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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing K-1 Visas. For those who are unaware, a K-1 Visa is a Fiancé Visa, it allows an American citizen to bring a foreign fiancé into the United States. Now generally speaking, we handle pretty much exclusively, I have a few outlier cases but more and more I focus just almost exclusively and frankly as the weeks and months go on I would like to focus only exclusively on Visas emanating from Thailand. And to kind of get into the meat of this video, different Embassies do things differently and trying to keep track of that from my perspective is rather difficult. 

Now as an American Immigration Attorney that is based abroad, I have kind of a unique practice insofar as I end up with kind of a hesitate to use the phrase but I guess there is really no the word, I end up with a kind of specialization in one particular country if you will, call it Thailand. Now I have dealt with cases out of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar over the years, a couple of cases out of the Philippines over the years, Singapore, Malaysia but it's pretty rare. More and more I am finding, there's almost kind of a differentiation, if you will sort of the way there is a speciation sometimes in genetic evolution and I don't know if this is an apples to apples comparison but with respect to different Embassies and Consulates, it seems like over time we have seen different posts kind of evolve different procedures that have resulted in wildly different ways of doing things. On certain cases you will see things kind of move in similar ways but quite honestly the cases I end up dealing with out here they are all pretty difficult frankly; they have got a lot of nettlesome problems in them for one reason or another, sometimes we are dealing with Waivers of Inadmissibility. So for me Thailand is kind of my focus and it's increasingly becoming that way. 

Meanwhile things are just different Embassy to Embassy. 221g procedures for example which for those who are unaware of what that is we have other videos on this channel just go into our search function, write in 221g, the number two, the number two, the number one and g, you'll see a number of videos on what a 221g is. Different Embassies deal with those very, very differently and for that reason it is rather hard to know exactly what an Embassy is going to do. Now meanwhile, you've got different officers, they're constantly kind of moving around so there is something to be said for the officer that's adjudicating cases at any given time within an Embassy may have some influence over how the process works overall. It has been my experience though just from a pure processing standpoint, local officers, folks that are full-time and always on the ground in a given post, they very much sort of set the guidelines if you will or sort of set the tone if you will with respect to how cases process. So again from jurisdiction to jurisdiction you're going to be dealing with different on the ground rules.

Now in a Thai Immigration context, anybody that's ever dealt with Thai immigration will totally understand this concept, from province to province in Thailand you are kind of dealing with different interpretations of the administrative rules. Now you get up to the nation state level and you are talking Country to Country, again it's similar where different places are going to administer different administrative rules differently. For that reason, you end up with this situation where quite frankly a case will process in one jurisdiction very differently than it would process in another one notwithstanding the fact that in this case and for the purposes of the video, they are still all K-1 Visas.