Multiple visits to USA

2/15/2014 8:27:02 AM

Whether you can support yourself in the US without the need to work is irrelevant to this, as when you’re a visitor, you are supposed to be visiting. This means you must have a main home outside the US that you intend to return to (that’s what they look for).

Your lengthy US stays and short trips “home” show that you do not consider your home in the UK your main home anymore (you’re hardly ever there!). So you’re not a visitor, and very likely to be denied entry.

Since you don’t need to work, go somewhere else for a while – Canada is nice in the summer, Mexico nice in the winter, if you want to stay in North America. Both allow a 180 day stay per entry for a UK citizen, better than the 90 days of ESTA.

New Zealand and Australia are nice also! I can understand wanting to be outside the UK (especially this winter), but California is not the only place with nice weather, good healthcare, or with an American lifestyle. Stay away from the US for a while, then just visit.

If you don’t need to work or run a business, and if you don’t have family in the US, there is essentially no practical route to a US residence visa (other than marriage). So give up on the idea of trying to live in the US, especially as a repeat “visitor”, and explore the rest of the world. Some of it is nicer!

2/13/2014 9:36:04 PM

Nobody will be able to give you a definitive answer on this, but I suspect that you’d still be at high risk of being denied entry even if you switch from ESTA to a visitor visa. Alternatively, you might be denied the visitor visa, which would save you the hassle of flying there in the short term, but is a major problem in the long term: you’ll be disqualified from ESTA for life and will need to explain why you were denied entry in all US visa applications forevermore.

My rationale: the reason they’re not happy is that you’ve been spending an awful lot of time — ~240 days in a year, if my math is right? — in the US “purely as a visitor”, and that has obviously set off alarm bells. If you get a visitor visa (B-2 or equivalent, I presume), you’re still “purely a visitor” and still don’t have a good explanation of why you’re spending so much time there, so CBP will suspect you’re up to no good (working illegally, planning to elope with your girlfriend etc and become an illegal immigrant, etc) and may deny you entry. You’re at particularly high risk because you’ve already been verbally warned, so there’s definitely going to be a red flag waiting in the database for you.

I would recommend you either a) heed their advice and stay out until August, or b) apply for a different class of visa that gives you a legitimate reason to be in the US (work, study, fiance, etc).

Update: So now you tell us you were in the US for medical treatment? That’s a perfectly legitimate reason to apply for and get a B-2 visitor visa (see under “Travel for Medical Treatment”), so you should definitely get one, and then you should be fine.

Credit:stackoverflow.com‘

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Hello,My name is Aparna Patel,I’m a Travel Blogger and Photographer who travel the world full-time with my hubby.I like to share my travel experience.

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