any special privileges should they decide to marry a foreign spouse?" might be that they typically aren't voluntarily "in-country" and frequently a solder's base pay, at least, will be below poverty line (though it may approach poverty line when certain benefits are included - e.g. food, housing and combat pay). We will miss Dan and his family in our Ukrainian neighborhood but expect we will be seeing more of them. We certainly hope so and we would welcome Dan's future contributions to these pages.
|
