There is an illustrated flowchart for various pathways to legal immigration in the U.S.
short answer: by design
This doesn’t appear to even touch on the topic of cost for the process. The fees on paper may only be a couple hundred dollars, but if you want any chance of actually getting through the process correctly without missing paperwork or deadlines resulting in a denial from the bureaucratic machine, you’ll essentially need an immigration attorney, and they are not cheap.
When my dad married a woman from the Phillipines about 9 years ago, it ended up costing around $20k for her and one child. That process took almost 5 years to complete… and this was after they’d already been in the US via a Visa and decided to get married here. So ostensibly a bunch of relevant requirements had to have been already verified with the previously approved Visa.
That’s worse than my story, sorry they had to go through that.
I married my wife while I was living in her country, Georgia. Then I came back to the U.S. and started the process for her to come. It took 17 months. I didn’t need a lawyer for it. We did later try to get a visitor visa for my mother-in-law and it got denied. I always say that if I had it to do over again, it would have probably been cheaper and quicker to fly them both to Mexico and then cross the border.
See also, “why does the tax system work for wealthy businesses but not for people with $1000 in Etsy sales or people who wanted their child tax credits”
Businesses can somehow always find all the immigrants labor they need, but the tired poor yearning suckers have to wait outside and hope the cartels find someone else to pick on
Obligatory fuck Cato.
I got a headache at the flow chart.
