N 400 No of Days out of United States

N

narayana7

Registered Users (C)
My question while filling Part 7 of the N 400 Part C Total No of days out of the US, while calculating the No of days, do I need to count the day I left from Airport and also do I need to count the Day I landed.

For Example : I left Jan 01 2008 and return on 31st Jan 2008 ( Here do I mention 31days as out of the USA or only 29 days and exclude Jan 01 and Jan 31st.

Please clarify.
Thanks

Narayana
 
as long as it's below 6 month I don't think they will care. But I remember reading somewhere - that out of those 2 "half days" spent half in US, one should count 1 day - the one he woke up in US.
 
narayana7 said:
My question while filling Part 7 of the N 400 Part C Total No of days out of the US, while calculating the No of days, do I need to count the day I left from Airport and also do I need to count the Day I landed.
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Arrival/Departure days are counting as days on US soil. You don't need to count these 2 days as days spent out of US.
 
Feliz-LA said:
But I remember reading somewhere - that out of those 2 "half days" spent half in US, one should count 1 day - the one he woke up in US.
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Not correct. Both days - not just one. It doesn't matter if they were half days - you were still on US soil - not outside.
 
Well, what if I went to Canada for 1 day (I actually don't even remember the exact date, just sometime in the beginning of July, 2006)? I entered Canada at around 5 pm on day 1, and came back sometime around that time on day 2. Now, it was probably a trip of more than 24 hours, but I was on US soil on both days... do I count 1 day out of the US?
 
cafeconleche said:
Well, what if I went to Canada for 1 day (I actually don't even remember the exact date, just sometime in the beginning of July, 2006)? I entered Canada at around 5 pm on day 1, and came back sometime around that time on day 2. Now, it was probably a trip of more than 24 hours, but I was on US soil on both days... do I count 1 day out of the US?
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For special circumstances you should consult immigration attorney.

USCIS Guide to naturalization M-476: When counting the total number of days you have been out of the country, include all trips you have taken outside the United States. This includes short trips and visits to Canada and Mexico. For example, if you go to Canada for a weekend, you must include that trip when you are counting how many days you have spent out of the country. Generally, partial days spent in the United States count as whole days spent in the United States.
 
cafeconleche said:
Well, what if I went to Canada for 1 day (I actually don't even remember the exact date, just sometime in the beginning of July, 2006)? I entered Canada at around 5 pm on day 1, and came back sometime around that time on day 2. Now, it was probably a trip of more than 24 hours, but I was on US soil on both days... do I count 1 day out of the US?
Click to expand...
That's a great question, and it seems to contradict the advice listed above stating that you need not count any "partial" day that you were on US soil as an absence from the US. I also struggled with this section of the application since, if memory serves, there is no clear direction on this in the Naturalization guidebook. The N-400 form and guide state to list the number and duration of trips greater than 24 hours, but make no reference as to how these should be calculated. This can be a problem if you leave on a Saturday at 9am and then cross back across the next day, Sunday, at 3pm. Technically, the trip was greater than 24 hours, but you were on US soil on both days.

So, what to do about this? Well, nobody really knows for sure but I can tell you what I did. Basically, I calculated the number of days by subtracting the date I left from the date I arrived back. If I departed on the 3rd and arrived back on the 5th then I counted it as two days (5-3). Since I also had trips that I thought were less than 24 hours but may have been longer, I included a general statement to that effect - that I had quite a few "day" trips out of the country but some of them may have lasted longer than 24 hours. I estimated that I had no more than 6 - 8 of these trips and that the longest duration was 2 days. This was in addition to the longer trips that I had listed on the N-400. I can give you the exact wording of the statement, if you like. I counsulted with an immigration attorney on this before I filed, and she seemed to feel it was fine.
 
Thanks for the feedback. I don't have to worry about this for more than a year still (al though, I should probably start filling out the N-400 form now, hehe), but I think I'll just count that 1-day trip as 1 day out of the country. It's the only ambiguous trip I have so far.
 
Here is a xxxxxx to count days of trips outside of the United States for naturalization application. The calculator accounts for partial days spent outside of the United States.
 
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