Wow - some great posts related to immigration matters here. My husband and I came to the U.S. on immigrant visas after hubby won the D-V (Diversity Lottery) several years ago. I was not legally married to my husband (had not yet gotten a marriage license) by the time he got the notice he was assigned a visa lottery. Neither did we legally married when he sent the first response to the (NVC) National Visa Center shortly after. We only got legally married in August of that year, 4 months after he listed me as her spouse on the NVC forms. The reason why I did not legally marry to my husband from the very beginning (since I began to live with my-hubby-to-be, in August) and my mother left for the States (September), was that I was counting on my parents who went to the US to get me too there, after my permanent resident mother (she won a D-V Lottery the year before) would have hopefully arranged something for me; although all she's able to do, in actuality, was just petitioning on my behalf in January of next year - she filed the I-130 with INS, immigrant relative petition for an unmarried child 21+
That petition would take years to mature into an actual green card, but we all were optimistic nevertheless; and there you have it - in April, my husband gets that notification letter from the NVC letting him know he had won the D-V lottery. From that point on, we were concerned that the Consular officer would accuse my husband during the interview for misrepresentation because of my hubby having claimed me arbitrarily as his wife on the NVC forms (initially in February when originally applied for, and then again in May) - given the fact that we only got the marriage license 4 months after he made the statements on the NVC forms (August). We remained anxious 'til the day of the interview, April of next year, but the Consular Officer was surprisingly over-friendly towards us, with him granting us the immigrant visas and without enquiring at all as to our marriage timing.
Truth-be-told, we were anxious also because we could not disclose to the Consular officer that the two of us had lived in a neighboring country for some time - my mother-in-law paid a friend of hers for us to be issued two brand-new passports, so that we did not have to show at all the neighboring country's entering visas we had gotten during the years on our old passports. We had been on and off illegally in that country, so we could not get clearances from that country's police for the time period we lived there. This is something that almost all the people who win the American green card lottery do - it's not smth we did to hide some kind of "major crime" committed or anything like that. We were hearing that those people who admitted to the Consulate that they had been in other countries, besides their home country, were required to submit police clearances from those neighboring countries' authorities, something difficult and time-consuming, since we had also been there illegally - the way such a thing is handled in our native country is to simply pay the municipal employees for a new passport (easily accomplished and for not too much money) and then appear with the new passport before the Consular officer.
We also arranged for (fake) Employment Verification Letters where it was stated by (fake) employers that we had been employed in our home country (having had, thus, lived there all the time), so that it would appear that we had not been outside our home country at any time (to put it differently, we covered gaps in our employment history). These latter two are done regularly by almost all people who win the lottery in our country, and the consulate people themselves know deep down themselves that such things happen all too often.
Now, this piece of neighbor * & ^ % keeps telling me what we've done is considered "fraud." I mean, come on, a lot of water has flown under the bridge, not to mention the fact that we have by now 2 children born in this country (US citizens). Do you think we might be having problems were someone to reopen the case and note these "minor inconsistencies"?