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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Green card - living out of the US?
I was wondering if any of you have had experience with this.
DH and I are considering moving to the US. I was wondering that if we decide to come back to Spain for an extended period of time, will this mean we'd have to go through the expensive visa process again in the event we choose to move back to the US? I'm lucky - immigration here was an absolute breeze for me once we married.
Re: Green card - living out of the US?
Do you mean moving back to Spain for an extended period of time?
As a green card holder you may travel abroad multiple times and re-enter the US, as long as you do not intend to stay abroad for 1 year or more, however leaving the U.S. for more than 6 months may already cause suspicious of your intent to abandon your residency. Your travel out of the U.S. must be temporary and you must be able to prove that you didn?t intent to abandon your Legal Permanent Residence. If a green card holder stay outside of the U.S. for 1 year or more or if an immigration officer finds out that the green card holder is living out of the U.S. permanently (except for some exceptions cited below) then he may ask the green card holder to give up his U.S. green card and legal residency, and the green card holder may be found inadmissible and denied reentry into the U.S. If a non-citizen resident needs to be out of the country for a long period of time it is recommended to apply for a re-entry permit, before leaving the U.S., to avoid risking losing your immigration status. Not being able to prove your temporary stay abroad may result in losing your green card.
Exceptions apply for people temporarily living abroad because they or their immediate relatives work with the United States armed forces abroad, or are civilian employees of the U.S. Government stationed out of the country due to official orders. In those type of cases, the spouse or child of the government or armed forces employee must not have relinquished residence, and be preceding or accompanying the member or employee, or be following to join the member or employee in the USA within a few months of his return.
So, once we're in the US that's it - no international "ping-pong", living between the two countries? Wow.
Well considering a green card is intended for residents of the US it makes sense that they don't want you living between two countries. I know people who have done it when they have moved overseas for work but they come back to the US frequently and were able to keep it up.
Usually. Unless you go for citizenship that levitates things a bit in the moving aspect.
Gillc stbx still keeps his green card active while abroad. She might have a little more insight.
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Now Nesting from Chicago, IL My nail blog:
I am pretty sure it can be done but I don't know legal it is if they know you are doing it, you know? And your dh could get citizenship after 3 years here, and then of course you could do whatever!
If being an American citizen means having to renounce his Spanish citizenship, then he won't do it.
I'll have to do more research. Thank you, again!
We had thought about applying for a green card for DH while we were here for this trip so that he would have the possibility of working and we could just have the green card in case we wanted to live in the future. But because of the reasons frlcb mentioned, we decided not to do it.
Your problem might be that you're not sure you want to move back to Spain again, right? To get a visa other than a green card, you have to prove that you will move back to where you're coming from (economic ties, family ties, etc).
So on the one hand you can't apply for another type of visa because you might stay in the US permanently, and on the other hand you might move back to Spain so aren't sure if you want to go through the hassle and money of a green card application. Is that a correct reading of the situation?
This is a misconception that the State Department doesn't do a lot to clarify if you know what I mean. You do not have to renounce your home country or surrender your original passport if you take on U.S. citizenship.
Are you a US Citizen? You should apply for EU Citizenship/passport before moving back here, I kick myself often for not doing that.
Yeah that's right my name's Yauch!
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That's exactly the situation.
Spain is in a terrible place right now, and since they're making so many cuts to education we're both terrified. I'd love to go to the US and DH is all but begging me to seriously consider going. However, both of us wouldn't like either move to be permanent.
But what about the first statement of the oath of allegiance:
that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all
allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince,
potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I
have heretofore been a subject or citizen;
?
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*headdesk*
Sounds like it's the same here in Spain.
We're both too big of wimps to play with fire, though.
The US hasn't made anyone give up another citizenship since the early 80s. The only thing is that if you have dual (or triple) you must enter and leave the US on your US passport. If Spain allows it your dh can definitely get both.
Interesting information. However, I reiterate, I'm a bit wimp with these things.
Thank you, though, for clarifying that.
I'm late to the party for sure. Just wanted to toss in there that my German FI has a dual citizenship now after living in the US for more than five years on his green card. He simply had to fill out a few forms showing that he still has immediate family members in Germany, and they allowed him to keep his German passport in addition to his new American one. I can ask him for more details on the process if you'd like, but I don't think it took more than a couple of forms.
This is very helpful, thank you!
Their changing all the multi-citizenship rules all of the place in the EU, so I wouldn't risk it if you're unwilling to have DH lose Spanish citizenship.
The re-entry visa is supposedly pretty easy to obtain. If you use that you can't really go back to the US on vacation though, as it's a 1 time re-entry "after a long time" as far as I know (you can apply for a new one again after that, but it always takes time.)
Speaking from experience, the guys at immigration really do give you a lot of grief when you spend more than a month or two outside the US at a time.
After a green card is issued they're supposed to give you 2 years to 'get your affairs in order' so to speak to definitely move there, but a year after issuance, they'll start interrogating you at entry if you've been away longer than 2 months and send your passport and everything to a separate office so you can be re-interviewed to make sure you are indeed still in the process of moving into the US. They get harder on you each and every time (until you give in and just renounce your green card).
I definitely don't want to scare you, but it is something to really look into before starting the application process and possibly wasting money on it.
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<a href="http://www.thenest.com/?utm_source=ticker&utm_medium=HTML&utm_campaign=tickers" title="Home DYou're not scaring me, this is information I want and need to know. This is a more complicated topic than I ever thought, so I figured I'd ask you ladies.
Who doesn't want multi-citizenship? The EU does not want EU citizens to have other citizenships? That's kinda lame.
So I should get my British citizenship ASAP?
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The US isn't going to care, it will all depend on the country of origin. I became a US citizen 5 years ago finally. I was able to keep my Dutch citizenship as well because I am married to a US citizen. Even if the dual nationality laws change in the Netherlands (like they're threatening) it won't affect me. It will only affect any new cases. I could've gotten my citizenship a lot sooner but during my first marriage I wasn't really interested. After my divorce I did not want to do it unless I remarried because I would not have been able to keep my Dutch citizenship if I was single. So once I remarried I went for it. Technically the Netherlands won't let you have dual citizenship but there are exceptions (being married to (in my case) a US citizen being one of them.)
My DD just got her Dutch passport. Sadly I don't think she will be able to keep that after she turns 18.
It's just a statement. It's up to Spain whether or not they count that as a renunciation of citizenship.
But it looks like a Spanish citizen automatically loses his Spanish citizenship when they naturalize to a country that Spain doesn't have a dual citizenship treaty with (and they don't have one with the US): http://www.immigrationcitizenship.eu/2005/12/spanish-citizenship.html
Technically you're right because Spain does not allow dual citizenship with the US. Lots of people just play with fire and don't go to the consulate to formally renounce (which is what you're supposed to do) but some people don't feel comfortable with that.
That's one reason I have yet to file for EU citizenship here. I know so many people that just didn't renounce their US citizenship, but I have no idea what kind of repercussions that could have and I feel like my US citizenship is good enough that I'm not sure why I'd need EU citizenship other than to be able to vote. As long as DH and I stay married I can retain residency anyway.
Elentetxu: If you guys want to move, go for it. I think even if you spend just one month a year in the US on a greencard (as long as your stay outside the US is never longer than 1 year) you can retain it. My friend's mom who had a greencard had been living in Zimbabwe for nearly a year and simply went back to the US to visit her daughter every once in a while to make sure she kept her greencard (until my friend's father got sick and her mom stayed out of the US a year). I don't think you have to think of it as permanent, but it's true it'll be a PITA if you had to do it over again in the future. But like you said things are definitely not improving with education here and you might have other opportunities in the US.
In the beginning it's pretty easy. You apply for a re-entry permit, which costs a few hundred dollars but lets you stay outside the US for up to 2 years. It's not hard to get as long as you have a legitimate reason to move overseas. In our case, it was a short-term work transfer, so that was kind of a no brainier. The re-entry permit is NOT a visa, it's just a document (that looks like a passport) that you hand over with your passport and green card at immigration to show that someone has already approved your travel, and the 18-year-old kid at the immigration counter shouldn't need to grill you as much.
You can renew the permit after two years, but you have to do it from the US. We always flew there and dropped it in the mail at my parents' but I've always wondered if they would find out (from immigration entry records) if you just mailed it over to friends/family and asked someone to remain it with a US stamp.
to be continued after a meeting
At first the re-entry permit is good for two years, but after you've renewed it once (for a total of 4 years), you can apply again, but it will only be valid for 1 year.
Since the normal rules already state that you can't be gone for more than a year, and we would have to fly to the US to apply for the re-entry permit anyway (plus pay the few hundred dollar application fee every year), we decided at the four-year point to stop getting a re-entry permit and just make sure H flew to the US at least once a year.
They do grill you at immigration, and even when we had the re-entry permit, we got some questions. The only time we had trouble was the very first time we came back from Norway, and they asked, "Do you plan to move back to the US?" H's answer (I could have killed him) was "I don't know; Norway's so niiiiice!
" That got us a bit of a talking-to.
The thing is that they will only take away the green card if they have reason to believe that he has "abandoned his residency." From all the times we went through with the re-entry permit, I learned what causes hiccups and what smooths things over, and the first time H traveled to the US alone, I coached him on how to answer immigration questions:
- Think very carefully about what you put under "country of residency" on the US customs form. I usually put "US/Norway" because "Norway" got us a lot of questions about our intentions to return, and I felt like "US" would be dishonest.
- Whenever they asked what we were doing in Norway, I stressed that we were there because of a temporary contract for my job. When they asked if/when we would be moving back, I would usually answer something like, "Well, my contract expires next February," even though I knew the company would renew it for another year.
- The key is to always, always, always let them know that you do plan to move back to the US at some point (hopefully soon).
This was kind of a headache, and I was always nervous about H losing his green card to an over-eager teenage border agent (one of our GM couldn't come to the wedding because 6 months before he had traveled to the US to visit his family company's US office, and a CBP agent decided that he was going to try to work on a business visa, so he canceled his visa, sent him home, and banned him from the US for a year).
If you are gone for more than a year, the regulations say that you need to apply for a "returning resident visa," so I once asked the vice consul how difficult it would be to do this (thinking that we could scrap the annual US trip and just apply for the visa when we needed). She basically said that they never grant returning resident visas, and about the only time they would is if the person literally could not return to the US for a year (e.g. they were in traction in the hospital).
She did, however, say that you can voluntarily give up the green card while you're overseas, and then if you do plan to move back to the US, you can reapply before you move. In that case, the process is supposed to be much faster than the original, because you've already been approved once.
I thought this sounded like a great idea, since H could just get a 10-year visitor visa (as an Indian, he's not eligible for the visa waiver program) for any trips back, and we wouldn't have to deal with the border stress/uncertainty anymore. He could just reapply for the green card if/when we ever decided to move back (since it was starting to seem less and less likely that we would repatriate). Bonus - H wouldn't be subject to US tax filing requirements in the meantime!
But H didn't want to give up his green card. So, he's still playing the return-once-a-year game, and since he's in the US right now for work, I guess it's still working.
Hola! Can you post a link of where you saw that you cant hold dual citizenship?
I was just wondering because I was thinking of applying for it this summer. Thanks
I have no hard and fast real advice, just wanted to chime in with anecdotal evidence on the dual citizenship front. I have 3 cousins who have dual Spanish-US citizenship and they didn't have to renounce either one. One of these cousins just got her Spanish citizenship as an adult recently (I think you had until this past December to claim it if you have a Spanish-born parent), is living in the U.S., has never lived in Spain, and definitely does not plan to give up her U.S. citizenship.
The only issue that has ever come up as a conflict between the two citizenships is that technically, you are not supposed to travel to any of the countries under U.S. embargo under the Spanish passport. This is a big deal in my family because of the Cuba connection. So, basically, even though my cousins are Spanish citizens as well, as U.S. passport-holders, U.S. rules about travel to Cuba apply to them and they could incur big fines (and other issues) if they travel to Cuba with their Spanish passport instead of following the guidelines of the Treasury Department that apply to American citizens.