The Philippine Supreme Court has made it easier for a Filipino spouse to get a foreign divorce recognized in Philippine courts. It is a rule change on evidence and procedure, not a change in who qualifies.

Note this is not a national divorce law. Domestic divorces are only allowed for Muslim Filipinos at this time.

What it means for a foreigner who divorced a Filipina

• Your divorce was already valid. Nothing here changes your status abroad. The rule is about her capacity to remarry under Philippine law and about getting her PSA records annotated.
• It matters mostly to her. Before this, the recognition case could stall or get dismissed because the petitioner could not produce proper proof of foreign law. That was the main obstacle, and it is now much lighter. This is the same hurdle the Court flagged in earlier cases, where the Court remanded for reception of evidence on Japanese divorce law.
• If you are the ex-spouse, expect that the case may be easier to win. You can still oppose it, but you would carry the burden of rebutting the presumption with certified foreign law.
• Limited divorces and legal separations do not qualify. The presumption fails if the decree says it is limited.
• Nothing is automatic. She still has to file in a Philippine court. The article does not say anything about property, support, or custody, so I would not assume those are affected.

For your K-1 and CR-1 cases
A Filipina previously married to a foreigner who now wants to marry your client, or a client whose fiancée has a prior foreign spouse, will find the Philippine side easier to clean up. A recognized divorce and an annotated PSA marriage certificate give her capacity to marry in the Philippines. For USCIS, the question is still whether the prior marriage was legally terminated where the divorce was obtained, so keep documenting the decree itself. I’m not a lawyer, so confirm the details of the Philippine court process with Philippine counsel.

You ever wonder how you stacked up against Filipino families? This data is for a Filipino family of five, in monthly income (about ₱62.90 to the dollar).

**Poor:** under ₱14,634 ($233). 6.4% of families.

**Low income, not poor:** ₱14,634 to ₱29,268 ($233 to $465). About 38%.

**Lower middle:** ₱29,268 to ₱58,536 ($465 to $931). About 34%.

**Middle:** ₱58,536 to ₱102,438 ($931 to $1,629). About 19% for middle and upper middle combined.

**Upper middle:** ₱102,438 to ₱175,608 ($1,629 to $2,792). Included above.

**Upper, not rich:** ₱175,608 to ₱292,680 ($2,792 to $4,653). About 1.6%.

**Rich:** ₱292,680 and up ($4,653 and up). About 0.6%.

The brackets are multiples (1x, 2x, 4x, 7x, 12x, 20x) of the 2025 poverty line of ₱14,634 for a family of five. The poor share is the 2025 PSA figure. The other shares are estimates, since a 2025 breakdown by bracket hasn't been published. The exchange rate is the October 8 close.

Don't be fooled by those who ask "I make $10k a month, is that enough to live here?" Those are just humble posturings. Anyone making $10k a month already knows the answer.

The truth is the average expat here isn't pulling anywhere near that. Most of the foreigners you'll meet in the Philippines are retirees living on Social Security, sometimes with a small pension on top. We're talking $1,000-$2,500 a month. I was part of that crowd for a long time. When I first started my business I was pulling in between $800-$1,300 a month in net income. Definitely not golfing then! LOL!

The digital nomads here aren't doing much better, and the visa rules explain a lot of it. Mexico, Portugal, Greece, and Costa Rica all require nomads to prove $3,000 to $4,400 a month in income before they can live there long term. Mexico has also stopped handing out 180-day tourist stays by default, so living there on back-to-back tourist permits isn't an option anymore. Thailand's nomad visa requires about $14,000 sitting in the bank, and Thailand has been cutting back its visa-free stays too.

Based on my anecdotal evidence from K-1 visa filings and document reviews, most expats fall into these categories:

About 80% - Retirees earning $1,000-$2,500 a month

15% - Digital nomads like remote customer service reps, freelancers, and successful YouTubers, and military retirees with a VA disability rating, earning $2,500-$5,000 a month

5% - US government employees, NGO workers, business owners, tech workers, and those living off their investments earning more than $5,000 a month

The Philippines is one of the few countries that doesn't have a proof of income or financial requirement to stay long-term. So ask yourself this. If the Philippines is so bad, why don't the people who keep ranting about it go somewhere with better infrastructure, like Thailand? The answer is most of them can't.

There seems to be a lot of blatant racism in this sub. Just FYI hurling racial epithets is a deportable offense if you get caught .

People ask me this more than you'd think. Your partner is coming to the US to marry you. So why is the visa called "K-1" and not something that says what it is?

US nonimmigrant visas are named after the paragraph of the law that creates them. The Immigration and Nationality Act has a section, 101(a)(15), that lists every nonimmigrant category as a lettered subparagraph. A is diplomats. B is visitors. F is students. H is temporary workers. J is exchange visitors. When Congress creates a new category, it gets the next open letter.

Most other countries don't do it this way. The UK calls its version a fiancé(e) or proposed civil partner visa. You read the name and you know what it's for. Australia numbers its visas by subclass, but even their version is officially the Prospective Marriage visa. The US system was built for lawyers and consular officers reading statute, not for the couple filling out the forms.

So where did K come from?

This isn't the first time the US had to deal with soldiers falling in love overseas. After World War II, Congress passed the GI Fiancées Act of 1946, a temporary law that let servicemen bring their fiancées over to get married. It expired. For the next couple of decades there was no permanent fiancé category at all.

That became a real problem during the Vietnam War. American GIs were meeting and falling for Vietnamese women, and they were stuck. There was no visa for someone coming to the US to get married. She could try a visitor visa, but a visitor visa requires you to intend to go home, and she didn't. Or they could marry overseas, which meant military paperwork, command approval, and the full immigrant visa process in the middle of a war. Neither option really worked.

Congress fixed this with Public Law 91-225, the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1970, signed April 7, 1970. It added a new subparagraph (K) to section 101(a)(15) for fiancé(e)s of US citizens, and a subparagraph (L) for intracompany transferees. The list had already reached J, so the fiancé visa got K. That's the whole story. K doesn't stand for anything. It was just next in line.

The number after the letter splits the category up. K-1 is the fiancé(e). K-2 is the fiancé(e)'s minor child. K-3 and K-4 came much later, in 2000, for spouses and their children, and they're rarely used now.

So every couple filing a K-1 today is using a visa that exists because of soldiers in Vietnam who wanted to bring someone home.

I asked before how you guys send money to your fiancé. I'm an autistic nerd, so I tend to heavily research things that most people don't care about. Anyway, I've always wondered how Wise manages to be so cheap. Other players pretend to be cheap, advertising "no fees," but they get you in the exchange rates, giving horrible rates and sometimes skimming 10% or more from the markup.

Here's how they actually do it:

• Your money doesn't actually leave your home country! I thought this was wild, but Wise uses a 1:1 peer-to-peer system. When you transfer money to say, your GF, the money goes to a domestic US bank account. They have a local bank account in Manila, and they use that local balance to send the money to her. That's why when you receive money it says 'you received money from Wise Pilipinas' They make up for it by using money someone else transferred from Manila to the US. If there's an imbalance on a specific corridor, they lower the transfer fee to encourage more people to transfer money in the opposite direction.
• For exotic currencies, they buy wholesale. If it's a less common currency like the Ghanaian Cedi where 1:1 matching is harder, they buy currency in bulk wholesale. This allows them to bypass the expensive SWIFT banking network altogether.

That being said, Wise isn't perfect: They are notorious for being slow sometimes, especially if your account history/balance doesn't far exceed the amount you're transferring (triggering manual compliance reviews). Also, they got busted by the CFPB for misleading fee disclosures (like hidden costs when using Apple Pay/Google Pay with credit cards), improper exchange rate rounding, and failing to properly handle error investigations and refund policies when transfers were delayed.

Wise is an integral part of my daily life living in the Philippines. I don't trust local banks, so I just use Wise to fund my GCash account and Schwab when I need cash. That real exchange rate makes a real difference.

I do push the K-1 because, right now, with the changes being implemented in the current administration, the K-1 seems to slip under the radar more often than that. That being said, I do think the K-1 is not always the best choice for many couples.

First of all, it's not necessarily faster. K-1 processing times are getting pushed longer and longer; we may go back to the 2024 situation when the K-1/CR-1 processing times are neck and neck. If that happens, the math changes completely since, with a CR-1, your partner will have their green card, and they can work right away.

Some other cases where you may consider the CR-1

1. Questionable circumstances such as a recent divorce on either side
2. Income not quite right. I've said before, meeting the threshold is not enough anymore to guarantee a K-1 issuance, or if you're self-employed and can't verify your income.
3. Criminal history: I generally push clients who made mistakes in the past to the CR-1

These are just a few instances where the CR-1 may be a better fit. That being said, every case is different

It's happened to me twice now. A driver will accept a ride and mark it as having picked me up even though they didn't. I have to go to Grab Support to get my money back. It happened with Grab taxi. I'm guessing there's more to this than I'm seeing because even an impoverished person isn't going to risk their job for 250php.

So this story just dropped and the sheer hubris is mind-boggling.

​Back in 2017, a Filipino named John Paule Rivera came to the US on a J-1 visa. His aunt, Myra Paule Schulenburg (a naturalized US citizen originally from the Philippines), decided to help him out. She submitted an altered birth certificate to USCIS claiming she was actually his mother so he could secure a Green Card.

​It actually worked. He got his permanent residency, enlisted in the US Air Force, and used his military status to fast-track his naturalization, officially becoming a US citizen in October 2022. Home free, right?

​Nope.

​He then decided he wanted to bring his actual biological mother over from the Philippines. So he filed an I-130 petition with USCIS... and attached his real, unaltered birth certificate listing his real mom.

​USCIS's system instantly flagged that his new petition listed a completely different mother than the paperwork used to get his original Green Card.

​Now both he and his aunt are facing federal time. The aunt faces up to 5 years for conspiracy, while he faces up to 10 years for immigration fraud, false statements under oath, and denaturalization proceedings.

​Imagine pulling off a federal fraud scheme, getting away with it for 5+ years, getting citizenship through the military, and then voluntarily handing federal agents the exact evidence needed to destroy your entire life.

Fake annulment papers are the #1 submitted fraudulent document to the USE in Manila. It's the first thing they check folks.

Hey everyone, wanted to put together an update on where things actually stand with K-1 petitions right now, especially with the recent wave of policy memos and consular updates throwing people off. If this goes well I'll do this every month.

The State Dept Embassy Retraining Pause If you’ve seen people on here posting about canceled interview slots or delayed scheduling notices, here’s why: the State Department issued a worldwide pause on immigrant visa appointments so consular officers could complete mandatory training on the expanded public charge screening rules. Even though the K-1 is technically a non-immigrant visa, it’s processed through embassy immigrant visa units. That retraining has created a temporary bottleneck and scheduling freeze at a lot of high-volume posts while officers get brought up to speed on the new "totality of circumstances" evaluation.

Public Charge Scrutiny on the I-134 Historically, the I-134 affidavit of support at the K-1 interview was a lower bar than the I-864 used for green cards. Under the recent consular directives, officers are holding K-1 applicants much closer to the full immigrant standard. They aren't just looking at the petitioner's tax return; they’re assessing the foreign fiancé’s age, health, and employability under a broader public charge framework. If your petitioner is right on the 125% poverty line, make sure your financial evidence is airtight to avoid getting hit with 221(g) administrative processing.

USCIS AI Flags & AOS Discretion Memo

• I-129F Adjudication: USCIS has expanded automated system checks on initial petitions. Discrepancies between your travel dates, social media, and declared meeting timeline get flagged automatically now, which is driving up RFEs for "proof of meeting in person" and quick engagements.
• AOS Guidance: USCIS also issued a policy memo reframing Adjustment of Status (I-485) as "extraordinary administrative grace". Translation: once your fiancé arrives and you marry, make sure your AOS filing is spotless, because officers are being instructed to exercise much stricter discretion.

What Timelines Actually Look Like Right Now

• NOA1 to NOA2 (USCIS): 8–11 months. The brief speed-up we saw a while back has leveled off, and I-129Fs are averaging around 9 months at CSC.
• NVC Stage: 3–6 weeks for case creation and transit.
• Embassy Interview: 2–5+ months depending on the consulate's backlog and how quickly they resume normal scheduling post-training pause.

Total realistic timeline from filing to visa in hand is sitting around 12 to 15 months.

Is anyone else dealing with rescheduled embassy dates from the retraining pause? Drop your consulate and NOA1 dates below so we can track movement.

United States Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Ryan Raybould announced that Lukman Owolabi Ganiyu, a former Senior Immigration Services Officer with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Adeniyi Akeem Somoye were arrested on federal charges for their roles in an alleged multi‑year scheme to receive illegal gratuities in exchange for manipulating and expediting immigration applications.

A federal criminal complaint filed Aug. 31, charges the duo with conspiracy to receive illegal gratuities by a public official. Federal agents arrested both on Sept. 2.

Seriously that's the first thing they check.

Due to an increasing amount of canceled visa interview appointments I am strongly recommending all applicants purchase refundable airfares to their interview locations if applicable.