Will my marriage be a shackle?

Mrs Huntington:

I am German citizen who has lived in the United States as a Permanent Resident Alien since February 1990. I am planning to get married to my boyfriend by year end in Jamaica. He is a Jamaican citizen.

My question is, will I lose my German citizenship or my US permanent resident status in the US? I read online that when marrying a Jamaican in Jamaica, I automatically become a Jamaican citizen.

Do you recommend that I wait and get married in the US, or can I freely get married in Jamaica with no problems for me?

I have been travelling back and forth to Jamaica. We are getting engaged in June and would like to be married by December.

I contacted the German consulate but they were unable to answer. I also contacted the US Embassy in Kingston with no luck.

Could you please answer the question?

Sincerely,

G

Dear G:

The first thing you need to do is contact the German embassy in Washington, DC, www.germany.info, to find out if you would lose your German citizenship if you became the citizen of another country or two other countries.

If you will maintain your citizenship, there are a few things you need to do. Since you have been living in the US from 1990, you need to explore becoming a US citizen. The basic requirements are:

a. Be a permanent resident for five years (three years if obtained permanent residency through marriage to a US citizen, and you are still married and living with your US citizen spouse).

b. Must not have been outside the United States for a continuous period of six months or more.

c. When you add up all your absences from the United States over the last five years, you must have spent more time in the United States than outside that country.

d. You must be a person of good moral character, e.g. no criminal convictions, file federal income taxes, and pay child support if obligated to support a child.

In your situation, it is important for you to become a citizen for a couple of reasons. First, if you plan to marry a Jamaican and move to Jamaica to live, you could jeopardise your permanent residency status. If a permanent resident stays out of the US for a year or more, he/she is deemed to have abandoned residency. Therefore, if your plans will take you out of the States to either Jamaica or back to Germany, you need to make sure you obtain US citizenship to give you the flexibility to travel around the world as you please.

us citizenship

Second, if your plans are to marry your Jamaican fiancé and for the both of you to live in the States, you will need to become a US citizen if you want to make that move quickly. When a US citizen files a petition for his/her spouse, it is considered an immediate-relative petition that is processed on an average of eight months to a year. Additionally, a United States citizen is allowed to file a fiancé(e) visa that would allow his/her Jamaican fiancé(e) to travel to the US and then marry him/her within 90 days.

If you file a petition for alien relative for your husband as a permanent resident and not as a US citizen, that petition will take four to five years to be processed. A permanent resident cannot file a fiancé(e) visa petition for his/her foreign fiancé(e).

One way to obtain Jamaican citizenship is to marry a Jamaican citizen. As a permanent resident, you would not lose that status if you were to marry a Jamaican and become a Jamaican citizen. You should contact the Jamaican Embassy in Washington, DC, www.embassyofjamaica.org, the Jamaican Consulates in Miami, www.jamaicacgmiami.org, or New York, www.congenjamaica-ny.org, to determine what you would be required to do in order to obtain Jamaican citizenship once you marry your Jamaican fiancé.

The determination of whether a citizen of a country loses that citizenship rests with that country and not with the country whose citizenship you are acquiring. This is why it is important that you contact your country's embassy to determine what its policy is in this regard. If Germany would, in fact, deny you dual citizenship, you would need to make the personal decision of which country you wish to be a citizen.

Dahlia A. Walker-Huntington is a Jamaican-American attorney who practises in Florida in the areas of immigration, family, corporate and personal-injury law. She is a mediator, arbitrator and special magistrate in Broward County, Florida. info@walkerhuntington.com or editor@gleanerjm.com.