Marriage in India and US

[frozen_angel]

Hello,

I am currently on H1B Visa and my girlfriend who is a Polish citizen is on F1 Visa. We are planning to get married back in India sometime next year. But we were wondering if its possible to do a court marriage or something here in US sooner so that we can utilize some of the financial and immigration benefits which will come through it. For example, we will not need to pay international student fee at the university etc.

Even if we get married here we will like to get married again in India (which will be on different date, months apart) and get a marriage certificate there too. I am curious as its legal to have two marriages with same person in two different countries on different dates (i.e. two marriages certificates stating the wedding on different dates). Will this cause any issue during our green card processing or any other immigration process?

Any help/advice will be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

[newacct]

In general, if you are married, you cannot legally get married again. A marriage conducted anywhere should be recognized everywhere. If you get married in two places and have two certificates with different places and dates, that's going to cause all sorts of problems. What some people do is do the legal marriage here, with little or no ceremony, and then go back to their country later to conduct a ceremony for religious or social purposes (it can even look like a regular wedding ceremony) but not have that ceremony count as a legal marriage.

[frozen_angel]

In general, if you are married, you cannot legally get married again. A marriage conducted anywhere should be recognized everywhere. If you get married in two places and have two certificates with different places and dates, that's going to cause all sorts of problems. What some people do is do the legal marriage here, with little or no ceremony, and then go back to their country later to conduct a ceremony for religious or social purposes (it can even look like a regular wedding ceremony) but not have that ceremony count as a legal marriage.

@newacct
Thanks for your reply. You mentioned about marriage with "no ceremony". Are you refering to getting marriage certificate signed by a judge etc? Or is there a simpler way of getting this done?

We are planning to do something similar to your suggestion. We will get married first in US and file for change of status for my partner from F1 to H4. After this will visit India in next 6-12 months and get a traditional wedding done there. Since we don't want to pretend doing a marriage just as drama in India we will be withholding the information of our wedding in US from our relatives.

Now I am curious if we will need to update passport or anything? We also found out that Califoria does confidental marriage certificate according to which the info is not made public searchable. This fits with our privacy need better but do you need if this will be red flag for USCIS for change of status to H4?

Thanks.