Where we
live and work
The short version. Five minutes, mostly pictures. Everything here links to the long page if you want the reasoning underneath it.
The plan we favour: move to Britain
If we stay in America instead, those two things collapse into the same day, and that day is February 2028 at the very best. If one question gets asked along the way, which happens to about half of these applications, it becomes late 2028. That is the number Munim saw, and it is real. It just belongs to one of the three plans rather than to all of them.
The recommendation below is Britain, and it was tested by an independent lawyer who was given the argument without being told which answer we wanted. It survived, with one correction that is folded in.
The whole thing on one chart
Three plans, and the same green card application in all three. The only thing that changes is which country we sit in while it is decided. That turns out to change almost everything else.
| Stay in America | Move to Britain | Move to Finland | |
|---|---|---|---|
| When do we live in the same house? | Feb 2028 | Dec 2026 | Feb 2027 |
| When can Janika work? | Feb 2028 | Throughout. She never stops. | Throughout. She never stops. |
| When can Munim work? | Throughout, on his student permission | Throughout. He is a citizen. | Only once Finland grants him a permit |
| Can Munim leave the country? | No. Not once, for about a year. | Yes, freely | Yes, freely |
| When is Munim an American permanent resident? | Mar 2027 | May 2027 | May 2027 |
| When is Janika? | Feb 2028 | May 2027, the same day as him | May 2027, the same day as him |
| Does anyone have to say yes? | An American officer | Nobody | A Finnish officer, for Munim |
The green card arrives at roughly the same time on all three plans. What differs is how much of our life we spend waiting for it.
The same two years, drawn twice
Both charts cover the identical stretch of time, from this September to the autumn of 2028. Green means living where we want to be and allowed to work. Red means neither.
Why Janika's date moves by fifteen months
Munim believed two things, and both are right. Marrying does give Janika a green card off the back of his: the law gives a husband or wife the same category and the same place in the queue as the person applying. And if they are not married by the time he applies, she gets added afterwards. Nothing about the plan has broken. What changes is only the building she walks into, and that is the whole fifteen months.
Janika has always come to America as a tourist, on the scheme letting European citizens visit for ninety days without applying for a visa first. The trade for that convenience is a rule that has been on the books for decades: if that is how you last entered, you cannot switch to a green card while you are inside the country. You are dealt with at an American embassy abroad instead.
There is one exception: being married to an American citizen. Munim is British, so it can never open for her, however long he holds a green card. This is not a new rule and Janika has done nothing wrong. Being a tourist on the visa waiver is precisely the situation it was written for.
So where does February 2028 come from?
From the order things happen in, not from anything about Janika.
If Munim stays in America, he becomes a permanent resident on his own, first. Janika then follows separately, and following has its own paperwork stage that must be filed and processed before an embassy will even open a file on her. That stage takes just over seven months in a typical case. Stack it behind his own application and she arrives February 2028 at the earliest.
Go through the embassy together and that stage does not exist. She is on his application from the start rather than chasing it afterwards, so the seven months and the year of waiting for a work permit both disappear.
Does moving country change the tax bill?
Munim asked whether treaties exist to stop the same money being taxed twice. They do, and for the two of us personally they work. Wages and dividends both get relief, and the combined burden ends up being the higher of the two countries' tax rather than the sum of them.
Where they stop working is the company, not us
Eulia is registered in Delaware, which makes it permanently subject to American company tax. Moving house does not change that. But if we then run it from somewhere else, that country usually decides the company is theirs too, and now two countries both claim it.
You would expect a treaty to settle that. On this one question it does not. The British treaty says that if the two tax offices cannot agree whose company it is, the company gets almost no treaty protection. The Finnish treaty gives it none at all.
None of it bites yet, and that is the practical answer. The company has no profit, so there is no double tax to relieve. What moving costs today is not tax: it is roughly four to fifteen thousand dollars a year in accountants and filings, to keep two sets of books and arrive at a bill of nothing. It becomes real the moment there is profit, and then it needs an actual tax adviser rather than a page like this one.
What happens if it is refused
This matters more than the chances do, so it is worth being exact. In the first half of this year the American government decided 11,896 of these applications and refused 6,486 of them, which is 54.5 per cent. That is from their own published spreadsheet, not from a law firm's blog.
But it should not be applied to Munim, and nobody can give him one that should. Of everyone who applied in that period 2,270 were born in China and 1,469 in India. Sixty-five were born in Britain. No published figure adjusts for the strength of a case or who prepared it. Anyone quoting a personal percentage here is guessing.
Which is fine, because the Britain plan is better whether it is refused or not, and that is a stronger claim than any percentage.
Look at what happens when it succeeds, not only when it fails
On the America plan, even the good ending is a year and a half apart. Munim gets his green card, and Janika is still in Finland, still unable to work in America, waiting for a process that cannot begin until he already has it. That is the version where everything goes right.
On the Britain plan, the bad ending is that we lose a fee and some months while already living together and both working. Nothing about our daily life turns on the answer.
And it need not take a year to find out
For about three thousand dollars the American government will decide the first stage in around nine weeks instead of a year. So the real choice is not between a fast plan and a slow one. It is between finding out early and finding out late, and finding out early costs money rather than time.
What is still genuinely unknown
Three things, listed because a page that only tells you what it knows is not being honest.
- Who employed Janika in Britain between 2020 and last May. If it was part of the same international group she works for now, a much faster route opens: a transfer visa decided in about three weeks, which also lets her husband work. It is one question, to her, and nobody has asked it.
- How many days Munim has been counted as unemployed. His records say both "none" and "about sixty". Only his university holds the real figure, and the difference matters.
- An hour of paid legal advice, not yet booked. It settles the last few questions and costs less than being wrong about one of them.
What the words mean
- Green card
- Permanent permission to live and work in America without an employer sponsoring you. Not citizenship, and not a visa.
- The petition, and the application
- Two steps people run together. The petition asks America to accept that Munim's work is worth having; the application is the request for the green card itself. The first has to succeed before the second can.
- The visa waiver
- The scheme letting Finnish, British and most European citizens visit for ninety days without a visa. Convenient going in, restrictive coming out.
- Embassy processing
- Having the green card decided at an American embassy abroad rather than from inside America. You are interviewed there and arrive already a permanent resident.
Where the detail lives
- The full version, about forty-five minutes. It has a switcher at the top for the three plans and it opens on the America one, which is worth knowing before you read a date on it.
- Why Britain specifically, which turns on a footnote nobody expected.
- Where this could be wrong, the three places the researchers disagreed with each other.