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Applying for just the right immigration status for you involves an analysis of your life, employment and family situation.
There may be more than one option available to you. Typically, a person comes to the United States first to visit. Most often this is the sole goal of entering this country.
Thereafter, circumstances evolve so as to create opportunities or desires to stay here for other reasons, and for various periods of time. Therefore, it is possible that one or more statuses can end up as part of your immigration path.
The Temporary Visas and Permanent Residence options contained in this section explain the various categories that exist under U.S. immigration laws. You can click on any of the visa options listed to get a detailed explanation of the specific options.
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BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF US CITIZENS
Brothers and Sisters of U.S. citizens who are at least 21 years old are the 4th preference family priority. 65,000 visas annually are allocated to this category worldwide. Copy and paste the link: http://travel.state.gov/visa_bulletin.html to your address field on your browser for current processing times based on the citizenship of the foreign brother or sister. As you will see from this link, the priority date may be backlogged for 10 or more years. This category has been oversubscribed forever, especially for countries like Mexico, India and the Philippines. If the brother or sister is married to a person of a different citizenship, then that spouse's citizenship can be used instead to determine the "priority date" rather than the principal alien. If you're a citizen of the Philippines and your spouse is not, you could save up to 10 years in processing time! It now takes some 20 years to process this way for Philippine ciiizens compared to the 10 years to immigrate for everyone else. As a result, in general, this way of immigrating should be used as a fallback option rather than the main option for immigrating anytime soon. Depending on the foregin person's life plans, it may be best to either file this petition early, or forego it all together.
Under this category, not only can the spouses of the foregin sibling also immigrate, but minor children can also immigrate, and depening on the age of the child when the petition is filed and how long the case takes, sometimes even grown up children can benefit from this category.
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