Visa Question Visa to USA for Wife

I am confused by the different types of visas to the USA. The relative (spouse) visa requires that the sponsor be domiciled in the US in order to sponsor the relative (spouse).

How do I get a visa for my wife to visit the USA if we do not intend to live there and she does not meet the "tourist requirements" that are not written down anywhere?

Some of the visas are immigrant type. How long do we need to stay in the US for her to be considered an immigrant (resident)?

As a citizen, the US taxes me in whatever country I reside (domiciled). Now I can't take my wife back for a visit?

 

I think tourist visa requirements have been written down and are easy to find, for example here
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/tourism-visit/visitor.html
Other than if your wife would be pregnant and expected to give birth while visiting the USA, there would seem to be no obvious reasons to refuse her a regular B-2 tourist visa, and being married to a US national, even that might not be an applicable rule for denial of visa in her case.

 

Nope. Each applicant is evaluated based on their probability of not overstaying their visa in the USA. The strength of ties to the Philippines verses the potential to overstay in the USA. There are no published standards for the evaluation of this criteria.

The link you posted only shows what forms to fill out. It does not list the requirements for approval.

As was stated on another thread:
For Filipinos to get a visitor visa for the USA they need to show EXTREMELY strong professional and financial ties to their home in the Philippines. The very wealthy would have little problem. Holders of public office are also good candidates. Having marketable skills but no lucrative job here in the Philippines is a visa-killer...don't even bother trying. US Immigration knows how easy it is for people with some skills to work under the table in the US and far too many have entered in the past on a visitor visa and never leave.

I have heard this from a number of Filipinos who have wanted to travel to the US.

 

A few years ago there was a very good money earning business going on where wealthy family's here would pay for foreigners to marry their daughters for visa's to USA and Australia.. it worked quite well until there was some number crunching about how many of these marriages ended in sudden divorces. And how many petitions we submitted for family members.

 

From the official pdf: ( https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/PDF-other/VisaFlyer_B1B2_March_2015.pdf )
Qualifying for a Visitor Visa There are specific requirements which must be met by applicants to qualify for a visitor visa under U.S. immigration law. The consular officer at the U.S. Embassy or Consulate will determine whether you qualify for the visa. The required presumption under U.S. law is that every visitor visa applicant is an intending immigrant until they demonstrate otherwise. Therefore, applicants for visitor visas must overcome this presumption by demonstrating:
• That the purpose of their trip is to enter the United States temporarily for business or pleasure;
• That they plan to remain for a specific, limited period;
• Evidence of funds to cover expenses in the United States;
• That they have a residence outside the United States as well as other binding ties that will ensure their departure from the United States at the end of the visit.

Those 4 bullet points right there are the requirements set out in the law.
They are not essentially different from the requirements that other countries set for visitor visa, like my own.

And no visa's are not guaranteed, so you need to bring a fair amount of evidence with regard to each of those 4 points.
When we applied for a visitor visa for the Netherlands for my wife a few years ago, she went into the interview armed with about 60 pages of evidence.
The visa was issued as expected.

 

That is called "trafficking", and it's not business but crime.

 

To visit my family. We would go after the pandemic settled down.

Part of my question has to do with taxes. I get the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE) by not residing in the USA. The bad part of this is that I cannot sponsor a relative (wife) if I am not residing in the USA. So this leaves us with the visitor visa.

@Philpots has a good answer in that if she is on the title of a home here in the Philippines then there is a very high probability they will approve her visitors visa.

Another choice would be for us to go there one year and then move back and have her continue to pay state and federal income taxes in the US. We work online for customers in the US. If you are paying local taxes in the US it is presumed that is your residence. Meanwhile we could move back to the Philippines where I could use the FEIE based on the time spent in the Phils. Just a thought.

 

These are called 'sham marriages' in the UK - mostly Eastern Europeans marrying unknown non-EU citizens to get them into the UK. They tightened up a little by asking the two potential spouses questions about each other - they often did not know a thing!

It probably still continues as sometimes it is easy to spot but if the potential spouses have brains then probably easy to convince the registrars. Incidentally, UK citizens have a much harder and more expensive process getting a foreign spouse in - much easier for a EU citizen, but one who is NOT a UK citizen, to get a spouse into the UK! Crazy.