Expired Greencard

CGD

I lived in America for approx 12 years and I am home approx 15 years now but my greencard and my wives expired in 2001 and we never renewed. Now the way things are we are thinking of going back. My daughter has an American passport as she was born over there. My question is do we have any chance of re-activating our green card or any way of getting a card through my daughter as she is a citizen? Big mistake to let our greencards expire but who knew!

silja

No chance of renewing your greencards, they become useless if you are out of the USA for more than 12 months even if not expired.
How old is the daughter? if she is over 21, she can petition you for an immigrant visa, takes about a year to get.

CGD

silja wrote: »

No chance of renewing your greencards, they become useless if you are out of the USA for more than 12 months even if not expired.
How old is the daughter? if she is over 21, she can petition you for an immigrant visa, takes about a year to get.

Thought as much she is 19 so we will have to wait!

ProudDUB

I am 100% open to correction on this, but I could have sworn on read (on here) that for a US citizen to sponsor family members for green cards or citizenship, the US citizen had to have been living continually in the US up to their 14th or 16th birthday, or something like that. OP, if your daughter has been back in Ireland since she was 4, that may be a problem for you.

I remember saw a thread here, where an Irish citizen was the daughter of a man who was born in the US, but who moved back here to live with his family when he was just a baby. His daughter wanted to know her father could sponsor her for a green card or citizenship. It turned out that while he could claim US citizenship if he wanted to, as he spent the bulk of his life living outside the US, he lost the ability to sponsor others to move over there.

I think new laws were brought in fairly recently to stop Immigration tourism whereby pregnant women go to the US on holiday, have the baby there, and then use the child as their backdoor route to a green card.

I could be totally wrong on that, but for some annoying reason its in me noggin, so there you go.

silja

ProudDub, I am sure you are wrong. There is a rule that if you are a US citizen and living abroad, and you want your foreign born child to have US citizenship, you need to have lived in the USA for 5 years, but that does not apply to petitioning for a visa. The daughter would need to move to the USA before or at the same time as her parents to petition though.

ProudDUB

Fair enough so. I blame that 5th martini I had at lunch.

silja

I am having one of those days too, but kids to collect from school so no drinks for me...

Aprilmay

Silja is correct I have a friend here who let her green card expire and has had to go through the process all over again and she thought its a bit awkward going through the process again as they obviously knew she gave up the first one she had.