Rishta with US, UK, Canadian or EU nationality
Profiles with settled immigration status, stated openly.
Immigration status is one of the most misrepresented facts in overseas matchmaking. Every profile here states residency status directly, whether that is citizenship, permanent residency, work visa or student visa. We do not verify immigration documents ourselves — ask to see the visa, residence card or passport on a live video call, held by the person, before anything is agreed.
Every profile in this category shows full biodata — age, city, caste, sect, education, profession, family background and partner preferences. Photographs and WhatsApp numbers stay locked until the member accepts your request.
Typical filter: Residency: Citizen or Permanent Resident
What families ask about Green Card & Citizen proposals
A US match turns on immigration status and on timelines that are measured in years rather than months. The difference between a citizen sponsor and a green card holder sponsor is the single most consequential fact in the proposal.
Citizen or permanent resident?
Which state, and what is the community like there?
Does the sponsor meet the affidavit of support requirement?
What is the plan during the wait?
Will she arrive on a two-year card or a ten-year one?
Does the sponsor stay responsible if the marriage ends?
Has he petitioned for a spouse before?
What if the marriage breaks down before the conditions are removed?
What to verify
None of this is adversarial. Both families are doing it, and doing it openly is faster and less awkward than finding out slowly through rumour.
- The green card or US passport shown on a live video call, held by the person
- Employment and income for the affidavit of support
- Whether any prior petition was filed for another spouse, and its outcome
- Tax filing status, which the affidavit requires
Our rishta consultants review profiles after they are published, and we confirm an email address. We do not inspect immigration documents, so everything above is yours to do, and we would rather say so plainly than sell you a badge that implies we have investigated anybody.
The mistake that costs most here
A prior spousal petition for someone else is a material fact and is not always volunteered. It can decide whether a petition is approvable at all, so ask directly, early, and in plain words.
Before you meet
- Ask for documents rather than assurances, and keep copies
- Speak to two references who are not immediate family
- Insist on a live video call before any in-person meeting
- Visit the family home, not only a restaurant
- Wait two weeks before deciding. Nothing genuine is lost in two weeks
The full verification checklist · Eleven red flags · Safety guidance
Green Card & Citizen profiles
Loaded live. Photographs and numbers stay locked until the member accepts.
Citizen or green card holder decides everything after it
The page above calls this the single most consequential fact in the proposal, and that is not a figure of speech. The two sponsors are in different legal categories, and the difference is measured in years apart.
One category has no queue at all
Immigrant visas for immediate relatives of United States citizens are unlimited, so they are always available, and the spouse of a United States citizen is an immediate relative. Nobody in that category waits for a visa number, because there is no number to wait for.
The family-sponsored preference categories work the other way. They are numerically limited, so they are not always immediately available, and when demand exceeds supply a queue forms in which a priority date fixes a place. The spouse of a lawful permanent resident sits in the category the State Department labels F2A, spouses and children of permanent residents. The annual limit for family-sponsored preference immigrants in the 2026 fiscal year is 226,000 across all of those categories.
What that queue looked like in January 2026
Figures make this concrete in a way that argument does not. In the Visa Bulletin for January 2026, F2A carried a final action date of 1 February 2024 and a date for filing of 22 December 2025, for all chargeability areas. Pakistan is not listed separately, so those are the dates that applied to a Pakistani applicant. A case needed a priority date earlier than February 2024 before a visa could actually be issued, which is roughly a two-year lag. A United States citizen’s spouse faced no equivalent wait.
Those dates move every month and can retrogress, which means they can go backwards as well as forwards. They are an illustration of the mechanism rather than a promise, and the current month bulletin is the only one worth planning around.
The upgrade that removes the queue mid-case
Worth knowing because it changes the arithmetic of waiting. Where a petitioner was a permanent resident when he filed for his spouse and has since naturalised, the petition is upgraded from the family second preference to immediate relative by sending the National Visa Center proof of citizenship, such as the passport biodata page or the naturalisation certificate. A green card holder who becomes a citizen during the wait can therefore lift his own case out of the queue, and a family weighing a proposal from a permanent resident should ask where he stands on his own citizenship.
She will probably arrive on a two-year card
Almost nobody mentions this before the nikah, and it shapes the first two years of the marriage more than anything else on the page.
If the couple have been married less than two years at the point she enters the United States, the immigrant visa issued is a conditional resident visa rather than an immediate relative one. She becomes a permanent resident with conditional status, and the card expires two years from the date she obtains it. The two-year anniversary of entry is the expiry date printed on the card itself, so there is no ambiguity about when the clock runs out.
To convert that into ordinary permanent residence the couple file jointly to remove the conditions within the 90 day period immediately before the card expires. Not within the two years. Within the last ninety days of them, which is a narrow window that is easy to miss and expensive to miss.
If it is not filed, conditional permanent resident status terminates automatically, a notice follows and removal proceedings begin. A late filing is still possible, but it has to carry a written explanation of why it is late, which is then weighed for good cause. That is a remedy rather than a plan.
The part that matters most to her family
There is a widespread and frightening belief in Pakistan that a woman whose marriage fails inside those two years is simply deported. That is not what the rules say, and the people who repeat it to her are often the people who benefit from her believing it.
The conditions can be removed without a joint filing in several circumstances: where the marriage was entered into in good faith and ended by annulment or divorce and she was not at fault in failing to file on time; where she or her child was battered or subjected to extreme cruelty by the citizen or permanent resident spouse; where her removal would result in extreme hardship; and where the spouse has died after a good faith marriage. A waiver can be requested before or after the ninety day window, up until a final order of removal.
Her family should know those four routes exist before she boards the plane, not discover them in a crisis in a country where she knows nobody.
The affidavit of support is a contract, not a formality
The page above lists the affidavit among the things to verify. It is worth understanding what the sponsor is actually signing, because both families routinely treat it as paperwork and it is not.
A sponsor who is not on active duty must show income at 125 per cent of the Department of Health and Human Services poverty guidelines. A sponsor on active duty in the armed forces who is petitioning for a spouse or child must show 100 per cent. Where the sponsor does not meet the floor, a joint sponsor has to be found, and that person signs the same undertaking rather than simply vouching for him.
The affidavit is legally enforceable. If the sponsored person receives certain means-tested public benefits, the agency providing them is to request reimbursement from the person who signed. The responsibility ordinarily lasts until the sponsored person becomes a United States citizen, or can be credited with forty qualifying quarters of work under the Social Security Act, which is usually about ten years of employment. Divorce does not appear among those end points.
Read in one direction that is a serious, long-running liability that a groom’s family should understand before anybody signs. Read in the other it is one of the strongest protections a bride has, and it is hers rather than a favour. Both readings are correct, and families on both sides tend to know only the one that suits them.
Why the prior-petition question is not rude
The red note above says a previous spousal petition is a material fact. The reason is that it can decide whether this petition is approvable at all, which puts it in a different class from the things families ask out of curiosity.
Where a lawful permanent resident obtained that status through an earlier marriage, a spouse petition he files generally cannot be approved if the new marriage took place within five years of him obtaining permanent residence. There are two ways through. The first is clear and convincing evidence that the earlier marriage was not entered into for the purpose of evading the immigration laws. The second is that the marriage through which he obtained permanent residence was terminated through death.
A second rule sits alongside it and catches people who have no idea it exists. A spouse petition is not approved where the marriage creating the relationship took place while the beneficiary was in exclusion, deportation or removal proceedings, for marriages on or after 10 November 1986, unless a bona fide marriage exemption applies.
So the questions to put, plainly and early, are how he obtained his own status, whether he has filed for a spouse before and what became of it, and whether either party has ever been in proceedings. A man with nothing to manage answers all three in a sentence each. A man who treats the questions as an accusation has given a different kind of answer.
Status words that are not interchangeable
Settled abroad is a phrase doing an enormous amount of work in rishta conversations. These are the categories behind it, and the only question that matters about each one is whether the holder can actually petition for a spouse.
United States citizen
By birth or naturalisation. Holds a US passport. A spouse is an immediate relative, so no visa queue applies.
Lawful permanent resident
The green card, ordinarily issued for ten years and renewable. May petition for a spouse, but into the numerically limited F2A category.
Conditional permanent resident
A green card obtained through a marriage under two years old, expiring after two years. Still a permanent resident, with conditions to remove.
Work visa holder
Present and employed lawfully on a temporary basis. Cannot petition for a spouse to receive a green card on the strength of that status.
Student visa holder
Present for study, on a temporary basis. Not a route by which a spouse becomes a permanent resident.
Application pending
A case filed is not a case decided, and a receipt notice is not status. Ask what has been filed, when, and what has actually been approved.
The practical rule is short. Only a citizen or a lawful permanent resident can start a spouse down the road to a green card, and anything described as a visa that is neither of those two is a temporary permission rather than settlement.
What the process is, stage by stage
Families plan around a wedding date and then discover that the sequence after it is long and mostly administrative. Knowing the stages makes the waiting intelligible and the questions better.
- The petition
Form I-130 is filed with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. In certain circumstances a citizen living abroad may file it outside the United States.
- The National Visa Center
Once the petition is approved it goes to the NVC, which assigns a case number and begins pre-processing. The applicant completes Form DS-261 unless represented by an attorney, and the NVC tells applicant and petitioner which fees to pay.
- Documents and the affidavit
The NVC requests the affidavit of support, the DS-260 immigrant visa application and the civil documents. This is the stage where a shortfall in the sponsor’s income surfaces, which is why it belongs in the conversation long before it.
- The interview
Once the file is complete the NVC schedules the interview and sends the file to the embassy or consulate where it will take place. For Pakistani applicants that is ordinarily Islamabad.
- Entry, and then the clock
If the marriage is under two years old at entry she arrives as a conditional resident, and the ninety day window before the card expires is the next date the couple have to meet.
Deliberately no timings here. Processing times move, they differ by case and by post, and a number quoted confidently by a relative who went through it in a different year is the commonest source of false expectation in this whole category.
A protection worth knowing before it is needed
Most of these marriages are ordinary and happy. This section is here because a woman moving to a country where she knows nobody should not have to find out in an emergency what her options are, and because the people least likely to tell her are sometimes the ones she is living with.
An abused spouse of a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident may file a self-petition. That is the point of it: the process is available without the abuser’s knowledge, consent, or participation in the immigration process. It does not depend on him filing anything, and it does not depend on his permission.
The petition is made on Form I-360, with evidence of eligibility, and there is no filing fee for a self-petitioner. The requirements include a qualifying marriage, or one recently ended, and a marriage entered into in good faith. An approval gives immigrant classification rather than status by itself, and can lead to a green card either by adjusting status inside the United States or through consular processing abroad. It also opens work authorisation, and children can be included.
This sits alongside the waiver route described earlier, under which conditions can be removed where a spouse or her child was battered or subjected to extreme cruelty. The two exist in parallel, and a woman does not have to choose between staying in a dangerous marriage and keeping her status.
In the United States the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-SAFE, which is 800-799-7233.
What to actually look at on the video call
The page above says to ask for the card or passport held by the person on a live call. This is what to read once it is in front of you, because a document glimpsed for two seconds settles nothing.
The expiry date on the card
Two years from issue means conditional residence. Ten means ordinary permanent residence. It is the quickest way to learn which conversation you are having.
The category code
Printed on the card, and it records the basis on which residence was granted. Ask him to explain what his says rather than reading it to you.
Passport or certificate
For a citizen, the passport biodata page or the naturalisation certificate. These are also what the NVC accepts to upgrade a pending petition.
Both sides of the card
Front and back, held steady, in the same call and by the same person whose face you can see. A forwarded photograph establishes nothing at all.
Tax filings
The affidavit of support is built on them, so a sponsor who cannot discuss his filing position is telling you something about the stage that is coming.
Employment and income
Measured against the 125 per cent floor, and with an honest answer about whether a joint sponsor will be needed.
None of this is hostile and none of it is unusual. Every one of these documents is ordinary, already in his possession, and shown without fuss by people whose situation is what they have said it is.
Begin the search with your family beside you
Free to publish a profile during launch. Photographs and contact numbers stay yours until you decide otherwise.