USA Visa and Immigration FAQ

This FAQ has information about procedural and substantive issues of U.S. immigration laws.

This FAQ about USA Visa and Immigration was compiled and written by rskhanna@access5.digex.net (Rajiv S. Khanna) with numerous contributions by others.

If you have access to the Web you can access the FAQ from http://www.immigration.com

Many FAQs, including this one, are available via FTP on the archive site rtfm.mit.edu in the directory pub/usenet/news.answers/us-visa-faq. To get this FAQ by E-mail, you should send a message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with send usenet/news.answers/us-visa-faq/part1 in the body of the message. Make sure you don't have a signature in body of the message.

To get the entire FAQ [which includes the answers to the questions from this FAQ] by email, you should send a message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with
send usenet/news.answers/us-visa-faq/*
in the body of the message. Make sure you don't have a signature in body of the message. The above instruction *work*, I have tried them, if it doesn't work get local help before sending me an email.

IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT NOTE !!!

If you don't have access to alt.visa.us and you wish to ask a question related to immigration then send your query to alt-visa-us@cs.utexas.edu Please try to be brief and try not to exceed 72 columns when you type in the message. Mention in your message that you don't have access to alt.visa.us newsgroup and people should respond to you directly.

Individuals are encouraged to submit corrections, questions and answers to rskhanna@immigration.com directly. In many answers below, submitters are noted in parentheses at the beginning of comments. (Comments may be slightly edited.)

"WE CLAIM NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION. APPLICATION OF LAW CAN VARY DRASTICALLY ACCORDING TO THE FACTS OF A PARTICULAR CASE. THE FAQ IS NOT MEANT TO BE SPECIFIC LEGAL ADVICE. IT IS ONLY A STARTING POINT. MUCH OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THE FAQ IS PROVIDED BY LAYPERSONS. PLEASE USE YOUR OWN JUDGMENT."

This article includes answers to the following questions. Questions marked with a <> indicate questions new to this issue; those with significant changes of content since the last issue are marked by <>:

Welcome to alt.visa.us, a newsgroup for discussion of non-immigrant and immigrant visas to USA.