Citizenship requirement - GC 5 years - some clarification needed...

[SeenuHolenarasipur]

Dear Friends,

Want get some clarification on one question. for Citizenship requirement, eligibility is 5 years of GC. Is there a restriction on number of days staying outside USA? I mean, law says you should not stay outside US for more than 6 months. Is this 6 months (180+ days) in a YEAR OR in a SPAN of 5 years. The reason I am asking is, my wife is here in US and completed around 3.5 years of GC... in between those 3.5 years she visited INDIA for vacation 3-5 weeks couple times. As we are thinking of moving our kid to India for further studies, she is thinking of going back for 3-4 months during next year (by that time she will complete 4 years of GC) and come back to US again. Can that be doable? is it affecting her citizenship process?

Please help and advise.

Thanks
-Seenu

[cafeconleche]

Two big requirements are physical presence and continuous residence. The latter means you must only have cursory breaks in your residence of usually less than 6 months. The other is that you when you apply you must have been present on US soil for at least half of the previous five years (if you count exactly, it's 913 days). Both of these must be met. A few visits of a few weeks each shouldn't be a problem. Even another visit of 3-4 months should be ok. Just make sure she doesn't have a pattern of really long back-to-back absences (like, stay out for 5 months, come back for a couple of days, and then out again for 5 months, etc.).

[SeenuHolenarasipur]

Thank you very much for your advise... this really helped!. I will surely make sure we are within those limits :-)