We got a question from Darnique. “My boyfriend from Nigeria is quite a bit younger than me. Can we get a K1 fiancé visa?” Absolutely. We've already touched on this same, basically same question before. There's no reason why you shouldn't get approved, but if you're asking about the age difference, we have seen some concerns from Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco, basically several countries in Africa. It seems like they kind of scrutinize the age difference. For some reason, we've seen a higher approval rate out of Africa with the spousal visas over the K1 fiancé visas, so if that's something that you haven't talked about with your significant other, you may want to consider that. See if that's even a viable option for you.
Again, if you do have a large age difference and you really want to load up on the supporting evidence proving that you have a bona fide legitimate relationship, that could be commingling finances, joint accounts, things like that, third-party affidavits, you really have to go to the extra mile to prove you have a bona fide legitimate relationship, visit multiple times, and you want to look at the length of the relationship, visiting folks, physically visiting, not just Skyping or video conferencing with someone. You really want to be together. Again, every case is different. Everything comes down to the discretion of the consular officer but we just want to try and build the best case possible. Again, I can't speak to your specific case but in general, you just want to prove that you have a bona fide relationship.
Yeah, that's right and I'll add to that, that although we rarely see age problems, except again when it's an older female and a younger male out of Africa, we see that sometimes, doesn't mean they're not approved. Most of them still are approved. What I meant by that one, if you were listening earlier, is that we rarely see problems with age gaps. We almost always see age gaps. It's unusual that we see people who are within a couple years, almost always an age gap either way, male/female, almost never a problem but when it is a problem, we have seen is it's typically Africa, specifically Central or Sub-Saharan Africa is typically where we see that.
That doesn't mean that they're not approved. We see them approved all the time. You just have a harder hill to climb and as Rick was saying, you're going to need to do a little more than to say, “I went to Nigeria one time and we're in love and we Skype every day, but we've got a 40-year age gap. I'm 60 and he's 20.” That's going to be a little tougher and that's where we see people have it tougher. Now, if by age gap, you mean 10 years, no. In this business, when you say age gap, we really mean 20 years plus. Anything under that is generally not even relevant because it's just normal. These consular officers see it every day, those kind of age gaps.
For our terminology, when we say large age gap, we really mean 20 plus where you might need a lot more, as Rick was saying, you're going to need more evidence If you've only made one visit to Nigeria or whatever the question was about, if you made one visit and you have a 30-year age gap, yeah, it probably might be money well spent to make another trip and to build up a little more evidence.
