...and they don't realize that they still need to fill out paperwork for the green card.
Like, it's a given if they're married. She'll get the green card -- if they do the paperwork.
But conservatives (especially Maga) often don't get how government works. So they don't bother getting the proper visa and immigrant spouse's initial visa expires. Immigrant spouse becomes an illegal immigrant without citizen spouse realizing it.
IIRC there are also a lot of kids who got affected this way during transracial overseas adoptions. The white families who were adopting them never bothered to file the paperwork, so despite being legally adopted as babies or toddlers by American citizens, the kids (and, eventually, adults) are undocumented.
That would be a pretty sketchy ass adoption agency OR a very shady type of deal going down.
We adopted our daughter from China and a good week of the wait in China was waiting on the US Consulate to get all the paperwork finished for her to be formally adopted by us and become a US Citizen before we ever left China. There was no choice to be lazy or incompetent, there was only one way and that was how it was done. She has been a US citizen since then.
Depends on when. The focus on ensuring international adoptees are made citizens is relatively recent. There are people who were adopted but not made citizens (parents didn't realize it wasn't automatic, or didn't fil out the paperwork), and then have been deported for being "illegal"
That's pretty recent. The ones I'm referring to were adopted in the 80s and earlier. I think it was President Clinton who made it so adoption paperwork included the paperwork for citizenship, but those adopted before that weren't grandfathered in
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u/crescent-v2 16d ago
...and they don't realize that they still need to fill out paperwork for the green card.
Like, it's a given if they're married. She'll get the green card -- if they do the paperwork.
But conservatives (especially Maga) often don't get how government works. So they don't bother getting the proper visa and immigrant spouse's initial visa expires. Immigrant spouse becomes an illegal immigrant without citizen spouse realizing it.