Getting Married after Filing your I-485
This short post will remind people of some tricky details if you get married to a foreign national after filing your EB I-485.
If you are trying to immigrate to the United States through Employment-Based (EB) immigration, you know it is a tricky maze.
You might have finally gotten to the I-485 final stage process. And now that you have made it this far, and you feel like your life in the United States is relatively stable - well now you might think about getting married.
But it is important to know in this era of Visa Bulletin cut-off dates ‘falling backwards’ that if you filed your EB I-485 application and your priority date was current at the time you filed your I-485, then cut-off dates moved so your priority date is no longer current — If that happens, and then if you get married to a foreign national who also needs a green card, then she will not be able to file her I-485 application until your priority date is current again.
If you have an H-1B or L-1 visa status, then you should be able to get your new spouse an H-4 or L-2 visa; but your new spouse will not be able to file her I-485 application until your priority date is current again.
Argh!
This means that if you filed your EB I-485 application and you were hoping to stop maintaining your H-1B visa status, you might need to maintain your H-1B visa status in order to ensure your spouse has the ability to come to the United States as an H-4. If you don’t maintain your temporary visa status and instead you use advance parole to travel abroad and get married abroad, then your new spouse may not be able to come to the United States except through immigrant visa processing.
There is a way where one spouse can adjust status through the I-485 process in the United States while the other spouse can seek an immigrant visa from abroad. This is sometimes referred to as “following-to-join” but that option ends up being a lot more complicated and frustrating than you would think.
I hope to provide more detail on “follow-to-join” in a separate post — but this short post is simply to flag the issue that a spouse ‘acquired later’ is only able to file her I-485 application if her priority date is current at the time she wants to file, even if your priority date was current in the past and you filed your I-485.