A caller named Billy told the Immigration Answer Show that he and his ex-wife, both living in the United States, divorced by power of attorney in Pakistan because it was cheaper than divorcing here. He now wants to sponsor someone else for a marriage green card next year and asked whether immigration will accept the Pakistani decree. Founding attorney Jim Hacking did not hide what he thought of the plan.
mic What the Attorney Says
“It’s literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Whether a divorce counts is mostly a question of state family law, and it turns on jurisdiction. A court generally needs at least one spouse domiciled in its territory to dissolve a marriage. When both spouses live in the United States, a foreign court that neither of them lives in may have no power to divorce them, and the state where they actually reside can refuse to recognize the decree.
mic What the Attorney Says
“But if you’re both living here, I don’t know that the court even has jurisdiction to divorce you. So, I think that was like a waste of money.”
That family-law problem becomes an immigration problem at the next marriage. A relative petition under INA § 204 (8 U.S.C. § 1154), filed on Form I-130, requires the petitioner to be legally free to marry, which means every prior marriage was validly terminated. If the proxy divorce is not recognized where Billy lives, he is still married in the eyes of that state, the new marriage is void, and USCIS denies the petition. The divorce that saved him money in Pakistan becomes the weak link in the case he actually cares about.
mic What the Attorney Says
“Why start off a case with a poison pill of a shaky divorce?”
His fix is to clean it up before anything else: get a fresh, uncontested divorce in the state where Billy lives, which he points out is not expensive, then wait and start the new marriage case on solid ground. The mistake to avoid is setting a wedding date before the U.S. divorce is final and building a petition on top of a decree the state may never honor.
An unrecognized divorce is the same kind of avoidable defect as a prior marriage that was never properly ended before the next, and it leaves a marriage green card in the same place as cases built on documents that do not hold up. The sequence is what protects him: get divorced in the United States first, then marry, then file.