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K3 Visas: Vietnam

By Ben Hart

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 28Nov2010 Word count: 410 Viewed: 231 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

The following article is simply intended to act as sort of primer for those researching the American K-3 visa process for Vietnamese spouses of US Citizens.

Some are under the mistaken impression that the K-3 visa is the historically usual travel document utilized by Vietnamese spouses of American Citizens to travel to the United States of America. In reality, the classic travel document used by Vietnamese-American bi-national married couples to reunite in the USA is the Immediate Relative Visa category 1 or IR-1.

Due to changes made to relevant immigration laws those bi-national couples married less than 2 years at the time of the foreign spouse's admission to the USA are now granted Conditional Lawful Permanent Residence (CR-1 visa status); this conditionality may be lifted after 2 years of actual physical presence in the USA through application submitted at a local USCIS office. CR-1 and IR-1 visa petitions took a substantial amount of time to process through the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) at one point in time.

The backlog at USCIS lead to the US Congress and the American President to pass a bill creating the K-3 visa which was a non-immigrant visa designed to expedite visa issuance by creating a supplemental visa petition which was once adjudicated more quickly at USCIS. Now, USCIS adjudicates CR-1 and IR-1 visa petitions much more quickly which has slowly decreased the need for expedited processing through use of the K-3.

When a visa petition is approved by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) the file is sent to the American State Department's National Visa Center (NVC), this agency is responsible for ensuring that a visa application file is sent to the appropriate Consular jurisdiction. It could be argued that the point at which the Immigrant visa petitions began being adjudicated as quickly as the K-3 supplemental petitions the use of K-3 visa application became negated. Whatever the reason for the policy, the National Visa Center began "administratively closing" K-3 visa applications where the underlying IR-1/CR-1 petition was received by NVC prior to, or simultaneously with, the supplemental K-3 petition. At the time of this writing, K-3 visas are likely being issued less often due to NVC's administrative closure rule.

Meanwhile, this policy seems to have sparked some renewed interest by Vietnamese-American couples in IR-1 and CR-1 visas. It remains to be seen whether or not the K-3 visa will continue to be a highly utilized travel document in the future.

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