On Sun, 01 Apr 2007 19:06:47 -0700, The Doctor <>
wrote:
>Hello, getting ready to kick off my the K1 visa process. I'm male and
>living in the US, my fiance is Thai and living in Phuket Thailand.
>I've known here for going on 4 years now, she's a friend of a friend I
>met in college who was studying here in the states. I have some
>questions, and was hoping to get some advise:
>
>1. The US Embassy website lists an address in Bangkok for getting the
>police documentation required for the visa process. Can anyone tell
>me how long it normally takes from contacting them to getting the
>report? I ask since I believe there's a 3 month window from getting
>the report to when you must present it to the embassy. Also how much
>money it costs would be nice too.
>
>2. Is the Bangkok based police report the only report required?
>
>3. Should I hire an attorney, use a service like Visa Pro, or do all
>the paperwork myself? I don't believe there's anything too unusual
>about our circumstances, but I'm obviously not too familar with the
>proess and any potential pitfalls. Some websites make it seem very
>difficult to fill out the paperwork properly, but most of them also
>seem to be sponsored by services to help you.
>
>4. For the paperwork, should I use the address she resides at now, or
>the address on her government ID/residence card? She lives/works in
>Phuket, but has all of her official paperwork sent to her parents
>house in Nakhon Si Thammarat.
>
>5. Any idea what sort of questions are normally asked at the
>interview? Anything in particular I should look out for?
>
>Thanks in advance for any insight you can offer.
3. You should not need an attorney unless there is something unusual
about your case (past police record, etc.). The forms aren't that
hard to fill out if you are reasonably intelligent, and there is lots
of help available in this forum and others. Whatever you do, don't
hire an attorney or service that claims they can expedite the process.
I made that mistake and paid an attorney $1800 based on him saying he
could get my fiance into this country (from Thailand) in 60 days
because he "knew the system". It is now over 5 months and we are
still waiting for NOA2! He now admits we can do nothing but wait. So
I paid all that money for basically a typing service, since I had to
send him all the information and hiscretary just typed it into the
forms.
5. I have heard that some of the embassy drones will get quite
insulting and try to ask trick questions of the fiance. Apparently
they think they are marriage counselors or suspect that all Thai women
are coming to the US to be sex workers. Don't know how true this is
but have heard this from several people. There is a list of typical
questions availble for about ten bucks on the web at
www.fiancevisa.com. This guy claims to be a translator who has helped
prepare visa applications and these are actual questions asked at the
Bangkok embassy.
Hope this helps. Good luck.