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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing K-1 Visas, K-1 Fiancé Visas specifically here from Thailand so we are talking about a K-1 Fiancé Visa for a Thai Fiancé, yeah it's a Fiancé Visa although presumably you are going to end up married so will end up being a spouse.

The question is what if I want to sort of live part time between Thailand and the USA? I want to kind of split my time, we as a couple want to split our time, a K-1 Visa maybe a good option depending on circumstances. Again all of this is circumstantially dependent; this is just kind of general, educational informational only. But yeah, there is a sort of set of circumstances whereby someone can use a K-1 Visa and still move back and forth. Now the issue with the K-1 Visa is one, it is not processing nearly as fast as it once did so maybe some of the benefits in this context aren't quite there where they might have once been, comparative benefits I should say. 

Meanwhile, you now have to spend a fairly prolonged period of time in the United States going through what is called the adjustment of status process. I go back 15 years of doing this which isn’t very long compared to some of my other colleagues but I have been doing K-1 Visas from Thailand, for a decade and a half. There was a time, adjustment of status post K-1 issuance and the arrival of that foreign fiancé in the United States, where the adjustment of status process was quite honestly, I hesitate to call it pro forma, there was due process, they did have to adjudicate the thing, but now again it is another one of these quagmire dumpster fires within the bureaucracy that I can't figure out any logical reason for it to be the way that it is. It takes forever now. It just takes a long time to get the adjustment completed compared to what it once was. There was a time when it was a matter of weeks. You arrived in the US; you arrived in K-1 status; you got married and 6-8 weeks later they mailed out the Green Card, after you filed the I-485 adjustment status form, they mailed it back to you in a couple of months. It wasn't a big deal and there wasn't a lot of, "oh we need to interview this, we need to RFE that", RFE being request for evidence. They had the case file already, they knew what was going on. Now, for whatever reason they seem intent upon basically making requests for evidence which in my judgment, I don't really understand what the purpose of some of these RFEs is and then meanwhile just the overall process takes a lot longer and nobody can really explain to me why that is occurring, what value is being added there. Okay, we have still got a Covid backlog, okay. We are in 2023, going into quarter two at this point so you know, that is getting to be an excuse that is starting to kind of hurt my ears a little bit but okay fine, there's a backlog out there and we have still got to deal with it, whatever. 

Long story short, the K-1 Visa may not be quite as optimal for those who want to bifurcate their time between two countries because at least on the front end of the overall process you are going to be dealing with spending a lot of time in the United States just to regularize the Thai party to a given marriage's status in the USA before being able to travel about internationally with a lot more leeway if you will.