Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing K-3 Marriage Visas. For those who are unaware, the K-3 is actually a supplemental Marriage Visa. Unfortunately, a lot of charlatans and fakes, and just fly-by-night operations out on the internet often talk about the K-3 as if it is the Marriage Visa. It's actually a fairly discreet visa insofar as it's just a tiny category insofar as how many people actually use it, and the reason is, it's a supplemental petition. You have to file an underlying Immigrant Spouse Visa petition and then after that is filed, you file a subsequent supplemental take three application. Why? 

The K-3 was created under the Life Act during the Clinton Administration. It was created at a time where it took multiple years, like 2 to 3 years, to process an Immigrant Spouse Visa petition. Meanwhile, Fiancés at the time took like a matter of months. So basically, what Congress said was "look, we will pass this Life Act which President Clinton signed; it said "hey we're creating this new K category for married people, for foreign spouses of American citizens - it's American citizens only - and if you file an Immigrant Spousal Visa petition, we will go ahead and let you file a supplemental petition for a K-3. That's a Non-immigrant Visa, but you may be able to get it faster, and it worked out rather well. People use the K-3 with a pretty good deal of satisfaction I think in the late '90s, going into the early 2000s. Now that was all before my time. 

When I first started doing Immigration, we would do a fair number of K-3 cases, mostly because the population just thought, the public if you will, just thought that was a standard Marriage Visa and point of fact, it really wasn't, but that was what they wanted to do so we would file it and move on. 

In about 2010, they introduced the Doctrine of Administrative Closure within the National Visa Center which said, if we get the underlying Immigrant Spouse Visa at the same time as or before the K-3 petition, we will just close the K-3 petition. Well USCIS sped up its processing of Immigrant Spousal Visa petitions and therefore as a practical matter, the K-3 got phased out.

I've seen a few cases here recently where usage of the K-3 might be warranted under the circumstances, but for the most part, again since the Doctrine, the program if you will, of Administrative Closure at NVC, the K-3 has been largely, for the most part in disuse. It's not completely, I'm not saying it's not useful under certain circumstances, but those circumstances occur within a narrow bandwidth that make it not something you're going to use on a regular basis. 

The question posed is, is the K-3 worth the hassle? It depends on your circumstances, but where we are seeing the underlying Immigrant Spousal Visa petitions process out oftentimes before the K-3 anyway, as a practical matter I think it makes the K-3 kind of a moot point.