Can I use B1/B2 visa to travel to the US without a business purpose?
- By
- Aparna Patel
- |
- 23 Jul, 2023
- |
If
- you have M under Entries meaning a multiple entry visa. (This is missing from every other answer!)
- Expiration date is on or later than the date when you plan to present yourself at the border of the United States asking for admission (doesn’t need to be valid during the trip only on the day of entry).
- Under Type/Class you have B1/B2.
then the answer is yes. All of these need to be met.
This is a simple one to answer.
B2 is tourist.
B1 is business.
So if you have B1/B2 stamped in your passport you have visas for both purposes.
You can do either or both, perfectly legally.
When issuing visas, countries have different levels of concern about three different types of people entering the country. In ASCENDING order, they are:
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Tourists: Low level of concern. They’ve come to the host country to “have fun” (and spend money).
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Traveling businessmen/women. Here, there is some concern because they are “working.” But if they are based, employed, and paid OUTSIDE the host country, they probably won’t be staying long or taking jobs opportunities away from the locals. More like creating local opportunities, by exploring the possibility of a “deal.”
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Workers remaining inside the host country for an indefinite period of time, being paid “locally,” by a “local” firm. These are the people a country is most concerned about, taking jobs away from locals.
Although it’s possible, I have yet to hear of a country that is more concerned about tourists than they are about “businesspeople.” A business visa would cover business purposes, and also lower levels of concern such as tourism.
The reverse is not true. A person with with a tourist visa will seldom have the rights conferred by a business visa, which covers a higher level of concern.
Yes you can, my wife recently applied for a tourist visa so she selected the B2 category, but when she eventually got the visa, it was a B1/B2 visa. The way its worded, it seems you can only use B2 for personal travel, but thats not the case.
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