If you’re using Boundless you’ll have a portal available that will guide you step-by-step: filling out of the form is relatively simple and they will also review it to make sure that you are not missing anything.

However, a big portion of the I-130 submission is gathering different types of relationship evidence, which is why I will focus on this part in this article.

On Boundless website you can find a pretty extensive list of examples of documents that you can submit to prove that your relationship is true, here’s what we submitted:

• Joint lease document
• Utility bills showing both spouses’ names
• Joint health insurance policy showing coverage for both spouses under the same plan
• My husband’s will listing me as his primary beneficiary
• Letters from family members and friends with both our names and the same address
• Tickets for trips we took to visit each other family or for family events (e.g. weddings, Thanksgiving, Christmas)
• Proof that we had been communicating regularly for the previous 4 years (a document with excerpts from our whatsapp chat logs, one excerpt per month)
• Photos showing us together, especially with family and friends, for the previous 4 years, with a caption detailing who’s in the photo, what’s the occasion, a timestamp and location. Ideally include wedding photos: we didn’t have proper wedding photos, since our ceremony was going to happen in the South of Italy in May, so we include one from the judge office and specified why it was the only one.

Next up: The Consular Processing!

You may also find interesting:

• Green Card application: timeline and steps
• Getting married in the US as an Italian citizen

This is where things get really interesting. Right off the bat: budget for an immigration support firm. You’ll thank me later.

It’s going to be a very long, very complex, very stressful process and you need all the help you can get.

We decided to use Boundless, their marriage green card services are $649 which they would refund if your application is denied by the U.S. government.

The second thing you need to do is assess whether you’re willing not to be able to travel out of or in the US for up to a couple of years.

If you are ok with not being able to travel to the US until you receive your green card, which was my case, since my husband lived in Switzerland and I couldn’t bear the idea of not seeing my family for two years, you will be required to fill in Form I-130 also known as “Petition for Alien Relative”.

If your spouse is in the US and you want to be with them, you may want to proceed with submitting Form I-485 (Application for Adjustment of Status) at the same time as Form I-130.

The timelines for these two applications are different: if you decide to live in the US from the start you will wait about 10–23 months, if you initiate the process from abroad you will wait 11.4–15 months.

If you choose to wait abroad, after your I-130 has been approved, your case will be sent to the NVC. The NVC will send you a Welcome Letter that will contain a code so you can log into the State Department’s CEAC website. This is where you can submit your Immigrant Visa (IV) Application (form DS-260) and your spouse can submit the Affidavit of Support and upload the supporting documents once they are gathered.

There will be some back and forth about missing pieces and clarifications needed, but eventually you’ll receive an email announcing that you are “Documentarily qualified”, which means that the documents part of your application has been approved.

The NVC will then work with your Embassy to schedule an in person interview, you don’t have to contact the Embassy yourself. As soon as you receive notice of the appointment in your email, though, you should schedule your medical examination (your Embassy website — you can find it here — will have a list of approved doctors, fees vary a lot).

At the end of the interview you’ll be told if you are approved, depending on the Embassy they will either stamp your passport with a temporary permant resident visa or they’ll hold your passport to stamp it and then mail it to your house.

The last step that triggers the printing of your Green Card (assuming that your medical and your interview were successful) is you entering the US: that will be the first date of validity of your Green Card, from that date it may take up to 90 days to receive the phisical card.

Now, a very important piece of advice: everyone will tell you that you have to stay in the US until you receive the card. I couldn’t, since I had surgery planned in Switzerland and I needed to pack up my apartment, so, after stressing for days and googling and talking to immigrant advisors, we finally managed to get past to the USCIS automated responder and through to a human operator who confirmed that, as long as I had a safe address (my father-in-law’s) where I could receive the Green Card, and as long as my passport stamp was still valid (6 months from the date of the medical exam) I was free to come and go. Now, I haven’t been back since my first entrance and I have my physical card with me, so I’m a little nervous: I’ll update this post with the outcome of my official moving trip to the US in 10 days.

Here’s my timeline (18 months total):

• February 8th, 2023: created account with Boundless
• February 21st, 2023: application package mailed
• February 27th, 2023: the USCIS acknowledged receipt of the application
• January 30th, 2024: the USCIS notifies that they are reviewing my application
• February 6th, 2024: Welcome Letter from the NVC and Notice of Immigrant Visa Case Creation
• March 18th, 2024: NCV has finished reviewing all the documents and approved them
• April 1st, 2024: NCV notifies that I have an appointment for an in person interview in Bern
• April 9th, 2024: Medical examination
• May 21st, 2024: in person interview at the US Embassy
• June 6th, 2024: entered the US for the first time after my green card has been approved
• August 9th, 2024: received my Green Card.

In the next posts I will go into details about what is needed for every step and tips to avoid too much heartache, so stay tuned for “How to submit a successful I-130”.

You may also find interesting:

• Getting married in the US as an Italian citizen
• How to submit a succesfull Form I-130

If you don’t live in the US and you’re not an AIRE member, this is done through the competent Italian Consulate: not every State in the US as a Consulate and you must chose the one that has a jurisdiction over the county where you got married. This an helpful link for that: https://www.italiandualcitizenship.net/italian-consulate-locations/

Once you’ve selected your Consulate, you head over to their website to identify what you need to prepare for your application, in my case it was Chicago, according to their website these are the documents required to record your marriage in Italy

1. Application form for registering Vital Records in Italy (usually found on the Consulate website)
2. Certified copy of “Marriage license/certificate” and certified copy of “Marriage application and record” issued by the competent County Clerk. The marriage certificate should mention the city where the ceremony took place and not just the County. The marriage application and record should include both parties’ birthdates and parents’ names.
3. The Marriage license/certificate and Marriage Application and Record must both be legalized with an Apostille to be requested at the competent Secretary of State.
4. An accurate, complete and typewritten translation of both the Marriage license/certificate and the Marriage Application and record is required. Translations may be done by any person who can write correctly in Italian.
5. Photocopy of both parties’ passports and a photocopy of the birth certificate of the non-Italian spouse.

Now, for the Apostille part, you may obtain the “Apostille” in person or you may forward the original documents to be “legalized” to the Secretary of State, along with your written request for the “Apostille”, including the correct fee and a self addressed stamped return envelope. We decided it would be safer to just go to the Secretary of State in Denver and get it done there: it was a fairly quick and easy process.

We did, however, mail the application package (form + attachments) to the Chicago Consulate when we got back home: the Consulate received the documents on January 17th and my hometown in the South of Italy (where I officially resided) confirmed the transcription on May 11th.

The most complicated part of all this was to figure out which documents to prepare, to whom they needed to be sent and in general getting a clear picture of the steps involved, so I hope this’ll be helpful.

Next chapter will be about the Green Card application!

Now, getting married in the US, especially in Colorado, is a piece of cake: if you’re not already married, blood-related (cousins are ok!) and are a 18+ years old resident, you just simply walk into a County Clerk’s office with your partner, fill out some paperwork (the only required document is a photo ID) and sign the license. Just like that: you’re married.

If you’re not a citizen, things are slightly more complicated: you also need a passport. In theory.

In our case, we needed a few other things:

• I had to sign an affidavit stating my name and declaring that I didn’t have a Social Security Number
• Eric, having been married in the past, had to provide the divorce decree
• We had to get married in front of a judge, because, while self-solemnization is a legal way of getting married in Colorado, if your goal is avoiding any possible problem with the customs officers you want to have the signature of a judge on your Marriage Certificate.

Stay tuned for “How to get your American marriage transcribed in Italy” and other bureaucratic shenanigans!

At the time it wasn’t possible to binge watch a TV show, but I would definitely have. My obsession reached the point where I started telling my mum that I believed that I had been switched in the hospital and I was, in reality, the child of a US American couple. The proof for my statement was to be found in my love for white picket fences and hamburgers.

Fast forward to 2018, no one who knew me even a little was surprised that I fell in love with a US citizen. Whom then I proceeded to marry in Colorado in November 2022. That’s when my journey to get a Green Card started.

Our original plan was to move to Castle Rock, Colorado, to be near my father-in-law: too bad that he then decided to move to Arizona. So, change of plans: Eric, my husband, realized that he wanted to be able to go to the office at least a few days a week and his team is in New York City, so that’s become our new destination. Which is why “Empire State of”. By the way: last time we were in NYC I counted the times that you can listen to the Alicia Keys song while walking from 34th street to 53rd: 8, at least.

The rest of the title of this blog comes from my last name: Gioia (which means “joy”). Let’s say it’s wishful thinking more than a statement: I was in that stage of my life when I was ready for that house in a prairie with a white picket fence, a farmhouse kitchen, a vegetable garden and listening to the sound of birds and leaves while sipping tea on the porch; not for sidewalks smelling of urine, Barbie doll sized kitchens and an apartment with no balcony with the soundtrack of traffic and sirens.

So, looks like I will need to tap into a different era of TV shows: it’s going to be more Sex and the City and Friends, except I’m not single nor in my twenties anymore.

Everyone is asking me if I’m excited about moving to NYC and I feel like my answer would be letting them down: at the moment I’m more worried and stressed than excited. But hey, all the cuisines of the world, all the theater shows, movies in original language, concerts! All things we could not access here in Lugano, Switzerland.

So, we’ll see. Stay with me and we’ll find out how much Gioia I’ll be able to find in NYC.