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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure other Visas can be tough, but I got my spouse visa in Japan in a few weeks from the time I started. A couple simple forms, less than $100 in fees, and a couple trips to the immigration office.

The US is ~$1,400, 6 months, multiple appointments, and a stack of paperwork for the same thing. Really pathetic. There's no excuse (no, not even volume).

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Spousal visas are treated very very differently from business visas in Japan, and I would think most countries. You are married to a citizen of the country, and it would be inhuman to deny you the right to live in the country of your spouse. Inhuman, but sadly all too common in some countries' immigration rules. I'm thinking of the UK citizen friend of mine working in silicon valley, married to a Japanese woman, who was separated from his child and wife for the better part of a year just because US immigration was fucking around with them.

I am guessing you are white and from a "tier 1" country? Your experience might have been very different coming from, say, Indonesia. They can go into much greater detail and require higher standards of evidence if they think there could be an economic motive to your move.

I can't speak to the US experience but it's basically the same deal in Australia - a good friend of mine got her spouse visa literally overnight from the Tokyo embassy, but I've heard stories about it taking 18 months to receive the same thing if the applicant is from a developing country.

The situation truly sucks, and I wish they could do a better, faster and more dignity-preserving job, but there is a lot of fraud and motivations of the applicant can often be questionable. A thai-chinese friend once told me that one of her friends needed to marry an Australian for visa reasons, and would pay $25k or more. That opened my eyes a bit. She could just make that much more working here. Guess the occupation.

There's no excuse, but they do have a lot to deal with.

Its not about status of the country , each country is given a fixed quota . Usually from developed countries less number of people are trying to come to America than from say a third world country, so the backlog of a applications is less , thus the faster processing.

That may be a factor, but it is not the only factor. When applying for a spouse visa, someone from (say) Norway has little economic incentive to gain the visa. As a general rule of thumb, their visa will be subject to less checks and the marriage assumed to be genuine. They just don't have much motive to lie or try and fake their way through.

Someone moving from (say) Cambodia, however, will face an entirely different situation. They plainly have any number of motives to get the hell out of Cambodia and into a big rich country. These motives can and do lead to fake marriages, fake information, everything. The application will be given a far greater level of scrutiny and will take a lot longer.

Hell, don't take my word for it, Australian immigration spells it out. Here's the official "assessment level" (ie, assumed risk) of people applying for student visas here:

http://www.immi.gov.au/students/students/chooser/574-nonjs.h...

Plan on a miserable experience if you're not from a country in level 1. And you can be sure there's a much more detailed one for internal use, for spouses, etc.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Too true.

I'm originally from an African country, and trying to get into the US was next to impossible despite my qualifications (valid), experience (in several Western countries) and financial position (good).

Five years on, with New Zealand citizenship, I can travel visa-free virtually everywhere, work in Australia without paperwork, and can expect a short application process to get into the US, based on the experience of a friend of mine, who had the same progression.

It sucks if you're on the other end, but to some extent, a greater degree of scrutiny is warranted when your origin is a country you have motive to get out from and to commit fraud to do so.

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