The Austrailian Process
Oddly enough my new brother in law is marrying an Austrailian citizen and thus is going through... make that... has gone through the same process for gaining admitance down under.
As luck would have it they met while she was traveling abroad for a lengthy period of time. She wound up staying in England for a year and as such the two of them have qualified as a defacto married couple in Austrailia (Common Law marriage essentially).
The processing for his visa took 3 weeks. Let me say that again. 3 WEEKS. Weeks. 21 days. He has the right to work as a part of this. He says he could have had it faster except that he didn't have his medical at the same time as he applied. We took 6 months for the K-1. It is goign to take another 3 months to get the EAD for right to work.
By contrast lets say Suzie and I had lived together in England for a year (We Dated for 2) and then gotten married and applied to come to the US. We would have had to apply for a K3 visa and it would have been 8 months or so from the point of the application to her recieving the visa. So being married would not have helped in terms of initial time to enter the country.
This absolutely baffles me. It seems odd to me that I can get cleared to own a firearm in 5 minutes but it takes 8 months to clear a legaly married spouse to enter the country. 6 months to clear an intended partner while it takes 3 weeks for an austrailian visa to clear for the same circumstances. And it isn't like the Aussie's don't have a long line at the door. In fact relative to their population size they have one of the higest immigration rates. The admitted some 300K + in 2003 for purposes of staying in Austrailia for a year or more.
To really put things in perspective I'll put it another way. We looked at immigrating to Austrailia as an option for how we could live together. The timeline for us with neither of us being austrialian citizens or having any ties in the country other than some friends of hers was about the same as it took her to get into the US. So it would have taken as long for a cold case immigration to aussie as it took for a citizen to bring a spouse into the US.
As luck would have it they met while she was traveling abroad for a lengthy period of time. She wound up staying in England for a year and as such the two of them have qualified as a defacto married couple in Austrailia (Common Law marriage essentially).
The processing for his visa took 3 weeks. Let me say that again. 3 WEEKS. Weeks. 21 days. He has the right to work as a part of this. He says he could have had it faster except that he didn't have his medical at the same time as he applied. We took 6 months for the K-1. It is goign to take another 3 months to get the EAD for right to work.
By contrast lets say Suzie and I had lived together in England for a year (We Dated for 2) and then gotten married and applied to come to the US. We would have had to apply for a K3 visa and it would have been 8 months or so from the point of the application to her recieving the visa. So being married would not have helped in terms of initial time to enter the country.
This absolutely baffles me. It seems odd to me that I can get cleared to own a firearm in 5 minutes but it takes 8 months to clear a legaly married spouse to enter the country. 6 months to clear an intended partner while it takes 3 weeks for an austrailian visa to clear for the same circumstances. And it isn't like the Aussie's don't have a long line at the door. In fact relative to their population size they have one of the higest immigration rates. The admitted some 300K + in 2003 for purposes of staying in Austrailia for a year or more.
To really put things in perspective I'll put it another way. We looked at immigrating to Austrailia as an option for how we could live together. The timeline for us with neither of us being austrialian citizens or having any ties in the country other than some friends of hers was about the same as it took her to get into the US. So it would have taken as long for a cold case immigration to aussie as it took for a citizen to bring a spouse into the US.
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