I married someone that was not from the US and immigrated about fifteen years ago. I’ll say that our experience was very similar. Including the bit about the visas. The visas were the tricky part and probably exist for mail order brides more that people getting married, or at least that’s what I thought. I kind of understand that part of the process being broken, but it is broken there, that isn’t an exaggeration or dysphemism. The interview helps, but you have to get to the interview for it to help.

We hired a lawyer, but in retrospect I wouldn’t bother. This probably depends on the country of origin and current international relations. If you can fill out paperwork and wait, that’s about all a lawyer will do.

The part that always stuck with me is that we had to have paperwork proving that nobody was tired, poor, huddling, homeless, or tempest tossed. It’s still not my favorite thing to think about. I was pretty young though and still suffer from some idealism.

Altogether it was fairly expensive, took a long time, but wasn’t really difficult, more tedious. At certain points it’s easy to be kind of lost within the system or stuck waiting for one thing to do the next and that can be frustrating when you’re younger and poorer and newly married. At least in our experience neither country seemed to recognize or care about our marital status in the other country. That only really seems to come up with property or work though.