Moved oversees with wife, should I cancel green card application?

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babojm

New Member
Green card application for wife, moved overseas due to job, should I cancel process?

Hello,

I am a US citizen, and my wife is Japanese. We got married last spring, and then started the application for permanent residency through consular processing. The I-130 was approved, and the case is now at NVC. We also paid for the processing fees, and now need to submit the AOS and DS-230.

However, during that time, I was offered a job overseas and accepted it. The job will last for around 4 years, during which my wife plans to stay with me. We intend to return back to US after that.

Based on what I read, further processing of this application seems difficult since the sponsor (myself) is no longer physically residing in US. Even if my wife were to somehow get the green card, maintaining it also seems quite complicated if she wants to stay with me outside of US during that time.

So my question is, would it be possible to continue postponing the process until we return back to the States, or will be better just to drop the application at this point and retry the application later on?

Thank you for your help.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
If your employment is with a US company abroad you can still pursue the GC app via CP, if not dropping the app right now and starting the process later again makes more sense.
 
Your wife needs to be inside the US when filing for AOS, and then she needs to stay in the US for 2-3 months until her Advance Parole is approved (unless she has an H1B or L1 visa), and she would need to be in the US again for fingerprinting and the interview (and you also need to be at the AOS interview).

Therefore AOS clearly doesn't make sense; at this point you should either cancel the petition, or file I-824 to move the case to a US consulate in the country where your overseas job is.

If you decide to continue the case at a consulate, there will be the difficulty of maintaining the green card for the remainder of the 4 years. However, if your overseas job is for the US government or a US company that meets the relevant criteria, she may be eligible for expedited citizenship under section 319(b). Once she has US citizenship she can stay abroad for the 4 years without worrying about losing her status. But upon obtaining US citizenship she would lose Japanese citizenship, which would create difficulties if she wants to live in or visit Japan extensively in the future, so maybe she wouldn't want to become a US citizen.
 
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