Say a young woman and her family move to the United States from their native…oh, let’s say Bahamas.
She and her parents are not citizens, but are working in the US, say the father is a Teacher, the mother is a Cop (I say cop because I’m assuming the parents are here as legitimately as it would be possible to get a job as a police officer) and the young woman works at a pharmacy.
The young woman gets a boyfriend, a US citizen, and subsequently gets pregnant. After the birth of the child, is she automatically a US citizen? I hear of people marrying to stay in the US often, but by giving birth to a citizen, is that an effective way of staying in the country?
Is it legal? What if one could prove you only had the child as a strategy for staying in the US?
And would the same be true of a man from another country, say France, for example, who gets a US citizen pregnant and she has the baby, is he given citizenship?
Say a Visa expires during the gestation period, would the woman be allowed to give birth in the US?
No worries, I was born in Raleigh, NC, I’m just curious about how effective getting knocked up is for staying in the US, since I don’t hear of it as much as marrying to stay in.
The child will be an American citizen if it is born in the US, regardless of the status of the baby’s parents.
However, giving birth to an American citizen, or fathering an American citizen, does not make you an American citizen. Your status is unchanged. It is not true that by having that baby you can now stay in the US indefinately. Nothing has changed for the parents.
The only difference is that if they are obligated to return home and they take the kid with them, the kid is still an American citizen. The kid can enter and leave the US just like any other American citizen, even if his parent’s can’t.
IIRC, the same applies to marrying an American citizen. You do not acquire citizenship by virtue of marrying an American citizen. You have to go through the naturalization process.
attachment to the principles of the U.S. Constitution; and,
*
favorable disposition toward the United States.
I apologize for seeming to wander into GD territory, but shouldn’t this end any illegal immigration discussion? Favorable disposition? I would guess this is much-discussed in GD, but I don’t go there.
Normally you ALSO have to be a Legal Permanent Resident (green card holder) for some period of time (5 years for most people) to be eligible to naturalize. It surprises me not at all that USCIS manages to completely obscure this issue. The only GD is why USCIS routinely make such significant ommissions.
A better checklist is found elsewhere on the USCIS site:
Just to nitpick some more, very little is automatic when it comes to immigration benefits. Marrying a US citizen does not automatically give you permanent residence status. It does, assuming there aren’t other factors that would make you ineligible, allow your US citizen spouse to sponsor you for permanent residence, a process that requires a hefty chunk of paperwork, supporting evidence and fees. I’m hoping to be done with it by the end of this month, but you never know.
So if the woman in my example has a child, could she be kicked out if her time ran out? I’m assuming the child can stay no matter what, right? Is the child her leverage? Since she is legally responsible for the American child? Does this work?
**Lemur **mentioned that if the mommy is obligated to leave and they decide to take the child, the child can enter and exit the US as he or she pleases. But say the mom hasn’t done anything wrong other than have her time in the US run out, and refuses to take her child with her, does this mean the child may be deported or kicked out too? Or can the mom stay to care for her little citizen, in which case must she promptly try to regain temporary or permanent privileges?
The mother has to go. Chicago had an infamous case of this last year - Elvira Arellano, a Mexican citizen who entered the US illegally, was deported, returned back to the US illegally, and gave birth to a son here. After a period of time where she claimed sanctuary in a church (which doesn’t have any legal basis but who wants images all over the news of a woman being dragged crying, with her little boy, from a church?), she left to go to an immigration rights rally and was nabbed and deported. She could have left her son with someone in the US or taken him with, but I forget which she did; she had been trying to use her US citizen son as leverage to stay.
If the Mom heads back to her home country but leaves the kid on a streetcorner, then the kid will be treated like any other kid left on a streetcorner. They’ll end up in foster care if no relatives are available. Eventually the mother’s parental rights will be terminated, but that could take years, during which the kid will remain in foster care.
The fact that her child is a citizen who has the right to remain in the US has no bearing on her right to remain in the US to care for that child in the US. If she doesn’t have the right to stay in the US she’ll either have to leave, or stay illegally.
When did this all change? Or has it not changed? Because I remember the whole mail order bride thing and people getting married just for citizenship. As far as just getting married to become a citizen, has it ever been that easy to become a citizen? Or…was this all a myth the whole time?
My Thai wife is not a US citizen by virtue of her marriage to me. I’m not aware of any benefits at all that she’s entitled to by being married to me; perhaps there’s some form for us to fill out and then she would be eligible, dunno, we’ve never checked into it.
I remember when we were first married and then went to the embassy to get her a tourist visa for the US. (She maintains a 10-year visa in her passport, which is about all we ever go to the US anymore, once a decade or so.) One embassy official was very helpful, a little TOO helpful in that he kept explaining how we go about filing for my wife to become a US citizen. The fact is she’s simply not interested, but he seemed incapable of believing that. I guess our case is an exception; many couples here do try to get the wife citizenship.
If you are willing to take the long term view you can get married for citizenship, but you’ll have to do a little more work than just get married:
Get married
Apply for permanent residence
Once this is approved (lets say a six month wait), wait three years. Permanent residents married to a US citizen can apply for citizenship after three years (normally this is five years).
Apply for citizenship (I don’t know how long this takes, but I think it is over a year).
So it is a 4.5 to 5 year process. I can’t say whether this was different in the past or not, but I do notice in many news articles about immigration they tend to leave out the processing details, so an article might simply say “marrying a US citizen allows one to stay in the US”, leaving readers to think that it is simply a case of telling the government “Yo, gimme my green card!”
Being pregnant with a US citizen also does not confer you any special benefits. If you do not leave the US when your visa expires, and you do not somehow get an extension or are granted a different visa, you are here illegally and can be deported if the INS catches you, no matter when you are due. If the INS doesn’t catch you, I believe it would be illegal for an emergency room to turn you away if you are in labor. But that has nothing to do with your immigration status. You could concievably give birth and have the INS waiting to deport you directly from the hospital.
Yeah, I know it’s no longer the INS, but it was for all the time I worked in immigration, and I’m too lazy to get in the habit of calling it by its new name.
Immigration laws change constantly, and have been amended many times, significantly in 1996, and in 2001 when the INS ceased to exist and the DHS took over. But I think people have been confused for a while. Marriage has always been about getting the “Green Card” (becoming a legal permanent resident). Heck, there was that romantic comedy on the subject called… “Green Card.” The myth of marriage being “special” in some way is actually true, people are just wrong at the what the 'specialness" is – it isn’t to do with citizenship.
The thing that makes marriage special, is that it is virtually the only way for an illegal to become legal without leaving the country first (ad sometimes the only way, period). You can “adjust your status” to legal permanent residence when you marry a US citizen even if you have overstayed your visa are therefore illegal. Normally, people who overstay their visa are not only are not allowed to become LPR, they are barred from the country for either 3 or 10 years.
