Yet A Longer Road to Partner Visa

[emo_snal]

   It seemed like the ongoing struggle to get my fiancee a visa couldn't get worse but it seems like it may have.

Background   But first let me summarize everything up to this point. So Cristina lives in Venezuela, where I, as an American, cannot go, and being from a collapsing country she can't just come to Australia on any easy-to-get visa

Comments

[belleweather]

We're still processing K-1s in somewhere between 6 and 12 months, as far as I know. I know that you don't want to go back to the US, but it'd be a much cheaper and faster option. I just can't figure out how you'd get both of you back to AUS, unless the aussies would give her access based on her green card without having to wait to naturalize. Or you got a job at USAID or DOD or something where she could qualify for expeditious naturalization... :( Immigration sucks.

[chocolate_frapp]

geez, what a hassle!

[emo_snal]

Yeeeah ):

[nightspore]

ugh

[emo_snal]

Yeeah ):

[yueshi]

That sounds really complicated.
But I wasn‘t aware that US Americans can‘t travel to Venezuela….. is there actually a ban, or is it out of safety concerns?

[emo_snal]

Safety concerns. I could travel there though I'd need to apply for and receive a visa. But American tourists are regularly arrested for being accused of being CIA spies and tortured for months/years until finally traded back in exchange for Venezuelans arrested abroad. The United States no longer has an embassy in Venezuala and along with Iran and North Korea it has the State Departments strongest travel advisory level of "DO NOT TRAVEL"

[yueshi]

Okay, that makes sense. For a moment I was really wondering if Venezuela just went „nope, no Americans here“
Well, I keep my fingers crossed that you will find some way to get married soon!

[emo_snal]

Thanks!

[waitingman]

Sometimes I'm so embarrassed by our country's visa laws & how hard it makes things for people to come here. The way we carry on, you'd think we were packed into the place cheek-by-jowl, instead of having one of the lowest population densities this side of Antarctica...

Your wonderful relationship needs no further documentation - it's clearly the real macaw...

[emo_snal]

Lol!

And yeah, I've definitely remarked before about how they act like the country is "all full up" where even if you don't account for the vast deserts in the middle it STILL has an unusually low population density. They definitely make it deeply unreasonably difficult to immigrate here. I'm also often thinking about how I think it was still within the lifetime of people living today that they would literally pay (white folks) to move here. And Australia is even more of an "immigrant country" than the US. Nearly everyone I know if not an immigrant themselves has parents born abroad, but they got here and want to slam the door behind them

[waitingman]

That's exactly the problem - there are too many people still alive from the 'White Australia' policy days & the Ten Pound Poms who were paid to come here, post WWII - I just read that scheme was in place until 1982!!

The issue is that back when those immigration policies were in place, it was primarily to get skilled workers out here for our burgeoning industrial, manufacturing & engineering projects. In these modern days when all that industry has been moved off-shore & most jobs are now in hospitality, retail, law, finance & real estate, it's the old factory workers & their indoctrinated offspring who grumble about the bloody foreigners coming over here taking our jobs & stealing our Welfare (Surely they can't do BOTH??!!), mostly because the bloody foreigners are arriving well-educated & willing to work, like the old days, but now they're not white people

[emo_snal]

Another funny thing is how they desperately want rural doctors, but apparently doctors in order to get their credentials recognized in Australia need to spend a year or so at one of a small number of approved hospitals, like doing a residency all over again, and these are all ni the major cities, and I'd imagine being forced to spend at least a year in a place increases the odds the person will decide they want to stay there versus going off into a rural area.