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K1 Visa Thailand: The Importance of Interview Preparation

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the K-1 Visa and we are specifically discussing someone that makes many of both our petitioner clients and our beneficiary clients, both our Thai clients and our American clients and our clients of other foreign nationalities rather nervous with respect to the K-1 visa and that is the interview. 

The interview is a daunting prospect for many. They basically go into it, often times I have encountered that they go into it sort of fearing the worst. The interview should not be viewed as something that is a scary prospect.  That being said, one should be prepared to explain oneself to the interviewing Consular Officer, in this case the United States Embassy here in Bangkok, Thailand or in another Embassy depending on one's specific set of circumstances. 

So the thing to keep in mind, in my opinion with respect to the interview is understanding what the function of the interview is.  It is not a "stump the applicant" type of thing although certain types of things called the Stokes interview, sometimes people take the position that it is kind of a gamesmanship trying to stump the person who is being interviewed. At the end of the day, the policy reasoning for interviews is to ascertain whether or not the relationship is genuine or if there are grounds of inadmissibility in play in that given case.

The thing to keep in mind with respect to the interviews that I have seen over the years here in Thailand, it has been generally my experience it is almost an exercise in due diligence. The Consular Officer is ascertaining whether or not the relationship is genuine and whether or not the individual in question has committed some kind of crime in the past, has some kind of illicit or criminal past or is a person that needs to be deemed inadmissible due to some sort of health and safety reason. They are not there, at least it has been my experience, that they are not there to intimidate or embarrass the applicant. That is not their function. Their function is simply to ascertain whether or not this individual is genuinely traveling to the United States for the purposes they are claiming and go from there. The other thing that I think people think interview preparation is and it is definitely not, I often hear people use the term "coaching". Can you "coach" her on what to say at the interview? No, that is not the function. The function is to concisely and honestly summarize one's reasons for going to the United States, one's relationship history and be able to answer relevant questions pertaining to one's own history. It is not a matter of being "coached" or there is some sort of magic language that needs to be said and in fact being dishonest in an interview can result in findings of fraud and material misrepresentation which can lead inadmissibility in and of itself and that is really not a place that an individual wants to be because on top of everything else if one is seeking a waiver now their credibility has basically been impeached and as a result the issues associated with a waiver can be somewhat exacerbated. 

So, basically what I am trying to say with respect to this is, interview preparation is important. One of the things I want to be clear with my clients and I am hoping that they come away from our interview preparation with a sense of comfort, a sense of knowing how the protocols are going to work, a sense of being able to go in and explain oneself coherently and be able to deal with the Consular Officer in such a way that the case processes in an efficient manner in order for the visa to be presumably issued to get to the United States because that is the goal at the end of the day. Again it is not an exercise of being coached to say a certain thing. No, it is an exercise of concisely and honestly explaining one's intentions and one's history in order to be issued a visa to the United States.