So, What Happens to Fiances Now in Hong Kong – Can They Get Any Kind of Visa Prior to Marriage?
Posted in Family Visas, Musing, The Hong Kong Visa Geeza, Visitor Visas /
Nope.
For Hong Kong visa purposes, fiances may as well not exist.
It used to be that the Immigration Department would routinely grant extensions to visitor visas for up to 2 months for those foreign nationals who were engaged to be married, had booked their ceremony and were one bag of sugar away from icing the wedding cake.
However, with the revamp of how visitor visa extensions are treated down at Immigration Tower these days, all of that has gone out of the window.
So if you plan to marry a Hong Kong resident (holding the nuptials in the HKSAR itself) AND you are a 7, 14 or even a 30 day visa upon arrival national, you may find your time in Hong Kong together with your life partner limited until your dependant visa is eventually issued.
ImmD will not even respond positively to requests for a visitor visa extension in order to allow the non resident spouse to wait out the 6-8 weeks dependant visa processing time – seeing this as “Queue Jumping”, preferring that the applicant be outside of Hong Kong while the family visa application plays itself out.
Sometimes, all is NOT fair in love and war.
More Stuff You May Find Interesting or Useful
How are fiances prior to marriage treated by the Hong Kong Immigration Department?
The vexed question of Hong Kong visas for Chinese national spouses resident on the Mainland
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The Hong Kong Visa Geeza (a.k.a Stephen Barnes) is a co-founder of the Hong Kong Visa Centre and author of the Hong Kong Visa Handbook. A law graduate of the London School of Economics, Stephen has been practicing Hong Kong immigration since 1993 and is widely acknowledged as the leading authority on business immigration matters here for the last 24 years.
