Hi all, this is my first post, so I will start off explaining our situation. I am an American married to a UK citizen. I have been living here since 2008 with an IRL, and we were toying with the idea of moving to the U.S. for an indefinite amount of time. My parents are getting on in age a bit now, and although there are no serious health problems with either of them, it's something I have been thinking about lately. My spouse has never lived there, but as we were looking into visa requirements, green cards, etc., we discovered the USA's disdain of criminal convictions. It seems that you are deemed as inadmissible into the US if you have ever received any type of drug conviction, no matter what the drug, how long ago the conviction was, the circumstances, etc. I had no idea that our American laws regarding immigration could be so draconian, and so I was slightly surprised to find all of this out.
Basically in a nutshell, about 15 years ago my spouse was arrested on possession charges in the UK. While in a nightclub a bouncer caught my British spouse with less than half a gram of cocaine (class A), and half a gram of weed. They called the police, and my spouse was arrested and fined, and while no jail time was imposed, this obviously was a criminal offence. My spouse has no other criminal convictions before or after, and has always had an extremely successful career, etc. Just this one stupid mistake was made years ago. Now from everything I have read and researched online, this will make a green card automatically denied. There is no time frame that the US uses to deem someone rehabilitated (like the way Canada does if a conviction was 10 years or older), and the only loophole seems to be to gain a rehabilitation waiver, which is only available if a conviction was due to having 30g or less of marijuana!?!? That's more than an ounce of weed! It seems that even though my spouse had barely enough cocaine to get a small dog high, the US doesn't care whether or not it was half a gram, or half a kilo, and it basically considers this on par with someone who is distributing.
My question revolves around whether or not there is someone here who has been in the same situation, and how it was received if you did try to sponsor your UK spouse for a green card. We were considering consulting a US immigration attorney, but everything I have seemed to have read online seems to point to the fact that we are S.O.L. to put it bluntly and our hopes of moving back to the US are nil, just due to the fact that there is no grey area. Thanks for reading!
