I had 10 years of work experience and had been married to my wife for two years, together for five, when I applied for my spousal visa. We had already gone through the UK visa process to bring her there, but decided we wanted to try the USA.
Despite being able to show 10 years of consistent working history with income far exceeding the minimum, because I didn’t have a job lined up in the US (who would, or could, in that scenario?) we had to ask my wife's elderly parents to sign affidavits of support to prove I wouldn’t become a "public charge".
There were several times where we felt so insulted by the process, the length, the cost, the targeting from scammy law firms, that we almost gave up. People who have never been through the legal immigration process don't quite understand the amount of work it requires and stress it causes. I feel for the thousands of people who now have little certainty over their futures, and it feels necessary to say: people who come here to contribute their skills and experience don't all come along on an H1-B/L1, nor do they only come from white or european countries.
Simila in Ireland: you are not allowed to seek work while in Ireland on a holiday visa, you can only apply for work permissions/visas from outside the country, and depending on the type of visa you get (general work vs critical skills), your spouse might have to wait a year before they can join you.
Note - I immigrated to Ireland from the US and went through the visa process (including huddling in the cold in January at 4 AM at burgh quay, and years later, writing a scraper for their insanely bad appointment system that managed to actually be worse than huddling in the cold)
It's pretty normal not to be able to look for work on a tourist visa in most countries - are you suggesting this is unusual? As far as spouses, they used to have an incredibly asinine system where they told you your spouse _could_ work, without sponsorship, if they got a special form, but getting this form was de facto impossible. It was a very Irish approach, in retrospect. The campaign to fix this was, eventually, successful. (https://reformstamp3.wixsite.com/home)
Fwiw I’ve seen confused or misleading posters reply to this change with statements along the lines of ‘this only means that they don’t allow tourist to apply for greencards in the country’.
Which is nonsense, it applies to all non immigrant visas such as work visas. But it’s a line you’ll see various people try to claim as if this isn’t devastating to every spouse of a us citizen who now can’t get a greencard without leaving their us based job and family.
A green card is NOT a visa my friend. Getting a green card is a very involved process.
So why would you need to leave the country, if you couldn't figure out why you don't want to issue one in the year+ it takes to jump through the hoops
Just a fun fact, getting a green card means signing up for ten YEARS of tax liabilities in the US. And those 10 years start, AFTER you relinquished it...
Because the industrialization of America is over, and has been for decades. USA doesn't need low-wage, immigrant workers anymore. The railroads have already been built, the fields have been plowed, and now that's all done by big automated machines. Everything that cheap workers used to do that was valuable is now automated.
Who does the farming? Who does the cleaning? Who builds the buildings? Who are the line cooks? That should be obvious.
But it should be just as obvious that there are plenty of immigrants who are also necessary because they bring new ideas, their education, their incredible work ethic, to fill in the gaps that the US clearly has.
There is one thing that unites all of us (and I do mean us, as I am one of them). We all dream of a society where our hard work can become prosperity for ourselves and for everyone else, a plot of fertile soil that is worth sowing. We all come here with a dream.
And I personally don't mind so much that I'm uplifting people that don't agree with my existence. I just wish that they could stay out of our way so we could all benefit.
Without immigration an imminent depopulation crisis is on its way to America.
We are actually blessed to be in demand as an immigration destination as well as a culture and infrastructure uniquely set up for it.
Squandering that advantage to satisfy xenophobic ideology is yet another demonstration of the Republican Party’s lack of fiscal responsibility. See also: completely random war in Iran, ICE budget increases to pay to kick out taxpayers, tax cuts for billionaires, the current record high budget deficit etc.
Nah, there was just more economic activity to draw people in. By every other measure it’s been more hostile than average.
But you are right that it is ending, just wrong about what: it’s the high economic activity that attracted people which is disappearing thanks to the same people that hate migrants.
> By every other measure it’s been more hostile than average.
I'm not sure there's a "just" here: compared to peer countries, the US is either middle-of-the-pack[1] or significantly more accepting of immigrants[2] depending on which number you pick.
(This isn't to somehow imply that the US isn't hostile to its immigrants, because it is. But the question is whether it's more hostile.)
Sorry but this is just patently untrue. Are you American? Because in my experience, most Americans just don't realize how arbitrary and capricious the US immigration system is.
Pick any other developed country and the process is generally fairly simple. With some you can just apply for a temporary work visa (possibly without a job) or just apply to immigrate. If you stay in many places long enough on a temporary visa you pretty much get residency and ultimately citizenship.
Beyond what's possible, the time frames for doing anything with US immigration is ridiculously long. Like if you, as a US citizen marry someone overseas it can take upwards of 4 years to get a green card for your spouse and they won't be able to visit the US at all in that time. Why? Because filing a marriage petition means you've shown "immigrant intent" so you'll never get a visit visa (B1/B2) again. Also, the president may well just ban your country from getting any visa. 75 countries are currently on that list.
It's also incredibly easy to make a mistake at some point in the process and that may end up getting an approvable case denied or, worse, you end up with an improvidently granted benefit that cannot be repaired, even if it was an honest mistake.
That is for a different scenario. It means that if you already have a residence permit, you have to wait 8 years before you can apply for citizenship. OP is talking about marriage green card. For 75% of cases in Sweden it is less than 15 months to get a residence permit.
I looked it up, and we were required to complete form I-864 "Affidavit of Support Under Section 213A of the INA". My wife, her grandmother, and her grandfather all needed to complete one, and when considered together, prove that they earned 125% of the HHS poverty guidelines. As my wife didn't have provable income (we were moving together), we needed to dig into their social security income and complete the forms. I remember feeling sad that I needed to ask for such personal information from them.
My salary in the UK was many multiples of this guideline, but _earning potential_ is not considered. Pragmatism is not really a service offered by USCIS, it's too political. To be on-topic: this move will disincentivize smart but not-yet-wealthy people from immigrating to the "land of opportunity". It was already harder than it had to be.
It has always existed, but how strictly it’s interpreted (i.e., just cash welfare, or also Medicaid, SNAP, and other means-tested benefits) has shifted between administrations. If you applied during Biden’s administration, I could believe the public charge rule was applied very laxly, particularly because it’s rare to get direct cash welfare in the US these days, and even less for an extended period.
Or you can simply move to a country that actually apreciates you and doesnt treat you like unwanted subhuman garbage. We have few in Europe, with QoL and happiness higher than US average, sometimes much higher. Just dont make the mistake of comparing salaries directly, US is massively more expensive if you plan to stay long term (ie healthcare) and/or have kids.
You would also have enough time to actually enjoy life, not just work till death/health issues come in some empty prestige rat race.
> Where else would people get opportunities that could match the United States? I can't think of any country that would even come close.
Isn’t that comparative?
If you are in the EU then the US seems like a holy grail because pay is higher. If you have dual citizenship you can probably avail of the EU safety nets if you had to go back.
If you’re in South East Asia, any EU choice is a huge improvement. Lately there has been strong immigration to Germany for example instead of coming to the US.
After naturalization and giving up my original citizenship, I am a little envious of people with dual citizenship of US + any EU country. It really doesn’t get better than that.
> If you are in the EU then the US seems like a holy grail because pay is higher. If you have dual citizenship you can probably avail of the EU safety nets if you had to go back.
One of the reasons pay in the US is higher is because the EU taxes ordinary people fairly heavily to pay for those social services. But also because of systematic cultural differences between the US and EU that lead to the US having a more dynamic economy that generally pays people more.
> If you’re in South East Asia, any EU choice is a huge improvement. Lately there has been strong immigration to Germany for example instead of coming to the US.
Lately Alternative für Deutschland has been getting a lot of votes in Germany; what kinds of rules (on top of the existing ones) do they think should be in place for people in southeast asia trying to immigrate to Germany?
Ehhhhhh I like Europe, a lot, but when you're in you're 20's or 30's and looking at $300k in SF or €80k in Paris (and better access to investment products and lower taxes in the US to boot), suddenly clocking off at 16:00 on Fridays doesn't seem as nice as being able to retire in your 40's.
300k in SF or NYC is FAR from early retirement unless you live 'frugally' - Manhattan average rents are 5K for 1 bed. You pay city, state and federal tax. Food and alcohol are 30-50 percent higher than Paris. And no one talks about property taxes.
In the US, local and federal taxes plus property taxes are easily 50-60 percent of your income.
Inflation runs higher in NYC than the rest of the country, as well.
>And I assume the top 10-15% in Paris is substantially more than 80k?
I don't think that's a good assumption. 80k is rather high for Paris. That's a Google salary at their small office there (or it was when I checked a few years ago). I think the OP's comparison was pretty reasonable.
> Or you can simply move to a country that actually apreciates you and doesnt treat you like unwanted subhuman garbage. We have few in Europe, with QoL and happiness higher than US average.
Please don't. Europe has enough ethnic tensions. At least the US is built to be an ethnic melting pot. It's much better to go there.
Given the opportunity, at the time, I would have happily taken steps to prove my presence would be of benefit. Instead, I had to spend my time asking family to give me their pension statements.
Later, I was recognized for that potential benefit. Last December, I became a citizen.
If you leave the country for more than 6 months, you need to seek prior approval, and you definitely can lose it. I was on Green Card and when I crossed the border, I was questioned by the customs officer as to why I didn't get my citizenship yet because it was 15 years I was on GC and the point of the GC wasn't to be literally permanent. I quickly got my citizenship after that just in case the same thing happened again.
If you get arrested for a major crime, you can lose your GC but you can only lose your citizenship if you lied or committed fraud at the time of your application, or if you committed treason against the government.
This is complete nonsense. All other countries, including the UK, Australia and most of Europe has immigration systems that are just as stringent if not more so.
Notably, and very relevant, the UK recently made it substantially harder for UK citizens to bring over spouses to the point that even teachers don't meet the income thresholds necessary to qualify.
Australia is more expensive AND takes longer than the United States for the equivalent spousal visa.
Sorry, which part of my personal experiences was nonsense? Immigration is hard, and yes, I'm aware of challenges in the UK as I moved my spouse over there in 2014. Do you have an experience with immigration that you can speak to?
I think you're responding to a comparison I didn't make. My point wasn't that the US is uniquely difficult compared with the UK or Australia. My point was that legal immigration is difficult, stressful and often misunderstood, including for people who are clearly trying to contribute and follow the rules. I'm aware the UK system has become much harder since I used it, and I'm not disputing that. But "other countries are harder" doesn’t make my experience nonsense.
Your experience wasn't nonsense. Your expectations are nonsense. If you think immigrating to another country should be straightforward and easy, then it's your expectations that are wrong. I also immigrated to the US and it was just as tough, even though I came well before Trump and from Canada.
Is the goal here to be the same as others or to be better than others? The US immigration system is far from great at the best of times, but it's becoming worse over time.
It's not an ideal outcome it's a very non-enviable multi-decade process working menial jobs and being at risk of something benign like a traffic stop escalating to imprisonment at any time. This fantasy that illegals are living in luxury is how they boiled the frog on people who "did it the right way." They want to get rid of everyone.
The reality is many people come on temporary visas, as tourists, as students, etc., and overstay. This policy is some attempt to address flows of quasi-legal immigration.
It's unfortunate there's friction to the process, but it's by design. 15% of American citizens and permanent residents are foreign born, the highest it's been in 50+ years, so people are successfully making it through the process. Ideally we'd have better levers to (1) modulate the rate of immigration, (2) simplify the process of legal immigration, and (3) still somehow limiting illegal immigration, quasi-legal immigration, overstays, etc. This is not the ideal solution.
> it feels necessary to say: people who come here to contribute their skills and experience don't all come along on an H1-B/L1
Do people migrate to "contribute their skills" to a foreign country, or to improve their lives? Maybe I'm a cynic, but I suspect the vast majority of people throughout history have migrated to improve their lives, not to altruistically benefit a foreign country. And that's fine, that's normal. It's what motivates people, and the U.S. has a long history of being shaped by ambitious people, especially immigrants, who wanted to improve their lot in life.
> nor do they only come from white or european countries.
I don't know if that's necessary to be said, because who thinks that? In recent decades, 85%-90% of immigrants to the U.S. are not white. >90% if you include undocumented immigrants. The trajectory of America from a white majority to white minority country is fueling at least some of the immigration backlash today. But I think for most people, it's a feeling (right or wrong) that jobs becoming harder to find, houses are becoming harder to afford, and more and more people are competing for fewer resources.
> Do people migrate to "contribute their skills" to a foreign country, or to improve their lives?
I think the two are often linked.
> I don't know if that's necessary to be said, because who thinks that?
Effective January 21, 2026, the Department of State paused all visa issuance to immigrant visa applicants who are nationals of seventy-five countries. The overwhelming majority of the affected countries are not predominantly white and are not European.
Yes, I believe so. We have to remember that the previous administration, through executive order, with little public announcement or fanfare, with no vote from congress, and in direct opposition to the will of most American citizens, slashed the power of the Customs and Border Protection agency leading to an influx of 6 million illegal immigrants, and only took measures to resolve the crisis at the southern border after about three years when the media started covering it. It's safe to say the current administration doesn't have a monopoly on poorly thought out policy implications.
This is insane. I cannot fathom how I, nor educated and talented people I know, could have possibly stayed in the US back in the day if this requirement had been in place then. Applying for a greencard while working on an H, J or O-class visa is extremely common.
Far from a loophole, applying from inside the US is the only reasonable way to apply for a greencard. Depending on the country of origin, there may not even _be_ a US consulate, and where it exists, the wait can stretch into years, and the odds of approval much lower. You can't reasonably get a job at a US firm while being physically located somewhere else and on the other side of an uncertain and greatly attenuated greencard application process. That's just not how this works.
Whoever thought of this is either intentionally malevolent or inexcusably incomprehending of the immigration process.
I hear "I'm not anti immigrant, I'm anti illegal immigrant" a lot. To which there is an easy solution: increase the number of legal immigrants we allow.
Instead we're doing exactly the opposite, cutting down on legal immigration as well. Making it hard for me to believe that it was ever about illegal immigration at all.
Even worse, with changes like this we are taking large swathes of legal immigrants and transforming them into illegal immigrants. It reads to me that a substantial number of green card applicants will now be subject to ICE detention.
The cynical take is that with US companies expecting productivity increases via AI, they need to protect the US workers from competition via foreign labor. The current administration was voted in with an anti-immigration mandate so this is consistent. The practical reality is that you are not safe on any visa, it can be terminated arbitrarily by the state department and your recourse is likely expensive and timely.
The current admin does not understand that our lead comes from immigrants. Sorry, but most Americans are kind of mediocre academically.
I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.
This is just an ego problem I suspect. It bruises the ego of MAGA voters to realize that immigrants actually are smarter, they actually do get paid more (and not because they're "taking the jobs" but because they are actually more desirable.)
> The current admin does not understand that our lead comes from immigrants. Sorry, but most Americans are kind of mediocre academically.
> I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.
Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically? Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America?
Not all American citizens have the same level of intelligence, nor do all people attempting to or actually succeeding in immigrating to the US. To the extent that "everything nice" including technological development is grounded in the average level of intelligence of the people currently inhabiting a country (which I think is a substantial part of but not the entirety of the explanation), this doesn't necessarily imply that immigration which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric.
And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration (including some like "immigrating illegally, having a natural-born-citizen child on US soil, and having that child sponsor your legal immigration decades later) that have nothing at all to do with how intelligent a given immigrant is.
And of course, immigration itself changes how "mediocre academically" Americans are, by changing who Americans are - an immigrant might eventually become a citizen; or if they don't their children born on US soil will be.
It's a simple matter of math. The USA has less than 5% of the world's population. It's statistically impossible for that 5% to be the smartest 5% in the world. Therefore, if we want the smartest people in the world, we have to allow immigrants.
No? Not sure how you reached that conclusion. I'm just stating that the USA needs immigrants if we want to increase our median intelligence because we can't possibly have the smartest people in the world born here.
The current American immigration process is not figure-out-able. As any immigration lawyer will tell you, there's strategies with higher or lower chances of success, but there's nothing at all like a roadmap which will definitely lead to permanent residency if you follow it well.
> including our technological lead, is built by immigrants
That's my point to get the Constitution changed (Amendment #28) to allow an immigrant to run for POTUS. We love US more than natural-born citizens. Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's.
Our lead does not come from immigrants. The American people, who are a distinct people, have shown time and again a potential for great things.
Even if it were true, there are wider effects of immigration that you must consider. The purpose of life isn't to increase GDP. It reflects poorly on you that you must cast your opponents as being stupid and spiteful. Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?
Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant. Or are you referring to the Spanish that settled the west? The French in the far south? The Italians and Jews that populated New York? The British and Africans?
I’m painting in broad strokes, but to say “the American People” as if it’s somehow distinct from immigrants is just ladder pulling.
> Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant
I'm not American, but this conversation happens a lot in Canada where I'm from too
I was born in Canada, in a Canadian hospital. I've never had any other home than this country.
I'm descended from immigrants, but I am not an immigrant. I'm not considered indigenous either, that's a whole other type of person.
What a strange thing, to be from a place but have many people say "it's not your place, it's stolen" as if I had a say in that. If I went anywhere else, I would be an immigrant there.
It’s a numbers game. Taking the best from the world talent pool is going to provide better results than from the much smaller American talent pool. Unless your country has more than a billion people, you need to look at world talent.
The US has to especially encourage immigration since we have gone out of our way to make the education system systemically broken. Our funnel is broken on purpose. Look at countries with strong showings in things like chess or running. Why is that? They encourage large populations of kids to participate, the larger the pool the more top performers.
> The current administration was voted in with an anti-immigration mandate
Given that they’re underwater for approval rating on immigration it seems both you and they have misread the room. Most people’s objections have to do with immigrants who are violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat. This is what their campaign was highlighting as a problem. They have not been cracking down specifically on those immigrants. For this, they have no mandate.
>Most people’s objections have to do with immigrants who are violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat. This is what their campaign was highlighting as a problem. They have not been cracking down specifically on those immigrants.
There never were "violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat." That was a baseless, racist caricature and it's unfortunate that anyone took it seriously.
And we all still remember "the wall," and Trump complaining about immigration from "shithole countries" like Haiti (versus Norway and Sweden, gee I wonder what the qualifying factor is there) and how Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists across the border. The immigration policy of this administration has always been that immigrants (specifically any non-white immigrants) are an existential danger to American culture and safety. You don't try to wall off your entire southern border because you think the problem is a minority of bad actors. The DHS doesn't deploy white nationalist anti-immigrant propaganda[0,1] because it's just concerned about a criminal element.
And they didn't misread the room. Trumpism is first and foremost a white nationalist nativist movement. People wanted the wall. They wanted immigration stopped. "The immigrants were taking our jobs." "Muslims can't assimilate into civilized society." "Europe is basically a war zone because of all of the Muslims and low-IQ sub-Saharan Africans." These are all things Trump supporters have been saying for years and that the American right has been saying since at least 9/11. "Borders, Language Culture" as Michael Savage used to say. It's all been out in the open.
White Christian conservatives still support Trump's immigration policies by a wide margin. He speaks to the people he intends to speak to. I don't know why so many Black people and Latinos signed up for the "Leopards eating your face" party thinking the leopards wouldn't eat their face, but that's on them. But pretending Trump doesn't have a mandate to purge the country of immigrants is just naive - that is the only mandate he actually has.
Trump has -20% to -25% net approval depending on the poll, and his approval rating on immigration is -10 to -15%. Clearly people do not like any of this in practice even though they might have liked it in theory.
I mean, the issue is that a large number H1B folks have vital skills for the US economy and that even just 20% of those leaving would mean every single big tech company would be in immense trouble
> even just 20% of those leaving would mean every single big tech company would be in immense trouble
I'm not so sure.
I think it would play out like this:
1. 20% H1Bs leave; 2. Those migrants are now in countries of origin, looking for work; 3. Many of the big US tech companies will already have offices in those countries, and those that don't can make new offices if they wanted to; 4. many, but likely not all, of those employees are now working for the same employer (or close enough), just in a different jurisdiction; 5. as none of these employees are physically in US hotspots, all the other stuff that happened in those hotspots because of big tech pay, suffers, conversely all the stuff which was suppressed because of those wages may (possibly) return; 6. two of the things that go down are the number of people transitioning from temporary visa to citizenship, and the available talent pool for the local-to-those-places startup and VC scenes.
Certainly a lot of them do. It's also true that having a large portion of them leave will just mean that the company will have to replace them with someone who will require a higher wage, and won't have any issue leaving if the workplace culture degrades.
There are plenty of voices explicitly saying that there are too many legal immigrants coming to the US under existing US immigration law, whose presence is not good for the majority of existing Americans despite not being illegal.
> And by the way, I want to make – I want to be very clear. I’m not just talking about illegal immigration, we have way too many legal immigrants coming into this country, too. 1.5 to 1.6 million legal people coming – Ilhan Omar came in legally and she hates the country. She’s a sleeper cell infiltrator of the United States representing Congress. She hates the country. She hates the west. She should be deported back to where she came from, Somalia. Go run for City Council in Mogadishu. The country is not enriched by people like Ilhan Omar.
"an easy solution: increase the number of legal immigrants we allow."
Not really.
The answer is: have a fair, transparent and function system.
Then - yes - you can totally 'increase' (or decrease) as needed.
'Increase a bit' likely the right thing to do - but it's a completely separate question.
But throwing Green Card holders out is completely insane, grabbing people out of church and schools and putting them into detention without oversight is cruel and inhumane.
The national debate is insane.
Just basic, normal, reasonable policy and process.
That's it.
Like DMV level stuff.
Then you can adjust the numbers one way or another.
In my experience, the phrase is just used to mean, "I don't hate immigrants, but..." (which, like the phrase "I'm not racist, but...", you are free to doubt case-by-case). I.e. it is not inherently inconsistent to apply the same disclaimer regarding a belief that legal immigration is too loose, too high, mismanaged, whatever; since that doesn't necessitate a belief that immigration as a concept is bad.
I know this is going to. be contentious, but US mainstream discourse seems to have completely eliminated the distinction between illegal and legal immigration, in the last 10 years. Everyone seems to be a "migrant".
US policy has also nearly completely eliminated the distinction, by making legal immigration close to impossible and ~arresting~ kidnapping people at courthouses who are there for their immigration hearings, then shipping them off to foreign torture camps.
It is so nearly impossible, that somewhere between a half million and a million people have done it every year for the past few decades (including last year).
Nearly half of the workforce of crop farmworkers in the US is made up of "illegal" immigrants. The US food-supply relying on those people has meant that, in practice, immigration law enforcement is deliberately selective and self-serving.
So, the idea of illegal immigration as a vice worth cracking down on and punishing has not been consistently applied by the people publicly condemning it (like this current administration), meaning there is a very real sense in which the distinction between illegal and legal immigration is not real.
I'm right there with you, and it's why I go to great pains to articulate the entirety of my position on immigration when I get into these sorts of debates. The simpler someone's position on immigration is, the less they understand it at length or the more extremist their viewpoints tend to be.
It's not that complicated, my immigration policy is "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
my position has been steady since the start of my political consciousness (maybe ~12 years?)
all laws, including immigration laws, should be enforced consistently and universally, and without bias. and the laws should be changed to make it much simpler and easier to immigrate especially if you are able to already secure employment, housing, and health insurance.
It wasn’t ever about illegal immigration. It’s a way to make the position sound logical and tolerable. Now the goal post is moving to make only certain people legal.
Trump equivocated when it came time to condemn people shouting “The Jews will not replace us” and the Proud Boys. Anyone who thinks it’s just about illegal immigrants is delusional.
Somewhat ironically many of those most vocal about supporting all this are immigrants.
Those that jumped through all the hoops above bar, paid their dues in a messed up system where they bit their upper lip and got through it, and have been extremely frustrated at others trying to game the system.
I was one of them, and supported the idea of going after illegal immigrants. But now they're coming after me too, a faculty with a PhD, researching AI.
When I heard the crowd roar every time Trump said “we’re going to kick them out” I knew exactly what the crowd was cheering. Trump never used those moments to say “but America is a nation of immigrants and we celebrate their contributions”. He wanted to rile up a crowd while maintaining a fig-leaf of “oh it’s only illegals who are evil”
You don’t have to have a PhD to understand the appeal and consequences of nativist populism — just the slightest understanding of history.
It’s a smokescreen people use to claim it’s not racist. It reminds me of that south park episode with the cable company representatives with velcro pockets. “Oh you want to migrate here legally? Oh it will take 3 years and it requires an active employment offer at application time and on arrival? Oh no… tell me more”
The aim is not to fix the problem. These populists would be out of power the moment the problem is fixed. They want to prolong it - even make it worse - because that's what keeps people angry.
Many people hold one or more of the following positions:
1. Illegal immigration is bad, and we should do more to reduce it.
2. Immigration (any kind) is too numerous. Eg someone could say "Nashua, New Hampshire is now 17.2% foreign born and I think that is too high." Within 2. there are multiple separate reasons to have the position. One could think that its bad for assimilation, or one could be upset that the Nashua school system's budget increases are almost completely due to having to hire more ELL staff to accommodate the rapid rise in non-English speakers in a school system that used to be almost entirely English speakers. I'm sure there are more complicated examples but I hope that one is easy to understand.
3. Immigration (any kind) is used to lower wages of the working and middle class via labor and program abuses. At the low end, this used to be a leftist talking point (the kind Bernie Sanders once talked about). At the high end, it is grousing about H1B abuses. Despite many agreeing that th program has large abuses, H1Bs are legal immigrants.
Your idea of an "easy solution" doesn't remotely correspond to a solution for people who think #2 or #3. Even for #1, someone who dislikes illegal immigration does not necessarily want more legal immigration, though that used to be a very common view (eg, Bill Clinton in the 1990s, I think George Bush too). If a person believes #3, increasing the number of legal immigrants may simply increase the corresponding abuses.
n.b. the text above is descriptive, not normative.
I hear it a lot too. It makes no sense. Obviously, if only the illegality was the problem, we could just declare all immigration legal and that would "solve" it. But it wouldn't, obviously, because that's not what people are concerned about at all
What are people concerned about? If I walk into your house uninvited, that’s trespassing. Is that “solved” by declaring all entry into residences legal?
The problem with these analogies is that your nation is not only your nation, but also the nation of all the people who are very happy with all the migrants, for whatever reason.
> If I walk into your house uninvited, that’s trespassing.
Sure.
What happens if your kid invites round a friend of theirs you don't like?
What happens if you are a kid and your sibling does?
What happens if you rent out a room to a lodger, and the lodger invites someone over?
What happens if you're a tenant in a rental, and the landlord sends in an emergency plumber?
Remember, every single migrant working illegally in your country is someone that another person in your country wanted to employ; if you're in the US, most of those employers will be selling you your food and your houses, which most of you seem to like, while some were South Koreans making data centres which you personally may hate but your pension funds love.
The U.S. is an aggressively capitalist system. A person’s value is usually measured in dollars exchanged for labor. Legal immigration status is not a certification of capability, so it has little practical utility. In a capitalist exchange, it literally doesn’t matter.
What the lower classes are concerned about is the value of their labor relative to others’, while the upper classes are concerned with getting a good deal by avoiding increases to the labor-cost floor. Bribes/subsidies and offered scams, have worked so far.
If the federal government, as an institution, were genuinely concerned about illegal immigration, it would have a different set of tactics. Start by punishing the sources of capital (fewer people), then property owners (more people), and only afterward the laborers themselves (many people).
What I see is a combination of class warfare and political theater, not a sincere effort to enforce the law. The law is incidental, made obvious by the exceptions the administration has had to carve out for certain industries.
It's collective narcissism. Narcissists only ever express one emotion - aggressive contempt. So the destruction, incoherence, murder, and abuse are all predictable outcomes of a malignantly narcissistic regime.
Out groups are always the initial targets for these movements, but as time goes on any form of dissent will cause narcissistic wounding and will be treated accordingly.
They only want a certain type of immigrants. I know some that go through the process easy breezy and others that absolutely suffer. It is largely dictated by country of origin, outside of the normal checkboxes.
Its not about immigration at all. It is about creating a "us vs them" tribal narrative. That's why people defend even US citizens being harassed under this administration. And the justification is because they might hold a different PoV.
The irony is that if anyone thinks they are going to solve this problem - I have a bridge to sell. If GoP solves this then they are going to lose of the biggest talking points in next elections. I can see this being challenged and drama played out for long time saying "other side" is not letting them move forward with it.
All the while the "extraordinary" Green Card will actually be "ordinary" - done by greasing POTUS palms. Because POTUS and his supporters are hell bent on turning America into a third world low trust country.
They were always just against immigrants, legal or not. It was obvious back then, it should be super obvious now. And most of them didn’t really hate all immigrants, just those with a particular skin color. The MAGA movement was always racist at its core, no one should be surprised by the turns it has taken.
Point of order: that is blatantly untrue. Anti illegal immigrant has everything to do with ensuring the people in the country are known and allowed. It is completely uncoupled from legal immigration. To say an easy solution is increasing legal immigration is just saying lets leave all the security holes wide open and just make it so only the real bad guys use them because others have an easier time going legal.
First, a lot of the immigrants that people complain about now are only immigrants because the US fucked up their country. Venezuela is the poster child for this. There are consqeuences to destabilizing other countries for American corporate interests.
Second, companies like illegal immigration. It allows them to pay people sub-minimum wage in horrible working conditions and if the workers every complain, you just call in ICE to deport them. You pay a small fine for employing undocumented migrants and the next day hire a new batch. You probably even have avoided paying wages to the deported workers.
Third, a lot of attention is paid to people who sneak into the country. This is the minority. Also, "entering without inspection" (that's the legal term) is a civil infraction (unless you've previously been deported; then it's a crime), much like a traffic ticket. You technically aren't a criminal if you do this.
But the majority of undocumented migrants are visa overstayers. They get a legal visa to come to the US, often a visit visa, a student visa or a temporary work permit (eg J1, H2A, H2b) and just don't leave.
And to answer your implied question, it's not about illegal immigration. It's about white supremacy and the exploitation of labor under capitalism.
This pattern plays out across so many things conservatives say. It was never about free speech. It was never about being civil after someone was killed. It was never about balancing the budget. Their anti-dei stance was never about fairness. And no it was never about illegal immigration. It’s almost like they lie constantly about their beliefs. To themselves as much as everyone else.
I'll keep repeating it: stop assuming that fascists use their words to accurately express what they think and feel. They don't. They use words solely as a tool to increase their power. Hypocrisy does not register for them, in fact they're tickled that their enemies shackle themselves by feeling the urge to be logically consistent. You cannot engage in debate with fascists, you're playing chess while they're playing shoot-my-opponent-in-the-head-while-he-thinks-we're-playing-chess.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Do you believe mass immigration has any negative side effects, at all?
Let's say hypothetically the UK increased its population by around 3 million since 2020, including one particular influx designed and implemented by Boris Johnson to suppress wage inflation, which had a direct effect on the lower end of the job market for the native population. You could also easily argue it led to a direct surge in popularity of the far right party Reform.
It's not. Trump has always wanted to revert back to a predominantly white America if he could achieve it. The government is racist and hides their racism behind shitty interpretations of our founding articles.
It’s sad that pragmatically adjusting quotas is never the loudest argument in the room. I’m in favor of greatly increasing legal immigration, providing paths for safe work and citizenship (when that’s the goal). I’ll admit that my idea of an ideal system is probably not palatable for many. But if we could start from anywhere near a sane baseline, I’d understand wanting to gradually find sustainable quotas that take all factors into account. I’m done with purity tests and letting perfect be the enemy of good.
I suppose by “all factors” I mean all factors aside from exploitation and xenophobia, but I hope we could at least move the Overton window back that far.
Okay. Let's choose a small random country as a basis for your immigration ideas. Ie., Rwanda (pop 14.8m) or Israel (pop 10.24m). What is the quantity of immigration flow that you want, who and from where and on what basis of admission over what time period. What are your intended demographic, social, and political shifts that you say are going to be "not palatable" for the people living there now? In fact, please expand on exactly how "not palatable" you expect your plans to be for them.
This strikes me as an unreasonable demand on the author of the comment. Part of the point of the current system was (at least at some point) to have knowledgeable people, armed with the available facts, figures and theories make some attempt at balancing the safety of the incoming people against (at the very least) their economic impact on the country. From there some rudimentary guard rails (quotas, visa type, etc.) would be set. I suspect few of us in this forum feel comfortable making these decisions from behind a phone, tablet or laptop.
My understanding is that many of us, perhaps including the author of the comment to which you are responding, would like to see at lease some small, inching movement towards such a system.
On the contrary, asking for well-thought out political thought is the most reasonable demand in the world. If you have an idea about health care, national defense, or trade policy, I expect thought and numbers, not vague platitudes.
For example, you want small inching movement. From what starting point? Inching movement from the near-zero flows of the mid-20th century? Inching movement from the mass flows of the 21st century? Both ideas would have major consequences, and if you are going to advocate for mass social change, you should think it out and advocate with care and thoughtfulness.
I’d take rapid movement, honestly, I simply think it unlikely. In terms of what kind of change, I was speaking of movement toward a rational system with clear goals, with decisions made by knowledgeable people. With that in mind any movement, I think, should be estimated from the present. We can’t change the past!
Agreed, care and thoughtfulness should be the rule, not the exception. Presently we are getting neither. I’m a software developer, I don’t work in policy; but I believe our immigration position should be aligned with policy goals and I’m not sure we have any of those, either.
In any case, re-categorizing so many legal immigrants in order to imprison them strikes me as pointless and fundamentally wrong.
Why do we need to quantify an exact quota to qualify as well thought out political thought? Some people think about this issue from the basis of fundamental freedoms. Innocent, productive people deserve the opportunity to move where they obtain the most prosperity.
If I advocated abolition in the 19th century, it would be missing the point to turn around and say "oh yeah? And how many slaves would you like to free per year, and what effects do you expect that to have? Include examples of past slave rebellions"
> For example, you want small inching movement. From what starting point?
The obvious assumption is that they mean from where we are right now. We're not going to suddenly be at the mid-20th century again. This comes off as argumentative more than curious (as do your other comments in this thread, for what it's worth).
Advocating for small inching change to a rate is different from advocating from small inching change. Easy example: if you are in a car with an accelerator pedal depressed.
> Advocating for small inching change to a rate is different from advocating from small inching change.
No, it isn't. It is a change; whether it's acceleration or velocity is an implementation detail. Whether it should be changed suddenly or gradually is the spec.
The US's strength is/was in part because of immigration. The best and brightest want to come to the US to go to school and then they often stay for the enormous opportunities only available in the US. I want any immigrant that wants to come to the US given a reasonable path to make that happen.
You are right that the Native Americans were completely misplaced by immigrants, but immigration made the US what it is today and I see no reason it won't continue to make the US a uniquely strong country.
You may be interested to learn that American immigration flows were higher or lower at various times (nearly zero for long periods). As you allude to with Native Americans, the effects of the different flows were not uniform on all people, and instead caused various negative and positive effects. The period of Americans great post-WWII economic and military rise came during its longest period of immigration moratorium, during which its population was fairly homogeneous. In recent decades, America has begun to decline economically and militarily relative to China, a country not subject to these "strengthening flows". Odd case.
The citizenry would probably fare no worse than with the arrival of the Irish, the Italians, or the Germans. What are you expecting, for the Indians or Chinese to sack DC aux Visigoths?
“Open borders” was pretty much standard across the world prior to World War 1. These tightly controlled immigration policies are, historically speaking, incredibly new.
I think it’s self evident that the U.S. benefited greatly from its mass immigration inflows in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Your statement has no basis whatsoever in reality. The US, for example, had a four-decade moratorium on immigration beginning in 1924. Mass immigration flows appeared at various times and places in the past (often accompanied by bloodshed and suffering), but it's highly incorrect to imagine that 21st-century 1st world demographic shifts are some sort of historical norm.
People coming to live in your area, not your personal home, to work hard for opportunities, are in no material way like pick pockets. Your analogy is so extreme I am tempted to assume you argue in bad faith. The economic success of the United States, its simultaneous growth and flexibility and prosperity is directly caused by our heightened skills to welcome immigrants and make use of their talents and desire for success (compared to other countries with similar demographics). We are awesome at welcoming people into a modern society that values smarts, individual diversity, getting along with neighbors of differing backgrounds, hard work, risk taking, striking out on your own, the NBA, good home cooked food, fast food, and Taylor Swift, and getting them to enjoy these things also.
I didn't say they were pickpockets. I was trying to point out the absurdity of correcting illegal activity by simply eliminating laws.
I love immigration. We should have lots of immigration! But it should occur within consistently, fairly enforced laws passed by our legislative system. I get that our immigration system is arguably broken and that it's very difficult to pass meaningful legislation, but that doesn't mean we should just allow whoever is president to dictate immigration policy.
So the thing to analogize is that DHS is acting like a junior high school gang, enforcing ever shifting rules and norms capriciously for the fun of bullying to score points with the onlookers. The bullied folks are not analogous to pick pockets. We have laws, laws under which TPS is legal for ever, under which we don’t round up and export people without criminal records, laws under which people pay taxes and raise their families here; all of this suffering being caused by Miller is not for the effects of the policies but for the demonstration of cruelty, contempt for differences, and a distraction from the roll back of a middle class centric economy where hard work and education were a pathway to a good family life.
> I was trying to point out the absurdity of correcting illegal activity by simply eliminating laws.
Isn’t this straw man? Who said anything about eliminating laws or being inconsistent about legal immigration? The top comment was only pointing out that slowing the flow of legal immigration does not fix illegal immigration and probably makes it worse. Some people don’t love immigration or feel we should have lots, despite the benefits, and sometimes those people say contradictory things.
This comparison is flawed because there is not legal pickpocketing, but there is legal immigration.
If there was a legal pickpocketing, and someone claimed to only be opposed to illegal pickpocketing, then it would be reasonable to point out that unless they're lying about their intent a solution to preventing illegal pickpocketing would be to make it all legal.
The analogy falls apart because nobody argues that they are "only" opposed to illegal pickpicketing.
If people are opposed to any form of immigration, then they should just admit that, rather than pretend they're only opposed to illegal immigration.
a. Opposed to someone taking my money against my will and the law just because they want to, “for a better life”.
b. Not opposed to someone taking my money in exchange for goods or services I want.
a. Opposed to someone moving into my country against my will and the law just because they want to, “for a better life”.
b. Not opposed to someone moving into my country because I married them and want them here.
There’s a whole spectrum between a and b, but I think most people are against a.
Legal pickpocketing is taxes you’re opposed to, or wages being garnished.
In theory people who say they’re only against illegal immigration are saying they completely agree with all policies regarding legal immigration, now and maybe into the future. Likely not what these people actually believe because while possible it would be a silly position. They’re probably just saying it to try to find some common ground with very pro immigration people. Likely a fools errand.
In this case the people brought up in the United States are sacrificing the well fare of their own children to preserve their own fears. I think that is wrong.
I want to keep the US a destination for hard work and smarts and striking out on your own. Don’t shelter your lazy kid, show them the beauty of complexity and mastery. Have them master some difficult skills, whether that’s a second language or botany or math or public speaking or building things. We are all responsible to each other for excellence. Respond to the opportunities for excellence, of what we can build together, dont’t yield to sloth and resentment being satisfied with turning your back on your own potential. The future is awesome and we welcome all who want to contribute! We welcome competition - better to be second best to the best than turning your back and cutting yourself off from the course of history.
Lots of things are wrong with giving people the power to make choices that affect the whole world, while excluding others who are equally or more affected, based on where they happened to be born.
If the logic is that people who are born somewhere else shouldn't have any agency over immigration laws, well, why does someone who lives in some town in my country with a negligible immigrant population get a say in who I and my colleagues can invite to work with us, and who I and my neighbors can invite to live with us?
If someone says they're not anti immigrant and then turns around to say immigration should be more difficult, there's an obvious logical disconnect in their worldview. It doesn't matter about illegal vs. legal: they want to make immigration more difficult, after claiming they are not against immigration. The comment does not claim there's anything wrong with the policy choice, just that the following policy preference betrays the initial statement as false.
It doesn’t seem inherently contradictory for someone to think “I’m not anti-immigrant” and “my ideal target for legal immigration is at 80% of its current rate”.
I think I see where you're coming from. To use an example, Switzerland has tight immigration controls due to the policies which grant citizens and permanent residents certain welfare benefits, since they don't want those to be leeched by people who do not contribute as much back. That is against immigration while not being anti-immigrant; the point is that the immigration itself does not motivate the policy which limits immigration, instead being motivated by the existence and meaning of other policies (a kind of protectionism).
Tying this back to OP's comment, it's hard to see these policy changes as any sort of legitimate protectionism and it's just as hard to divorce them from the justifications given by people who start with "I'm not anti-immigrant".
there are quite a number of issues with the situation as it was evolved. lots of people are intersted as a matter of policy in admitting that the US is largely functional because of immigrant labor, but relying in illegal immigration to fill those roles hasn't been great for the structure of the country or the laborers themselves. and to be clear this is not just harvesting the crops, and raisin the children, and building the houses, its also doctors and engineers and all sort of other professions.
so there a huge need to have a difficult policy discussion about what to do without cratering the economy.
but when you start removing civil liberties and running around in gangs grabbing random brown people off the streets and sending them to indefinate detention in the middle of nowhere, dumping people in Somalia, claiming you have the right kill anyone you want, you shouldn't be surprised when people start waving around the f word.
>but when you start removing civil liberties and running around in gangs grabbing random brown people off the streets and sending them to indefinate detention in the middle of nowhere, dumping people in Somalia, claiming you have the right kill anyone you want, you shouldn't be surprised when people start waving around the f word.
You've been propagandized to believe that is happening. Remember when we were grabbing random brown people, including Black Olympian school superintendents right off the streets and sending them to concentration camps?
Months later the truth comes out: illegal alien with guns in his possession, which is a federal crime. Deportation order issued under Biden's administration.
The post-truth era has made the f word effectively meaningless.
Sending masked goons to pull people off the streets is unconditionally fascist, and the people who participated are criminals who all belong in prison. If some of the goons were particularly conscientious and never arrested someone without good cause, that's great, and perhaps if they prove that we can shorten their sentences.
1) Someone can be against illegal immigration and for legal immigration.
2) That same person's idea about who should immigrate to the country may exclude most or all of the people who are currently immigrating illegally.
It's not like you can only be against illegal immigration because they forgot to fill out some form. Legal immigration has a component of deciding who gets in.
> I hear "I'm not anti immigrant, I'm anti illegal immigrant" a lot. To which there is an easy solution: increase the number of legal immigrants we allow.
Being "anti illegal immigrant" doesn't have to imply you let in whoever wants as long as they follow some process. You are taking away the agency of the people to select its immigrants.
Refusing future applications to adjust status would be one thing (still wrong, in my opinion). The fact that they are canceling pending applications is simply evil. There will be so much unnecessary anguish and expense. I really feel for anybody who is now learning they will have to leave and wait years to come live in the US with their spouse, due to overstayed visas which were supposed to be forgiven under the status quo.
This administration is doing things that are illegal. They're getting sued and they're losing. Constantly. But that's expensive and time-consuming for immigrants, which I guess is the point.
USCIS doesn't have the authority to just unlawfully deny a case. It can be challenged in court. They can make your life really difficult. For example, they can put you in removal proceedings if you're an overstayer with a petition that they unlawfully deny and then you're out of status. So now you have to go to immigration court, where the odds are stacked against you, and either get your case approved there or get removal proceedings cancelled. And the administration is holding certain people in removal without bond even if they've been here for decades. And some people, like those on ESTA, have waived their right to see an immigration judge at all.
They prefer what's called "consular processing" (applying outside of the country vs "adjustment of status" in country) is that it takes way longer and the administration has way more power to arbitrarily deny your case, as is the case with certain current banned countries. The Supreme Court ruled the president's power to limit visas to certain countries can't be challenged. The case was from the first Trump term. It's called Trump v. Hawaii [1].
But one thing they are also doing, which is evil, is taking advantage of people come to a USCIS interview without an immigration attorney. They separate the couple and threaten the US citizen that they're committing fraud and to withdraw the case or they get the immigrant to admit things that are false or they just outright deny the case on faulty grounds because people aren't knowledgeable enough to fight back without a professional. It is evil.
"Forcing green card applicants to leave will render many green card applicants’ ineligible because, when they leave the United States, they will trigger the 3- or 10-year bars on receiving an immigrant visa based on accrual of unlawful presence."
Yeah, that's a wild leap to conclusions. The "accrual of unlawful presence" is when you overstay a visa, or otherwise stay in the USA illegally. Here's the definition:
> Asylees and asylum applicants: Generally, time while a bona fide asylum application is pending is not counted as unlawful presence.
So unless there's currently a huge backlog of people staying here illegally who are somehow eligible for green cards in spite of this fact, the government changing it's policies to require new applicants do so from overseas is not itself causing these applicants to violate immigration law.
Is consular processing prioritizing adjustment of status applications? Here in India, as of now, a consular appointment for a B1/B2 non-immigrant visa application is about eight months away. The COVID pandemic was mostly over about three years ago and there’s still not enough processing capacity.
A number of people, especially in tech sector, legally stay in US while their GC is being processed. They have kids born in the USA. If such people were to leave USA to seek green card:
- the kids must first get visas to their parent's countries
- once reaching the other country, consular offices now have multi year wait lines for getting an appointment with a office to even hear your case.
- parents may stay in that country but what if kids run out of their visa? A number of countries offer citizenship via parents e.g. Indian parents can obtain Indian citizenship for their kids but it also means letting go of the kids' US citizenship. And what if the parent's country does not have such mechanism?
It's completely illogical that a person must first stay in a country for 5 years to become eligible for a green card and then leave for x years to get a green card to come back !! this is just a tactic to get non-immigrant visa holders out of the country.
As an American, I just want to say that I'm very dismayed by the discourse around this topic over the past 24 hours in particular. The polarization of politics has become so intense, that the bipartisan mainstream position of just a couple of decades ago – that immigrants are a net positive to this country – feels like a distant dream.
We've gone from perpetually punting the football on comprehensive immigration reform, to people saying, "Good, go back home, we don't want you here."
The same people who want to paint the Statue of Liberty gold seem to have no clue what it represents.
I received my green card in 2023 and I have mixed emotions.
On one hand, I'm so relieved that I have been able to dodge everything that the administration has been throwing at immigrant (legal and illegal alike), trying to see what sticks, like mass deportations, border wall expansion, visa restrictions, asylum crackdown, H-1B cuts, and chain Migration Ban.
On the other hand, we cannot apply for citizenship for 3 more years, even though me and my wife have been in the US for combined 25+ years, and paid over $100,000 in taxes last year alone, and it's jarring to imagine what the administration will come up with next to make the process less straightforward than it seems.
Most disturbing is the fact that a lot of people I know who climbed the same ladder will go out and cheer what the administration is doing.
I received mine in 2020 and have decided to move back home. The uncertainty in general just keeps me up at night. Feels like the goalposts could move at any moment. I know I'm likely overreacting but it is what it is.
Genuinely curious, what does taxes have to do with it? Everyone pays taxes, legal or illegal in some form.
I don’t think paying your dues should make you more likely to get through the pipeline. After all, you paid those taxes because you made good money, which is what people come here for.
Taxes are supposed to pay for public services. An efficient visa system is a public service. If you pay tons of taxes but don’t get a public service that’s personally very important to you, it’s natural to feel let down
Typing this from behind a VPN proxy, just in case but...
Does anyone know if this mean that I as a US citizen, who has a spouse who has already applied/submitted their application (but has been waiting while the government drags its feet on it for over half a year), will now need to say goodbye? Things were already getting blurry when we moved quickly to get things in when we saw the winds in 24....
This is a really horrible policy and I personally know a fair few people and families that are going to have their lives upended by this.
On the other hand I've always wondered if most of America's competitive advantage at driving tech innovation hasn't simply been through capturing the ROI of other more social minded countries investing in public education. It could be a massive long term benefit to Europe and Asia especially if they get to keep the talent they created, and more globally distributed innovation seems like it could have some benefits to global welfare.
The US isn’t what it used to be. It’s definitely not the best place in the world to live for quality of life, on basically any metric.
The requirement of being permanently obligated to pay us taxes on global income, if you have any kind of global mobility, is not worth it when you look at the situation objectively. The US is the only country that requires this, and signing up is voluntarily.
So while US immigration continues to act as though people will jump through any hoop they put up in order to be granted the extreme privilege of being able to live in the country indefinitely, it’s worth realising it’s not the 70s anymore and thats a goal many people are no longer optimizing for. In fact the opposite - the most talented people I know are all planning their lives to not settle long term in the US.
The whole immigration argument basically boils down to two schools of thought.
1) Those who believe that every human born on this planet has a basic right to move to and live in, any country that they want.
2) Those who believe that the people who are currently citizens of countries around the world, have the right to set strict restrictions on who is allowed to move there.
These two schools are fundamentally at odds with each other. Some members of both camps will go to the extreme to enforce their position and demonize anyone in the other camp.
Accepting your dichotomy for the sake of argument, I'm in camp 1, but camp 2 could still be humane and comprehensible. Many countries have strict immigration rules, and while I disagree with that philosophy, it's not necessarily objectionable in the same way.
The Trump administration is not in camp 2.
The Trump administration, as this rule clearly illustrates, is in camp 3: Those who believe that the people who are not currently citizens of your country should never be able to become so, and should be punished for even trying.
The problem is not that the system is "strict" in the sense of holding an incredibly high bar. The problem is that the system is arbitrary - there is no process you can follow that will give you a high degree of confidence that you'll be allowed to enter, or even that a decision _will be made at all_ in a fair manner, no matter who you are (unless you're a personal friend of the administration) - as opposed to you being randomly arrested by ICE halfway through waiting for a decision. And even if there were such a process, you would have no confidence that it wouldn't change retroactively in another week.
It is laughably naive to believe that they are doing this in good faith out of any sense of strictly filtering immigrants. There's exactly one explanation that isn't transparently pretextual, and you and I both know what it is.
> Those who believe that the people who are not currently citizens of your country should never be able to become so.
This is basically the longtime practice of countries like UAE, and historically it is categorized under camp 2; no need to create a third camp here. It’s not as if no foreigners ever in such countries become citizens – while most immigrants are meant to be guestworkers who eventually return to their own countries, there are still laws to confer citizenship on exemplary foreigners.
Non-western immigrants in the UAE are essentially enslaved. It is clearly in a camp which is separate from mere "strict immigration laws."
The UAE and the US (as of the last year and a half) don't (just) have strict immigration laws. Instead, they have corrupt and abusive immigration systems which operate outside of national and international laws.
I don’t see why you single out non-western immigrants in the UAE and try to depict this as an outcome of corruption or abuse. Non-western immigrants are subject to the kafala system, but even if they weren’t, their eligibility for citizenship (or not) would remain the same. After all, citizenship is off the table for even the highly privileged Western expat population that is not subject to the kafala system.
Again, the local laws allow for conferring citizenship on exemplary foreigners, which does happen, and so such countries fit easily into camp 2 by which a country has the right to choose who and who not it wishes to make citizens.
the reality is that there a very wide spectrum of opinions about what immigration policy should like, and really not so many people in the (1) category
Regardless if you find all bad luck immoral it just isn’t practical for every country to support every person. It’s immoral to have borders in the same way it’s immoral everyone doesn’t have a private driver, a personal chef, and a mansion.
So much of the US immigration process is built around punishing and exploiting. The primary reason for the strong border is allowing farms and construction companies to find cheap labor which can't complain about mistreatment.
It helps that a decent portion of the population hates and/or is fearful anyone different from themselves. That is what's allowed for these even more draconian and brutal measures.
This is the part that is the wildest to me. The current system seems to generate a collection of second-class citizens: people we openly rely on for labor but that have no recourse if they're exploited and no regulatory protections such as minimum wage (even though I argue against min wage, if we're going to have it, have it!).
My personal preference would be to allow nearly unlimited legal immigration but strip welfare programs for all. In this way we allow anyone and everyone to become an economic participant, voting participant after the naturalization process, and mitigate those immigrating purely for handouts.
But I haven't thought through this policy well. Maybe there is something this seemingly solution is missing.
That’s by design. Maybe not initially, but we’ve been having this immigration debate as long as I’ve been politically aware, which is going on 4 decades. It absolutely is the desired outcome today.
> But I haven't thought through this policy well. Maybe there is something this seemingly solution is missing.
What about long term immigrants who end up disabled through no fault of their own? Or who get cancer? Or who end up having a child (who is an American citizen) and that child is special needs and the immigrant can't manage a full time job and care for their child? If they get pregnant and end up on bed rest or with a traumatic birth that takes them out of the workforce for a period of time?
There are ways to end up needing to rely on welfare that aren't due to laziness or a desire for handouts.
If the answer is 'kick them out', I'd be worried about what we're teaching our American kids watching. There are two lessons they could pick up, and neither is good for their moral development or sense of self. The first is that anyone who lacks the ability to work has no value, and that will engender greater alienation and isolation as they place all of their self-worth on their ability to earn money. They'll look upon the elderly, children, and caretakers with disdain (Interestingly, this probably won't help the birth rates either...). The second is that they are protected but those people should be disposed of when they're not useful. This will make them arrogant and introduce the idea of dehumanizing other groups, which will further the cracks of division in our society.
There are vastly fewer "immigrants for handouts" than right wing media would like you to believe. Coming to the US is incredibly challenging. People who do it are mostly young and wish to work, to support families. Handouts don't accomplish that.
It take tremendous effort to immigrate, legally or illegally. Anyone telling you that they are lazy is obviously lying.
As a US native, I have met zero lazy immigrants, but lazy Americans are everywhere I look. Thus I think this sentiment is more a projection of their own behavior: “they must be as lazy as we are”.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It maps directly to much of their coalition’s rhetoric, accusations, policy agenda, and behavior these days, including, but not limited to, their obsession with pedophilia.
> The primary reason for the strong border is allowing farms and construction companies to find cheap labor which can't complain about mistreatment.
That doesn't make any sense. If you want "cheap labor [that] can't complain about mistreatment," you want a weak border, not a strong one, because a weak border creates a larger pool of illegal immigrants to draw from.
A strong border, at a minimum, reduces the supply of illegal immigrants, and may even push the employer into hiring people with legal immigration status who can complain and sue over mistreatment.
> It helps that a decent portion of the population hates and/or is fearful anyone different from themselves. That is what's allowed for these even more draconian and brutal measures.
I'd put it another way: a large part of the population has been put under a lot of stress and pressure, while simultaneously being intensely conditioned to not blame the people actually responsible. That stress has to go somewhere. Don't blame the little guys, even if you find them contemptible because they're not from your culture. Blaming the little guy (for "hat[ing]...anyone different from themselves") is another aspect of the conditioning that protects those actually responsible.
Strong border policies with moderate (weaker) and selective enforcement will give the combination that GP describes: enough supply backed by the threat of strong individual penalties if someone here illegally “gets out of line”.
> because a weak border creates a larger pool of illegal immigrants to draw from.
A larger pool with more rights and less fear of being deported. That means it's easier for them to pick and choose the jobs they do or even to start their own businesses.
They could, for example, form a union without the fear of deportation.
Look, if this were all about stopping illegal immigration, there are very fast paths to doing that. A prime one would be punishing not the immigrant, but the employer of the immigrant. Fine every farm in the US that employs an illegal immigrant and you'd quickly see the number of those jobs being worked drop.
But that's not what ICE is about which is why they and legislators haven't done that really basic enforcement.
Heck, at the start of this admin, Trump had to pull back ICE from raiding farms because the business interests of the farmers collided with the xenophobia of Steven Miller.
This is a bit extreme. On the other end of the spectrum the existing system is heavily abused and hard to defend. For example many if not most PERM applications in tech are a complete sham. Putting tiny job adverts burred deep in a newspaper hoping nobody applies to try and say there are no skilled workers in the US is just one example of current abuse of the system.
Not anymore. My PERM was cancelled for this exact reason. The job advert was put on LinkedIn and the company's website like any other job. They didn't hire the local worker either because they didn't pass the interview but my perm had to be cancelled bc a skilled local worker with "minimum qualifications" existed.
What you are saying used to happen but not anymore.
To successfully process a PERM a company needs to make the argument that they’ve tried and literally can’t find anyone else in the US to do the job. Thats obviously a very high bar, but for many years it was on open secret that companies mostly fudged these claims.
With so many tech layoffs now it would be nearly impossible for most roles to claim there’s nobody else available, and under the current administration the historical games are no longer just flying below the radar. That hasn’t stopped some companies from still trying though.
Isn't the correct response to the sham hirings to regulate that jobs are posted on a gov-run board for some period of time, ~30 days, before you can claim no qualified workers? That seems more reasonable than turning the spigot off entirely.
Perhaps. But given the volume of abuse that appears to be out there the tactic is more turn it all off then selectively back on where appropriate.
Thats obviously extreme but given the abuse in the status quo it’s hard to defend what was going on and whine about this now. Some folks are obviously angry, but that anger is better directed at those that were abusing the system not those trying to fix it.
Only if that job board was an actually useful and common source for genuine hiring. If it becomes “these companies are checking a box, don’t bother applying” or “these companies are considering an H1-B application, flood them with resumes”, neither of those is helpful to qualified workers who actually want to find a job.
This news has to be read alongside the immigration visa emission pause for 75 countries by DOS[1].
Since USCIS is blocking Adjustment of Status, and the Department of State is blocking green card emission for citizens of 75 countries, this means that if you are from the following countries you are effectively banned from getting a Green Card:
Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, The Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
I'm from one of the countries on the list. Not only is there no way to legally immigrate to the US anymore, but just visiting US once requires me to give an interest-free loan of up to $15k to the US government. Yeah, no, thank you.
I never considered illegal immigration, nor will I ever - I value predictable outcomes.
But looking at these new rules, I can't help but think that it really punishes people who want to play by the rules and sets the price for ones that don't to approximately $15k.
My country is not in the list (Mexico, not that we need to... Americans hate us), but I just cannot comprehend why people would go through all the pain for the immigration process in the US.
Actually, it kind of make sense why only the most desperate try to get into the US , people who have something to lose are naturally repelled by the bureaucracy.
Absurd, currently trying to figure out how to sponsor my wife and now this. The wording seems to imply that even those here on valid non-immigrant visas (F1) would need to apply via their home country. It doesn’t help that I130+I485 (AOS) could take over a year to process?
If you have filed I485 and they fail to process it before your current visa expires (D/S ends like F1 OPT). Then what? You just have to leave, abandon AOS and re-apply for CR1?
It’s insane that the simplest immigrant pathway; spousal green card could take 12+ months and may now require temporarily moving and being separated. Guess I actually will be paying $4K for a lawyer (plus the 3-4K just to file the USCIS forms).
I wish they would just have a simple fast lane for the 100% legal, non-complicated case.
> simple fast lane for the 100% legal, non-complicated case
Immigration policy in the current administration (which seems to be driven by Stephen Miller) is not based around legalaities, it's based around cutting immigration as much as possible because that's what satisfies Trump's voter base. These people do not care if you 'did it the right way'. They have an atavistic hatred of foreigners.
> Immigration policy in the current administration (which seems to be driven by Stephen Miller) is not based around legalaities, it's based around cutting immigration as much as possible
White immigrants are fine with this administration.
"All but 3 of 6,069 refugees taken in by Trump are White South Africans"
Happens as well in Germany and it's pure insanity. The US at least does not depend on migration as much as Germany, I believe.
Even the current right wing party CDU doesn't seem to want to make migration harder, but when the extremist party AfD gets voted into office, an already highly damaged balance will break.
Sad how people become so detected from reality that they make their society irrelevant and destroying a lot of wealth in the process.
> The US at least does not depend on migration as much as Germany, I believe.
To me it feels like the US pretends they don’t need immigrants when:
1. The overwhelming majority of current US residents were immigrants themselves at some point in the last 150 years (only natives were there, everyone else immigrated from somewhere)
2. The US wouldn’t function without illegal immigrants
3. Every country is short of workers in one domain or another. Encouraging immigration in these domains (see how Canada does it for instance) would be the smart move. But instead… yeah let’s make it even harder across the board
1. Appealing to the attitudes of 150+ years ago leads to all sorts of absurdities. We live in 2026.
2. The US not functioning without illegal immigrants is a bad thing. More often than not, employers like illegal immigrants because they can abuse them in some way or another. If you actually interact with illegal immigrants or the people that employ them, this is clear. “We need modern indentured servitude” is not the country I want to live in. I would rather these industries just be subsidized by the government to whatever extent it takes for US citizens to take the jobs with all of the protections we expect workers to have.
3. Not every country is short of workers. Employers may be short of workers that they can lord over, but refer back to point 2. Pointing to Canada’s policy as an example of a “smart move” is a strange play.
The current administration is certainly not working on the above premises, but I’m floored when I hear supposedly progressive people going on about who is going to work the psychologically scarring meatpacking plants if we don’t take on an undefined number of people who are only here to get shit on for a good paycheck. I have compassion for illegal immigrants, which is exactly why I don’t want them in the US.
My point wasn’t that exploiting illegal immigrants is good.
My point was that with the sorely lacking rules already in place, illegal immigration is a problem and at the same time there is still a supply problem.
So acting even more high and mighty like it’s the greatest place on earth to be and require people who want in to grovel even more certainly isn’t good policy.
I’m also confused why you think Canada isn’t doing it better? You can immigrate but your profile needs to match what the country needs: its win win, because once you’re there you have a fair chance at a good life (integration, job, etc) vs taking anyone in and then having issues with people who can’t find jobs, be happy in the country, and integrate into society.
But the process around the US visa and immigration program is a lot more hostile than it needs to be. I had the displeasure to deal with this grinder and it’s really showing that the attitude is “you’re less than nothing, it’s up to you to prove you’re worthy of us even reading the forms you filled in and paid for, fuck you very much”
People are repelled by country shopping by 3rd worlders.
EU countries are working on imigration rules that would allow for bringing imigrant labour without ever extending citizen privileges to them. A sort of permanent uderclass. This is what voters want at this time.
In EU, I don't think an underclass is what is wished. What we lack is being able to chose who is allowed to stay or not. Currently it's whoever manages to come illegaly is allowed to stay. It's madness
By the way, if you move outside the country, you lose Domicile which is required to sponsor the visa. And if you don't spend enough time in their country visiting them, your application can be temporary "denied" (delayed) with a request for evidence (that the relationship is real) they'll spend 3 months deliberating over.
Today's news make this crystal clear: the current admin does not want citizens marrying outside the country, regardless of how quickly the marriage rate among US population is falling.
Jesus Christ, that's a bad situation. It seems extraordinarily risky to leave the country to return. I know a native-born American whose foreign-born wife has been waiting years now to come to the US. By contrast, I received my green card (through marriage) shortly after application. Considering the rapidity by which friends of mine (who were married after and applied after me) received their green cards in mid-2024, I wonder if the Biden administration anticipated losing the election a few months later.
Other countries paying $10,000's to educate people who then want to apply this knowledge in the US. US reaction: "Nah." Besides, we are talking about legal immigration here.
The government has completely abandoned any pretense of following the rule of law. Don't be shocked when they start revoking green cards. Don't be shocked when they start revoking natural citizenship. "But they can't do that!", you say. But who's going to stop them?
It's not that bad because once the court ultimately makes a general ruling, not merely in favor of an individual, but against a federal policy, the ruling can apply to everyone, not just to that one individual. Granted, the government could still ignore the court's order.
This government and its supporters would say - Due process isn't applicable to everyone in the US especially who they perceive as being "illegal immigrant".
You can apply for GC from within the US. The only time you need to leave for Consular Processing is for the interview, after which you immediately receive your GC. Everyone is saying that the entire GC process needs to be done outside the US but that's wrong. You can have an H1B and apply for GC from within the US without leaving and you only need to leave for the CP interview which is a couple of days max.
This is confusing. If someone is already here on a valid visa, it's stupid that they should have to go anywhere else.
If they simply showed up or overstayed a visa illegally, then it's actually totally reasonable that before they can be given permanent resident status, they should be demonstrating compliance with immigration laws by not being here illegally.
Yet again with Trump's bizarre mixture of a nugget of a reasonable (and popular) idea with a barrel of nonsense and chaos. It's the same as with tariffs. Tariff things produced by adversaries, that we are well-positioned to make here ourselves and stimulate a good domestic industry with good-paying jobs? Yeah, but also let's tariff a ton of things we need that we don't even freaking make or grow here, and against our geopolitical allies to boot.
So throw the baby out with the boat. I'd say no matter how you do the numbers nowadays the number of people unknown to the government applying for a green card legally would be in the minority. So is this really a matter of national security that this needs to be done this way who knows. Given that most people have been here forever paid taxes paid Medicaid social security are being treated like fugitives. I am certain at some point the world will reject the choice of coming to the USA over other choices they have.
This government has a really bad reputation for taking one or two cases and making an example of them and then telling the other 98% they deserve it. I hope at some point this stops and someone rationalizes whatever is going on in my country
The base of the issue is weaponizing fear and anger in the citizenry to better control them. Immigration has been an evergreen topic for that for the entire history of the US.
In recent years, they've combined yet another favorite, racism, to get that tasty peanut butter chocolatey goodness to get the base angry enough to go to the polls to vote based on that.
I hold on to hope that somehow, someday, we can overcome this nonsense. I have nothing to support this so I get in this sense it makes me a man of faith.
> From now on, an alien who is in the US temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances
Whats the equivalent policy for other countries? Can you stay like you could prior to this?
In other countries (Germany, France, Canada etc) - there are spelled out paths for getting the permanent residency. I would be a permanent residency by now or maybe even a citizen if I had decided to go to any other developed country. But here, after 10 years, with a clean record, I worry I will be picked up by ICE someday.
Many other countries including UK enforce a similar rule. It's very inconvenient in those countries, but there's a significant difference: in most other countries that have this kind of policy, visas can typically be processed in a timely fashion (and are actually processed at all). It's insanely expensive and very arduous administratively to get a visa for the UK as the spouse of a British citizen, but the process will typically only take a month or so.
Isn't the Uk the opposite? There are many visas in which you have to be in the UK to apply. This is why we have people coming on boats, and why they are not illegal immigrants. They technically have to travel here to apply for aslyum, and since they do not have a visa cannot take conventional transport, but it is entirely legal for them to come here on a small boat as long as they present themselves to the authorities to claim aslyum upon arrival.
Graduate visa's are the same for example, where you cannot apply abroad, so you must be careful not to leave the country between graduating and getting that visa.
The asylum system and immigration system are surprisingly disconnected from each other in the UK.
Pretty much all forms of permission to stay in the UK other than asylum can only be granted from within the country if you hold an existing long term status. So if you're visiting as a tourist you can't then decide to apply for a spouse visa or even a working holiday or student visa without leaving the country first. If you're already on a student visa or a work visa or similar you can change categories without having to leave.
The graduate visa is essentially an extension to the student visa with slightly different permissions - it makes sense that you can only apply to extend if you're in country and you view it from that lens.
The historic reason behind all this is that there used to be a substantial difference between being granted "leave to enter" and "leave to remain" (out of country vs in country applications). Leave to enter used to be granted by embassies etc and the foreign office, but leave to remain was granted by the home office. Now the home office handles everything in the UK centrally so the distinction is not significant.
In European Union countries, transitioning from a temporary residence permit to a permanent residence permit is typically done inside the country: once one meets the eligibility based on length of stay or whatever, one files an application with the local immigration office. No need to leave and apply from outside.
I first entered Canada with my spouse as a visitor, then got a work permit as a NAFTA intra-company transfer, then became a permanent resident – all without having to return stateside for immigration reasons.
It basically means a huge percentage of these people might never come back. Once you go back to your home country, life moves on. Your plans change. Your path changes. And that could be terrible for the economy.
Hundreds of thousands of people either wouldn’t enter the local economy, or they’d be delayed for a very long time. I really don’t see companies being okay with that. Think about all the students who are ready to enter the job market. Instead, they’d have to go back home, wait for a visa, and only then come back. That kills the speed of the economy and makes hiring way more unpredictable.Or at the very least, it would seriously slow things down.
This is going to worsen healthcare in the United States.
Many critical roles are filled with doctors who are here on visas because there simply aren’t American graduates who want those jobs. I’m talking about jobs being doctors in hospitals and towns and cities that are not the most desirable.
Many of those doctors filling these positions today are immigrants who are on visas. They want to get green cards and stay here. They end up living long term in those communities caring for patients in them over the years.
If this policy goes into effect it will hurt all of that. And actually many of these hospitals and less desirable areas are placed with lots of Trump voters too.
In general if someone has spent years working hard with a visa and is law abiding and contributes to the community I don’t understand the purpose of making immigration harder. And I especially don’t understand why you would make it harder for doctors and engineers and other educated people who are here on visas to get a green card.
This is probably for the best in the long term. They've added enough friction, insanity and disdain for foreigners that no sane person will immigrate and we can start to build stronger industries and trade relationships outside the US.
From what I could understand from the 6-page memorandum, (my paraphrase) "the law allows us to be nice and convenient, but doesn't require us to be nice and convenient, so we decided to make things hard and cruel going forward"
The current administration is sending a pretty clear message to immigrants.
It will help would-be immigrants understand that the US does not want them and that it would be a mistake to invest time and energy trying to build a future in a country that hates them and can nuke their lives at the drop of a hat. It will help other countries that are not the US retain their talent and build up their own industries. A greater diversity in distribution of talent and industry across the world is a more resilient system.
It’s not a more resilient system. It creates geographic isolation and friction. It dilutes the talent pool instead of concentrating it which limits cross pollination. It also reduces specialization that drives efficiency and lets each country focus on what it does best and then trade with others.
I think that’s a bit dramatic saying the US hates them, but yes to your other point. The US is taking the position that it has more to gain from having strong and prosperous trading partners than it does from exploiting those nations and draining them of talent.
If you read "US as a whole", then sure. I've met many a lot of very friendly people in the US, some of whome I'd love to visit again.
If you read "the current US administration and their voter base" it sure feels like hate.
I used to visit the US a lot. I haven't been for a long time and as long as the current regime remains in place I'll spend my time and money in places where I can be sure not to be mistreated.
That's not because I fear I would be hated in the places I would actually visit, but because I have no interest in being at the mercy of US immigration. It doesn't matter that the risk isn't great - it is high enough and the potential consequences severe enough that it's put the US in the same category as high crime third world countries for me in terms of risk.
Already 20 years ago it was more stressful to go through immigration in the US, even as a white man from a rich country, than in dictatorships like China. As it stands now, I wouldn't hesitate to visit China, but I would hesitate to even transit the US.
Except the US isn't trying to make strong trading partners, its a side effect of the xenophobia and racism. If anything they are alienating anyone who would ever trade because every trade deal for something benign like, steel or whatever will include some random unrelated bull shit like "also if you want to trade you have to round up your trans people."
Yeah look at like any one of the 10,000 things this administration, Trump, Miller, republicans have said about immigrants. Look at ICE detention centres, how many hundreds or thousands of people have literally died, denied basic medical care or humane conditions, ICE agents who executed US citizens facing 0 consequences. ICE agents on camera ramming a car, radioing in to say that the car rammed them, and then shooting the driver. Cold-blooded execution. I could go on forever. Tell me again how stating that they hate immigrants is being dramatic.
It’s just facts but they’ve been boiling the frog and doing so many idiotic and horrific things at once that people have completely checked out.
They mean good for everyone NOT the US. Because now say, Germany or France, or where ever, come off as a better place to immigrate, so other countries can build stronger more competitice businesses.
This move, like everything the MAGA administration does, will only weaken the US.
Even better for other countries, anyone the US produces who isn't a raging idiot, also are more likely to want to immigrate from the US.
It could be good for anyone country that's not the US (despite our hubris, we're not actually the center of the universe). But for the US, a country built on immigrants ands immigration, probably not so much. We fucked around, we found out.
Well, we're continuing to find out. We haven't exactly scraped rocked bottom yet.
Isn’t it better for the smart people in India to stay there and make India richer, instead of coming to the U.S. to make billionaires here richer? These countries absolutely suffer from the brain drain.
That's not really how it works. Immigrants also benefit from coming to the US.
Skilled labor immigration is great for everyone involved, and bad only for the countries that suffer the brain drain.
But it's not zero-sum. The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity.
> and bad only for the countries that suffer the brain drain.
That's a pretty big qualifier!
> The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity
Isn't it the opposite? Creating wealth and technology in India helps a billion quite poor people. Creating wealth in the U.S. helps 300 million already rich people.
Except you can't create Google in India. Google isn't minted by divine inspiration hitting a couple of smart guys in a garage.
It's created by an entire ecosystem that allows a project like that to be conceived and executed in such a way that has benefited the entire world, including the poor in India.
It's a big qualifier, but like I said, it's not zero-sum.
No economist will argue that limiting skilled labor immigration (or any immigration, really!) is an optimal policy for improving the lives of the poor elsewhere. It just doesn't work that way.
That's why I said long term. This logic might as well argue it would be better for China to have had huge immigration to the US 50 years ago and contribute to the manufacturing or automobile industries there. But they didn't, and now they've built up their own ecosystems instead that are more efficient and ahead of the US' ecosystems. You can create Google in India or BYD in China, it just takes time for the ecosystem to build. It has helped China at least, and maybe the world more than if they had immigrated en masse.
The other line of argument is again the fault-tolerance I mentioned above, maybe see Taleb or distributed systems. Maximizing efficiency has trade-offs in resiliency. Yes it might be less efficient for there to be 3 ecosystems in 3 countries instead of 1, but its more resilient to shocks. We saw the risks of highly efficient but single point of failure supply chains materialize just a few years ago during the pandemic.
It's also pretty obvious that the tech companies being in the US benefits the US more than other countries. The big salaries are in the bay area, the tax revenue goes to the US, all the ex-Googlers founding new companies found them in the US etc.. So of course Google being founded in country X would benefit country X more than it being founded in the US.
> So of course Google being founded in country X would benefit country X more than it being founded in the US.
Exactly. Obviously it’s better for China that BYD and Huawei were founded in China rather than the US. It’s better for Korea that Samsung and LG were founded there instead of the U.S.
China created those ecosystems because of Western companies who offshored their manufacturing, with the ultimate goal of having cheaper goods and services.
It wouldn't have been able to do it without US companies, and it's not particularly a model that can be replicated that easily, though in general, economic policy that focus on exporting goods indeed tend to be the most successful.
Still doesn't mean the US should be preventing Chinese from immigrating here, so it's just utterly besides the point.
Because context matters, obviously. Global supply chains did not exist yet when the US industrialized.
The United States was a British colony where demand for raw supplies led to an organic development of railroads, coupled with technological transfer from businessmen in the UK hoping to capitalize on this nascent market.
Textile manufacturing was still a thing and we were in the very early innings of the global Industrial Revolution. The two world wars that destroyed Europe were also immensely helpful to the insulated US.
Why are you asking me questions for which there are easily available answers? Honestly, you might as well have asked an LLM.
Stop looking for evidence that only confirms your biases and start trying to disprove your hypothesis. Only when there's nothing left to disprove can you claim your hypothesis _may_ be right, though you can't ever know for sure.
By the way, immigrant labor was a massive force behind US industrialization so you're just totally lost at this point. Industrialization has always depended on interaction with rich economies. From capital flows to technology transfer, export markets, immigration, empire, or trade networks. No major industrial power developed in total isolation.
I doubt its better for India to have Indians making Google richer than to have them staying in India to make something even a fraction of the size of Google in India. How is India going to create that ecosystem if all the smart people leave?
It's better to not frame this in terms of a specific country, lest it come across as if we're picking on India specifically.
Developing countries have structural reasons for why they are underdeveloped. This is a very complicated topic, and one for which there is no shortage of academic interest. I suggest starting from William Easterly's "The Elusive Quest for Growth".
I quote here from the book review MIT Press:
> What is necessary for growth is that government incentives induce investment in collective goods like education, health, and the rule of law
> This is a very complicated topic, and one for which there is no shortage of academic interest. I suggest starting from William Easterly's "The Elusive Quest for Growth
What's Easterly's qualifications? Has he ever successfully improved the economy of a developing country? I'd rather learn what LKY or Park Chung Hee or heck even Deng Xiaoping or Pinochet had to say.
> you think we should model economic policy after Pinochet.
Pinochet is one of several autocratic rulers who put in place frameworks that resulted in economic miracles in their countries.
Especially in Asia and Latin America, I don’t think there’s a single country that tried democracy before economic development that didn’t end up a failure. I’d rather be a Chinese living under effective authoritarian capitalism than an Indian living under dysfunctional social democracy.
The innovations immigrants created in the UK during the Industrial Revolution made everyone wealthier. The innovations made by
Immigrants in in Silicon Valley have made the world more wealthy. And it was in part due to the concentrated talent pool that made it possible.
>innovations immigrants created in the UK during the Industrial Revolution
Name one of these innovations preferably made during the first 100 years of the revolution, which we can take to have started in 1712 with the first deployment of a practical steam engine built by Thomas Newcomen and John Calley at a coal mine. Certainly it had started by then.
100 years after 1712, all of the decisionmakers in Europe were rapidly waking up to the fact that the industrial revolution was a big deal because steam-driven textile mills, ironworks, and canals were changing Britain’s economy.
By 1812, many hundreds had already contributed some kind of innovation toward that outcome: an improvement in a machine or a process, a scientific or economic or sociological insight useful in industry or a new law or business practice.
Name one of those many hundreds that did not have two parents and four grandparents and eight great-grandparents of British ancestry.
Good! Top marks! The French-born engineer Marc Isambard Brunel settled in Britain in March 1799. After fleeing the French Revolution and working in the United States, he sailed to England to present his inventions for mechanized pulley production to the British government.
But even if we suppose there are a few more (as you suggest), the involvement of a few white immigrants is not a good argument for non-white immigration.
If the goal is to argue for non-white immigration, the smart tactic would have been to leave the industrial revolution in the UK completely out of the argument so as to avoid creating an opening for someone like me to point out that the critical first 100 years of that revolution was led and innovated by more than 99% Brits with the rest being white immigrants.
In many cases a talented/smart person will bring little to zero value to a country with ossified institutions, but huge value to one with the right systems in place to build value.
The way it works is that the origin country is worse off when people leave, but in general immigrants are much better off for moving, and it's not even close.
A big argument for letting people emigrate is that they owe no real debt to the county where they are born, or the city, or anything like that. They aren't selfs owned by a nobleman. If moving increases their personal lot, why should we stop them?
It's just sparkling xenophobia. Forcing a return to one's home country to apply for a Green Card can frequently remove the very qualifiers one has to getting said Green Card.
Just take a look at the categories of Green Cards available on USCIS' website[0], and think about how many of them will be unavailable if you're back in your home country.
* Green Card via Family? 18 months, minimum, for approval.
* Green Card via Employment? Well, self-deporting likely means the loss of said job opportunity, thus your ability to convert to LPR status
* via Special Worker? Here's hoping you're not an Iraq of Afghani national that might be persecuted back in said home country for cooperating with the US Government.
* via Refugee or Asylee Status, or as Victims of Abuse? Are we fucking kidding, here? Forcing refugees/asylum seekers/abuse victims back to their home countries is deliberately cruel, and I'm going to be looking for statistics on changes in approvals pre- and post- this policy change to make sure "special circumstances" are actually recognized as such
It's just a despicably cruel policy change that's so overtly xenophobic, it actually reveals the alignment of those reporting on it when it's not called out as such. It's the antithesis to legal immigration in that it all but destroys the process entirely, promoting more illicit behavior (dangerous and clandestine border crossings, exploitation of migrant workers, human trafficking, etc) in the process.
My buddy married someone he met in grad school abroad, then got a job in the US when he graduated. She had to move in with her parents in Japan while waiting for the green card. It took at least a year.
I'd disagree on nuance. Xenophobia is anti-foreigner. This targets people of color. They target people of color who are US citizens, too.
It is gutter racism.
edit: I wish I could be surprised by the downvotes, but it's gutter racism and I'm proud to point this out! I would be never be quiet about a matter of ethics and conscience just because of startup accelerator social media popularity points. This directly influences many of our friends and colleagues in this field. It is vile, evil racism and directly topical for software startups.
edit 2: the list of immigrants and children of immigrants who have founded software companies that are the absolute backbone of US information infrastructure is embarrassing to write down. Anyone can search for the information, but it's harder to list companies not founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.
The DHS has made many communications that were openly white supremacist. It's not just an unfair situation with legal technicalities. Their views and plans are more extreme and dangerous than our society is able to accept as reality, so many are in denial. There are obvious historical parallels.
There need to be thorough weekly video walkthroughs of all of the detention centers. Otherwise you can expect actual starvation at some point.
If the perpetrators are not dragged in chains in front of a nationally televised tribunal at some point in the future, we will have failed as a country.
One issue (apparently a feature) that may arise is that, if application is rejected in consular proceeding, the applicant is locked out from usa. AFAIK, if someone applies for an immigration visa in usa, they will not be able to obtain non-immigration visas in the future. A refused green card application might be the end of being ever in usa. The person may have to truely exit USA since there may be no way back (close bank account, sell property and assets, etc).
If the person adjusts status in usa, there are more possibilities for appeal etc.
The end result is the same though. If your application is rejected in the US, you could stay while you appeal, but if you're ultimately rejected then you have no choice but to re-apply through consular processing anyway once your status runs out. Good if you have a job in the US, but you're kicking the can down the road.
> A refused green card application might be the end of being ever in usa.
Do you have evidence for your other claim? The main thing you need to prove for a non immigrant visa or VWP is that you won't overstay or have intent to immigrate at the time of application and upon entry. Otherwise it's up to the consular officer like usual. You would need to declare the refusal/denial of course.
What will get you denied is "inadmissibility" if you don't submit a waiver. If you're inadmissible that usually means some serious violation and you've got other problems.
As far as I know, people have been successful in re-applying for EB green cards after being rejected when they've assembled a better packet.
If you apply for immigration status and are rejected, sure you can apply for immigration again if you gain much better qualifications. I haven’t seen many successful examples though.
People are deemed to have immigration intent for small things like they don’t have enough ties to their country of residence. An application for immigration is definite proof you had intent to immigrate. You can wait like ten years, but time doesn’t work in your favor (immigration gets harder every year, people get older and handcuffed elsewhere…).
Yes, this is a feature. I don't think non-immigration visas actually exist, or can in principle actually exist until there are massive legal and constitutional changes in the US up to and including ganking the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th amendment. Anyone who sets foot on US soil for any reason - even illegal immigrants, let alone people on a legal, ostensibly non-immigrant visa - can try to adjust their status, and has lots of "possibilities for appeal".
The US government should not give permission to anyone at all to set foot on US soil, unless the mass of existing citizens of the US are comfortable with that person eventually voting as a citizen on what the composition of the government should actually be. And as a US citizen, I am not comfortable with letting the vast majority of people in the world - many of whom are scrambling for any legal opportunity at all that will let them legally reside in the US - vote for the government that passes laws that affect me.
I should have been more precise, yes. But the majority of non-immigrant visas are single intent. H1B requires 100K and if you can’t first enter to see people and attend interviews, chances seem slim in these circumstances, if H1B program is not altogether scrapped.
Curious to know how this will affect immigrants who arrived on a student visa, receive OPT to stay while working, and then subsequently get married. I know many top performers at my company who are in that boat, especially from India, who have built lives here during their OPT + STEM. It would be a shame to lose them if they have to go back to India and wait years (if not decades) for a green card or H-1B.
No. This is the last stage of the Green Card process. When you do Consular processing you make an appointment at the US embassy or consulate in your country, go do the interview and then you are granted the GC on the spot. Then you fly back. You don't need to fly back for years, it's only for the purpose of the interview at the consulate.
IANAL. If you adjust status in the US you can also apply for AP/EAD if your original visa/legal status expires. You can't do that if you opt for consular processing.
Nothing new there, but under the new rules the former is no longer an option and you'd need to leave immediately. On the plus side consular processing tends to be cheaper and often faster (AOS and all the approvals vs the consular processing fee and a plane ticket).
What is the typical wait time for appointments when going to consular processing route? My brief searches say anywhere from 2-9 months. 60-90 day NVC review phase, 60-120 day interview scheduling, and then 1-2 weeks once you have the interview. Are you saying that the 120-210 day wait time can happen while you're still in the US?
A crazy number of people adjusting status, most notably DACA recipients, are adjusting in the USA (despite the much longer wait) because leaving the country may trigger a very long re-entry ban. This can be avoided through advance parole, but turns out, there are a limited number of things for which that's granted like employment and education and US consular visits don't appear to be on the list. So "just leaving the country" is a guarantee of your own banishment. In fact that's probably part of the reason why they picked this policy in the first place.
The U.S. doesn’t have a real statutory pathway to permanent residency for skilled immigrants. The current H1B to Green Card pipeline is built on a legal fiction papered over a visa program that was the word “non-immigrant intent” written all over the statute.
Gemini gets this correct: “The H-1B visa is a nonimmigrant classification that allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign nationals in ‘specialty occupations’ that require highly specialized knowledge and at least a bachelor's degree.”
Intent (are you planning to switch immigrant visa later) and status (immigrant/non-immigrant) are two different things. Visas like B1 are non-immigrant and require that you are not intending to abandon your foreign residence. In practice that means that when you enter US you cannot be planning to apply for immigrant visa. H1B is also non-immigrant visa, but it is dual intent visa meaning it doesn't have that requirement and thus it's fine to enter even if you intent to apply for GC. You can even exit and re-enter after submitting your application.
> In practice that means that when you enter US you cannot be planning to apply for immigrant visa.
You are correct about this.
> H1B is also non-immigrant visa, but it is dual intent visa meaning it doesn't have that requirement
You're incorrect about this. The concept of "dual intent" doesn't exist in the Immigration and Naturalization Act. It was created by executive fiat. H1Bs, like other non-immigrant visas, still requires non-immigrant intent. It's different only that it has two carve-outs:
Subsection (b) excludes H1Bs from the "presumption" of immigrant intent that applies to other categories of aliens. Subsection (h) provides that applying for permanent residency "shall not constitute evidence of an intention to abandon a foreign residence" for H1Bs.
So H1Bs must still have non-immigrant intent. It's just that they are carved out of certain presumptions that would automatically establish immigrant intent, which would lead to denial of their visa. It gives the executive flexibility to essentially look the other way when an H1B applies for a green card. But it doesn't confer any legal rights* onto the H1B. The administration can at any time decide that you actually have immigrant intent and yank your visa.
You're not actually wrong, but your phrasing makes it sound like that somehow excuses this travesty of justice.
I can only assume that's accidental. You're the 17th most active person on HN, so I'm certain you've seen an overwhelming amount of evidence of how skilled immigrants are immensely beneficial to the US economy.
The H-1B is not the only path to a green card. There are many ways, every case is different, and pretty much all of the paths suck, even if you do everything right.
This decision only makes all of those paths worse.
> evidence of how skilled immigrants are immensely beneficial to the US economy.
That's irrelevant. "Justice" means following the rules. Congress gets to decide the immigration laws. Congress has never created a real system for skilled permanent immigrants. The term "H1B" actually comes from 8 USC 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(B).
Subsection (a)(15) literally defines the term "immigrant" to exclude people in the subsequent subsections, including (H)(i)(b). Subsection (a)(15)(H)(i)(b) then reiterates that the category is for someone "who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform services." Congress didn't hide the ball.
Everyone who has applied for an "adjustment of status" is following the rules. It's literally a procedure you submit to USCIS.
People who have done everything by "following the rules" are now seeing the US backpedal on what was promised to them via an administrative memo published by USCIS at the behest of the president—not through new legislation enacted by Congress.
I don't know where you're getting your information from, but it's factually incorrect.
And as someone else said, "justice" does not mean following the law. That's the definition of "legal".
It's important to anchor these topics at a certain level of understanding of Law and Economics to discuss optimal policy, otherwise we'll just talk past each other with uninformed political views.
Your information is factually incorrect. You're confusing the USCIS procedures for the actual law. The current H1B to green card pipeline was never much more than "an administrative memo" to begin with.
Read 8 USC 1101, specifically subsections (a)(15) & (a)(15)(H)(i)(B). The statute classifies H1Bs among the "nonimmigrant aliens," and states that the category is for someone "who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform services." Does that sound to you like it was mean to be a pathway to permanent residency?
There was never a "promise" in the law. Instead, there were a set of USCIS practices and procedures that amounted to nothing more than writing down what USCIS was currently doing. But USCIS never had authority to turn what Congress created as a temporary worker program into a permanent path to citizenship.
I'm sympathetic to people who put their eggs in the H1B basket. As an immigrant, how are you supposed to understand constitutional law and limits on executive power? But the fact is that the modern H1B regime was created almost entirely by executive fiat and it can be undone by executive fiat as well. (All the 1990 Act did was undo some presumptions but left the executive free to decide at any time that an H1B has immigrant intent, which is a basis for visa revocation.)
My information is perfectly correct. I think you, as a layman, seem to be understanding the Law as being identical to the US Code, somehow ignoring the fact that rules and regulations, as well as case law, are also primary sources of Law in the United States. Here's from the first hit on Google for "Sources of US Law"
> The four sources of federal and state law are (1) constitutions, (2) statutes and ordinances, (3) rules and regulations, and (4) case law.
This amounts to much more than "writing down what USCIS was currently doing". This is a specific source of law. These regulations are legally binding as Congress has authorized the agency to issue them.
There's also plenty of case law from USCIS-related adjudicative reviews, meaning specific precedents set by judges who hear cases related to immigration.
After reflecting on your comment, I hope you're not trying to force an argument that any person who's requested an adjustment of status is somehow illegally present in the country, because that would be woefully incorrect.
I also don't appreciate the patronizing remark that I somehow fail to grasp the facts because I'm an immigrant.
I'm not sure why you think people who were born outside of the borders of the United States of America do not understand how liberal democracies work.
Do you actually think immigrants have no concept of constitutional law and limits on executive power? Do you think that knowledge is somehow protected by a magic seal that prevents me from ever obtaining it? Or do you think other countries do not have constitutions or a system of checks and balances? Do you know how many years I've spent studying nations in general and the US specifically? Do you know how many comparative studies I've written? Do you even know what my specific qualifications and degrees are? And I can do this in 5 different languages.
You're way out of your depth and your bias is showing.
I don’t know how this will play out for employment based categories. You need to be have a job and be on a valid visa to even apply for a green card. How do you then go outside the country, apply for a green card, all the while maintaining your job and a visa while you wait for the application to be processed? As far as I know not being in the US for extended periods of time, voids your work visa in the first place.
IANAL. My understanding is that you can do consular processing even if you are in the US, it's just that you need to leave to do the interview (and things like biometrics) and get the actual visa.
Now I'm not sure if you are allowed to re-enter after your interview before your case is decided/you get the visa but I would imagine so (if have valid visa), you would just need to exit again to get the visa later.
If that’s true, things may be slightly better, but I’m also reading this move will take away substantial funding from uscis since it is funded purely based on fees collected with immigration applications. Processing times are already pretty large in a lot of countries. So even with the flexibility, you carry a substantial risk.
I believe the issue with what you're describing is that if you're on a temporary visa, like a student visa, applying for a green card shows intent of immigration so you cannot return to the US on a student visa.
If you have an H-1B already you may be able to do what you're describing. If you're a recent grad in the US this basically locks you out of trying to get a green card until you've already secured an H-1B.
> don’t know how this will play out for employment based categories
I am only talking about employment based categories if you refer to my original comment. I’d be curious to know what visa categories allow you to file for an employment based greencard without a job?
It's shocking, actually. Horrifying, and again I say: They do all of the things one would expect them to do if their stated goal was the absolute destruction of the United States of America. They are traitors, no more, no less.
The tech industry and general business lobby is extremely pro H1b/immigration. They're probably the only thing holding back a total ban on h1b immigration right now.
In some ways that industry is losing a tool. Sponsoring a green card used to be the prize they dangle in front of the h1b to keep their nose to the grindstone.
Not from the US, but is a green card actually necessary to work there after studying? afaik student visa is different from green card right?
Most countries, you get a visa of some kind but you have no way to permanent residency at all unless you marry but you can keep staying there somewhat permanently.
White supremacists on the rise in the US.
Never forget, there were people already in the US when they first arrived.
White supremacists stole their lands.
What about a spouse visa? It's insane. I just got married to my girlfriend, and she needs to go back to her home country and wait for years before getting a green card? It's crazy.
Looks like this means if a US Citizen marries someone who visited on a non-immigrant visa without the intention of getting married, the US government will now force the family apart for an unknown amount of time, potentially forever, instead of allowing the spouse to stay while the I-485 is processed.
I wonder how this would work with a K-1 "Fiancé" Visa. Typically a K-1 holder can enter the country as long as they get married within 90 days, and then the family stays together while the I-485 is processed. Now what? Come to the USA, marry the US Citizen, and then you're banished back to your home country?
There's also the K-3 which lets the foreign spouse enter as a non-immigrant to keep the family together while the I-485 is processed. Are they getting rid of that entirely?
This is all totally bonkers, likely not well thought out, and pretty cruel to families, which is completely on-point for this Administration.
The reason why you allow married people to adjust status is because it's absurd to actually expect a spouse not to just break the law and harbor their illegal immigrant spouse. They are going to choose to break the law rather than kick their spouse out and have them apply from overseas. Maybe they deserve to be punished when inevitably that happens en masse, but one has to consider the societal effects of creating a bunch of criminals over what amounts to an administrative fuck-fuck game over a spouse who was already determined to be admissible to the US.
This government is run on mafioso leadership principles.
Thats why they’re appointed a whole bunch of unqualified people at high positions. This is what happens in the mafia. Those people know that the only reason they’re there is because of the dear leader and not because of their competence, so purely out of self preservation, they will put loyalty to dear leader above every other principle.
Similarly gangs will get even low level people to commit completely unnecessary crimes. Because once you’ve committed a crime, they own you. You’re at their mercy, since you can’t run to the police anymore, without risking jail time yourself.
So you make a whole bunch of your residents criminals, so they’re unable to exercise their rights effectively without threat of being punished for a completely different reason that the government now holds against them.
They’ve started with immigrants because making them criminals is as easy as writing administrative memos, but the same incentives will lead them to start making criminals out of American citizens too. You can already see some of it with the way they’ve criminalized protest against Israel. The next step will be to redefine whatever acts they can as terrorism since Congress granted the executive tremendous power when it comes to terrorism. But they won’t stop there.
>who was already determined to be admissible to the US
If that was true why even go through a whole process. To me it sounds like there is still an approval required meaning the person is not determined to be admissible yet.
The process as it relates to a K1 Visa is a multi-step series of approval gates designed to state that someone is “admissible” based on certain conditions, which change as you move through the process.
The general logic has been that it’s really easy for people to say they want to marry a U.S. citizen, get approved to emigrate, and then change their mind after (the common term for this is visa fraud). So the government grants a series of visas for increasing lengths as you move through that process and prove that it is a bona-fide relationship.
A K1 visa is the last step before getting married, and stipulates that you get married within a short time after entering the country, after which you have to remain married for several years, prove you’re doing things normal married couples do (like live together), and then you can get your permanent residency.
So, in short, it’s not as clear cut as a one-time yes/no decision. You very much live within a prescribed framework for several years until the government is satisfied that your relationship is real.
If they were here on a non-immigrant visa then they were already found admissible to the US. Some of them were just straight up illegals (like dreamers). I've met dreamers from time to time and all of them regularized their status after marrying (I assume the ones that didn't though weren't eager to tell me about their status so I simply never found out).
One interesting note here is the case of DACA recipients. If they leave the country to adjust status it should triggers a re-entry ban unless they're granted parole (DACA are quasi-illegal but granted a form of amnesty as long as they remain in US). AFAIK parole isn't granted for US consular visits, so it's effectively banishment as punishment for trying to adjust their status to reflect their marriage.
I responded similarly in another article. This policy punishes American citizens who pursue relationships with people they met in USA who were foreign born. At a time when marriage rates are rapidly declining.
FWIW K1s were never a great visa category. Doing an engagement party with a white dress and posting it on instagram could lead to a "go apply for CR1 instead" rejection.
I think if you enter on a B1/B2 tourist visa, you should not be allowed to adjust status to a green card except in extraordinary circumstances. I’m not so sure about other non-immigrant visas.
K1 will obviously be an exception as substantial steps are generally taken at a home consulate.
I’m also pretty sure you cannot apply for an AOS from a B1/B2 to a green card.
I think you can apply for an AOS to a different dual intent visa which could then allow you to apply for a green card if you meet the requirements for that visa.
Maybe something like if you get married while visiting, but even then I believe you need to apply for an adjustment of status to a marriage visa and then apply for a green card.
No. Before you could enter on a tourist visa and there was an automatic presumption of fraud if you got married, etc within the first 90 days, but you could get married after 90 days, but before 6 months of maximum tourist stay and they may investigate a little bit, but it was generally not difficult.
The IR-1/CR-1 that you describe is how a spouse would apply from outside the country.
My wife already has her green card through our marriage - but it expired under the Biden admin and we were given a 4 year “non-renewal extension” because USCIS was unable to process its renewal in time due to the post-COVID backlog. We’ve got about a year left on that extension and are absolutely terrified we are going to be forced to uproot our entire life by this evil administration and its pointlessly cruel policies.
It's shocking to me that the gov is allowed to claim "backlog" to defer one of the functions the gov is actually supposed to do. They print the money. They can hire enough to fulfill their obligation with almost zero effort.
Got this email (!) from an immigration attorney friend that basically says green card applicants need to leave the country in order to file.
From: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services uscis@messages.dhs.gov Sent: Friday, May 22, 2026 6:59 AM Subject: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Will Grant ‘Adjustment of Status’ Only in Extraordinary Circumstances
WASHINGTON—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services today announced a new policy memo reiterating the fact that, consistent with long-standing immigration law and immigration court decisions, aliens seeking adjustment of status must do so through consular processing via the Department of State outside of the country. Officers are directed to consider all relevant factors and information on a case-by-case basis when determining whether an alien warrants this extraordinary form of relief.
“We’re returning to the original intent of the law to ensure aliens navigate our nation’s immigration system properly. From now on, an alien who is in the U.S. temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances. This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes. When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the U.S. illegally after being denied residency,” said USCIS Spokesman Zach Kahler.
“Nonimmigrants, like students, temporary workers, or people on tourist visas, come to the U.S. for a short time and for a specific purpose. Our system is designed for them to leave when their visit is over. Their visit should not function as the first step in the Green Card process. Following the law allows the majority of these cases to be handled by the State Department at U.S. consular offices abroad and frees up limited USCIS resources to focus on processing other cases that fall under its purview, including visas for victims of violent crime and human trafficking, naturalization applications, and other priorities. The law was written this way for a reason, and despite the fact that it has been ignored for years, following it will help make our system fairer and more efficient.”
That’s really unfair, sorry this is happening to you.
> Nonimmigrants, like students, temporary workers, or people on tourist visas, come to the U.S. for a short time and for a specific purpose. Our system is designed for them to leave when their visit is over. Their visit should not function as the first step in the Green Card process.
Do they consider H1B workers to be “temporary” for this purpose? It seems broken and cruel to force them to go back to apply when they’re here legally and could easily just apply here (assuming their visa is still valid).
Yes, it looks like H1B workers will have to do this as well. It sounds like it applies to "dreamers" as well even if they have never visited their "home" country before.
My Eastern European wife and I recently faced the decision of how to go about getting her a green card. At the time we lived outside the US.
One option was to enter the US on her B1 visa pretending to have no “immigration intent” and then “change our mind” a respectable number of days later and apply for AOS. The process for this was 1.5 to 2 years. I didn’t want to do it for that reason and because I wasn’t comfortable with what amounts to visa fraud, but our attorney presented it as a pretty standard option.
The other option was consular processing. This wasn’t automatic. Our attorney contacted a few consulates in the region where we lived to see if any would accept our case (due to war the consulate in her home country wasn’t handling routine cases). We got approved for consular processing in Budapest.
I had to go once as the US citizen spouse to submit our application packet and do a pro forma interview. Then a few months later it was my wife’s turn to go to the interview.
The process, like any immigration process, was paperwork heavy and nerve wracking. The final interview was very simple and felt like a formality.
In that case once approved she received a visa that would be stamped upon entry to the US and this would count as a temporary green card pending receipt of the physical card.
All of this happened during the second Trump administration so I was expecting a hostile or at least adversarial process. But it was quite the opposite. Total elapsed time was about six months from initial attorney consult to entry into the US as an LPR. It would have been faster if our attorney was more on the ball getting our final interview appointment.
If I were to find myself in need of a green card for a foreign spouse again I would opt for consular processing if given the choice. Now that it’s required I imagine there will be a longer backlog.
Obviously if you need to do this at one of the consulates that no longer offers consular processing that’s a different story. I was fortunate that the Budapest consulate agreed to take our case.
>>
admitted into the United States as nonimmigrants to depart rather than
pursue adjustment of status. Such aliens are generally expected to pursue an immigrant visa and
admission from outside the United States if they wish to reside permanently in this country.
H1-B was already a dual intent visa. Are they trying to create a new visa category?
Whatever they are trying to get to this is a big concern for all H1B employees.
One of my hardest working coworkers at the big box retail store was here on a perpetually extended U visa (reserved for witnesses to crimes of federal interest) after being sold to a sex trafficker at a young age back in the 90's.
Under Trump 1 she was fired because they wouldn't renew it and she lost work authorization. Her kids are citizens and she speaks better English than Spanish, she was educated here and is effectively fully integrated. But she's slightly brown, and Stephen Miller says we can't have that.
We live on a prison planet. The borders are the cell walls. Some of us have more privileges and freedom to travel, but we're all restricted. This doesn't help anyone other than the few parasitic slave masters.
Almost every single European country requires you to leave the country in order to apply for a new visa status, which is what is happening here in the USA.
In SE Asia there's a whole cottage travel industry taking business and tourist visa holders on a quick trip out of the border in order to return to renew their visa (of course you can also pay for this service under the table).
> Almost every single European country requires you to leave the country in order to apply for a new visa status.
This is not the case for transitioning from a temporary residence permit to a permanent residence permit, which is the best analogue to the USA’s Green Card. In most European countries, one does that within the country (and often within the same province one lives, at a regional office).
Objectively terrible policy for ethics, public safety, and, selfishly, the American economy. Immigrants contribute to economic growth and are less likely to commit crimes are well established facts. It’s the 21st century, we have the internet and education is accessible, but instead of recognizing and championing the vital role of immigrants in America’s rise to power, here the nation moves to hurt itself for some misguided anti immigrant ideology.
I have never regretted abandoning my Green card and giving up US PR. Honestly every day I feel I lucked out by not being stuck there. Especially now in the NewUSA
They obviously know how unpopular this is, or else they wouldn't be releasing on a Friday night. This is so unimaginably disruptive, I wonder who inside the administration is suggesting this.
When I renewed my H1B visa (I think after three years), I had to leave the US to do it. I couldn't renew it from inside. The permission to work got renewed just fine - I could just keep on working for another three years - but if I left after the first visa expired, and wanted to come back, I would need a new _visa_ (thing stuck into my passport) to come back, and I could only apply for that while outside the country.
I read that it used to not be like this, that it used to be possible to renew the _visa_ itself from inside the US, but that got changed before my time. I can only imagine that the reason for that was that non-citizens inside the US are entitled to due process, but non-citizens outside the US are not. And denying a visa to somebody outside the US is therefore a lot easier than denying it to somebody inside the US, and essentially cannot be appealed.
When I applied for AOS form H1B to Green Card, I didn't have to leave the US. With this change, I would have had to. The only reason I can think for this change is that denials of AOS would now become unappealable. I hate this.
> I read that it used to not be like this, that it used to be possible to renew the _visa_ itself from inside the US, but that got changed before my time. I can only imagine that the reason for that was that non-citizens inside the US are entitled to due process, but non-citizens outside the US are not. And denying a visa to somebody outside the US is therefore a lot easier than denying it to somebody inside the US, and essentially cannot be appealed
No, after 9/11 they passed a rule to always collect biometrics before issuing visas and validating them at border entry. The DoS facilities in the US did not have fingerprinting facilities but the consulates and embassies did, so they forced the change. Recently there was a pilot to allow it in the US itself.
This is just Trump trying to torture immigrants likely due to the psychopath Steven Miller.
In general the law applies equally to everyone associated with the US in any respect so you get due process (in theory) regardless. Specific laws may apply to different classes of people though (see 'enemy combatants').
Another case of this administration just doing what it wants and ignoring legislation - ignoring the will of Congress. And Congress abdicating its responsibility to even make its will clear.
I am no longer surprised, but still don’t understand why almost all members of Congress are wiling to just let their power slip away like this.
I don't believe that's correct. H1-B is formally a temporary, nonimmigrant work visa/status which permits "dual-intent" (meaning a holder can be openly seeking permanent residence when applying for [or when on] such a visa without that dual intent being immigration fraud).
So what does this do to the K-1 fiancée visa? Your partner gets the visa, they come over, you get married, and then they have to leave and submit an application to get status changed from their origin country? Seriously? WTF is this crap?
K-1 visa is immigrant intent, you are basically applying for temporary 90 day pass to get married and one of two things will happen: Get married and adjust your status or leave.
What this screws over is there was plenty of people from US visa waiver countries who decided K-1 was too hard and just flew over to US and got married. They would then apply for Adjustment of Status. That is big door being shut close because B-1 is non immigrant intent visa.
My room mate from college did this with UK foreign exchange student 20 years ago. She came over on visitor visa, got married and they got a lawyer to fix it all up.
What about for people who do want follow the K-1 process "by the book"? It sounds like they would they now need to come over, get married, go back to their origin country to apply for status adjustment, and then come back over again? Or am I misreading this?
All this means is that I485 is no longer allowed and everyone needs to do Consular processing. It doesn't mean that Green Cards are no longer being processed.
I did consular processing when I got my Green Card. It's the FINAL step fo the GC process. You don't need to be outside the US for all the other stages, in fact I think if you leave during some parts, it would be considered abandoning your application. It just means that while you're in the US, you need to schedule an appointment at the US embassy/consulate in your home country, and fly back. Then you go through the appointment and there on the spot you're approved or rejected. It's a big nerve wracking but unless you lied you will be fine. Then you fly back to the US.
For me CP was much much faster, on the order of months.
I think in specific visa circumstances, an i485 will still be required such as K1 visa which is granted outside the country and then by nature of a K1 visa, adjustment to green card must happen within the United States.
There's no THE greatest country; every country can be great.
US&A has been the escape hatch for oppressive regime in China/Russia/... for many years, young people from there seek freedom in US, instead of fight for freedom in their own.
Individual freedom is great but collectively they made people who can't migrate have less and less freedom. Some expected US&A compensate that with trade, military and twitter, which all turned out to be disasters.
I'm sorry for anyone stuck in those processes, but for long term US&A giving up on Green card / dual citizenship is not necessarily a bad thing for the world.
> Individual freedom is great but collectively they made people who can't migrate have less and less freedom
Damned if we don’t allow people in and, apparently, damned also if we do allow some in
Your strange argument would actually support this policy: stop letting these people into the USA so that they stay in their own repressive countries and are forced to reform them.
Hundreds of millions of people from abroad shared that belief up until 2 decades ago or so. I don't think they believe it anymore. It's been like watching your awesome high school friend throw away their lives over time.
It will destroy the United States as a leading economy and superpower.
Think about it: China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population. But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people. Until now.
The US is best understood as a land of opportunity: a country with a strong economy and a population that is diverse in race, culture, and background. Wouldn't those people be better off moving back to the country of their immigrant ancestors?
Yep, skimming the cream of the world is the engine of US dominance. We generally got some of the most highly motivated people, because it takes a lot of work and determination to uproot your life.
There used to be a bipartisan agreement that a US advanced degree should come with a green card stapled to it. Even Trump: “You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country."
> China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population.
And China is notoriously xenophobic when it comes to immigration policy - they have a clear “best race” as far as the CCP is concerned and are doubling down on it. If you want to hold China up as a model I don’t think it’s the winning argument that you think it is relative to a pro-immigration argument. White nationalists would agree with you and say to only allow whites in and be more homogenous like China is.
Separately you’re also arguing in favor of only high-skilled immigration which seems kind of suspect don’t you think? No more refugees from Haiti or Syria, for example. Otherwise the US can’t be drawing on the pick of the world’s best.
> But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people.
You also aren’t accounting for the concept of brain drain which has historically been difficult for origin countries to deal with. It’s a little amusing to see folks positively arguing in favor of what would otherwise be considered a colonialist tactic of resource extraction.
I’m critiquing these two points however and not necessarily suggesting a policy, but I think it would be wise to think a little more deeply about these two points.
I’d also add, we are totally fine and the rhetoric around the US no longer being a leading economy and superpower is false. The strength of the country isn’t solely because of immigration. In fact, that may not even be a major factor. Geography for example plays a much greater role, our system of government and laws, our markets and culture of enterprise are far more important. I’d argue tablet kids and the introduction of technology into classrooms is, for example, a much greater problem for American talent than lower rates of skilled immigration.
Immigration is just another policy choice we make, like our system of laws or others. It doesn’t need this moral component to it. Increase the rate of people immigrating in some years, decrease it in others. No big deal. If you want to suggest it’s worthy of a moral crusade then you are barking up the wrong tree because the United States has and is certainly more friendly toward immigrants both now and historically than probably any other country on the planet. You should aim your outrage at countries such as China which severely restrict this moral good.
In itself, no, of course not. But it's part of a much larger pattern which together blow apart that whole "great American melting pot" thing that seemed fundamental to the country's prosperity.
It's not a dumb thing to say. The US is built on immigration. Making immigration harder will lead to the next big industries not having a focal point in the US. It's also not as simple as letting college grads get green cards. It's often second or third generation immigrants creating more economic prosperity. Attacking higher education and now immigration is basically destroying the US a decade to a generation from now.
This is to close the common loophole where people would fly into the US on an ESTA, B-2 or another temporary visa "without immigration intent" (fraud) and then marry a US Citizen and adjust status.
On visa forums this method is commonly discussed. By entering on an ESTA/B-2 with the intent to marry a US Citizen, they're committing immigration fraud, inherently. You would be denied entry at the border if you admitted to your plans.
The correct way to do this is to file a K-1 visa outside the United States, or marry outside then file a IR-1/CR-1.
The article you linked is patently incorrect. It claims "Now, every legal immigrant must leave the country—that is, self-deport—even if they are qualified for a green card and even if leaving would disqualify them.". This is false according to USCIS' memo.
It very specifically lays out common exceptions to this, including for legal immigrants on dual intent visas and those whose only pathway to permanent residency is via adjustment of status.
It also wildly misinterprets the news to claim that the K-1 visa has been effectively ended, even though the memo specifically excludes it.
> However, maintaining lawful status in a dual intent nonimmigrant category is not sufficient, on its own, to warrant
a favorable exercise of discretion.
Which basically means that, applying AOS while being in dual-intent category is not favorable and you will have to prove extraordinary circumstance for a simple i-485 AOS on H1B. Lacking the extraordinary circumstance, your application may be denied.
What this basically means for millions of people on H1B (especially from countries like India is), they have to go for consular processing. And given the lack of appointments in India and delays they are facing - you could be stuck for months to years and no company is going to wait for you while you go through the process. So leaving would definitely disqualify them.
Why should H1Bs be exempt from consular processing when nobody else is? K and IR/CR categories MUST do consular processing, which takes 3 years in some cases.
H1Bs should jump the queue why? You're arguing that the family of US Citizens should be considered behind temporary immigrant workers with no family ties to the United States, and you should be exempt from the requirements they face.
You are moving the goal posts. You said this memo does not apply to dual intent visa holders and I proved it does. I am not saying if an exception should be made ffor H1B visa holders or not.
I am just pointing out this affects all employment visa types.for countries with long delays in counselor processing this effectively kills any chance of getting Green card because no employer will wait that long.
Only if they do not maintain lawful status, which is what the law says anyway. In fact, it specifically mentions this: "USCIS acknowledges exceptions including nonimmigrant categories with dual intent and immigrant categories where only adjustment of status provides a pathway to permanent resident status"
Footnote 20: However, maintaining lawful status in a dual intent nonimmigrant category is not sufficient, on its own, to warrant a favorable exercise of discretion
Where in the memo does it say "only if they do not maintain lawful status"? there are plenty of people adjusting under employment based petitions who have non-immigrant visas (eg O-1) which are not dual intent.
"The noncitizen may legitimately come to the United States for a temporary period as an O-1 or O-3 dependent nonimmigrant and depart voluntarily at the end of their authorized stay and, at the same time, lawfully seek to become an LPR of the United States."
"USCIS acknowledges exceptions including nonimmigrant categories with dual intent and immigrant categories where only adjustment of status provides a pathway to permanent resident status"
> While aliens who were inspected and admitted or paroled may request adjustment of
status, as a general matter the discretionary approval of such a request is extraordinary given
Congress’s intent that aliens should depart once the purpose for which they sought parole or
nonimmigrant admission from DHS has been accomplished.
Slight correction here. It is fraud if you intend to stay after getting married. Nobody cares if you get married on a tourist visa and leave the country after.
So if someone is here in the US on an H1B and they want to become a permanent Resident/ Green Card holder, they will have to go back to their country of origin to apply? Otherwise they just stay on their H1B VISA and work.
That’s crazy. If someone is already living and working here, and is legally here (like on a work visa), why shouldn’t they be allowed to apply here? Why require them to lose time and money by traveling somewhere else?
It is to disincentive those on a temporary visa to apply for permanent residency, without eliminating the visa path entirely. What your mental model is optimizing for (easy, efficient) is different than what they are optimizing for (hard, inefficient).
> The policy change could impact hundreds of thousands of people a year and potentially reduce legal immigration further amid a sweeping government crackdown, according to immigration-law experts. President Donald Trump’s administration has introduced a series of restrictions affecting everyone from asylum seekers to students and highly skilled workers.
> The new rules generally apply to any foreigner who came to the US on a temporary non-immigrant visa, including students, employees on H-1B or L visas and visitors. The US awards about 1 million green cards a year, though roughly half of those are for foreign relatives being sponsored by an American citizen. Those applications are generally already processed outside of the US.
(POSIWID [The Purpose of a System Is What It Does])
the wildly corrupt double-standard is breathtaking
There is well documented historical evidence Elon Musk not only illegally overstayed a student visa, he also illegally worked while on that visa AND did illegal drugs publicly while on that visa
Destroyed USAID murdering millions, highlights the President is in the Epstein Files extensively, then six months later is flying on Air Force One, it's all a cruel joke against humanity
Right - this is the natural extension of the dichotomy "There are those the law protects but does not bind and those the law binds but does not protect". The law doesn't bind Musk - those visa infractions are enforced on peasants, not Epstein Class Nobles like him.
Basic empathy would be OK with letting the White refugees entry to the US. But because of the anti-White/Europhobic racism from the left, they lack empathy.
This is such an insanely unpopular move even among some of trump’s supporters.
I really think this will be this version of the republican party’s suicide note.
> it's somehow not that unpopular among the less bright.
politics aside, do you realistically believe that you can view twitter and actually mentally carve out the opinion of a group of people in real life?
that's exactly the issue with twitter.
for one : you're polling twitter users (a TINY subsect of humanity), two : you're extracting opinion from those that seek to broadcast it (an outlier) , and three: twitter never self-exposes the world to a user, it selectively curates and amplifies, and fourth : it's one of the most gamed communications arenas in existence.
you're viewing the world through an itty-bitty twitter-colored monocle and making sweeping accusations across large cohorts, it's not an accurate portrayal of actual human opinion.
I don't think it's a perfectly representative sample of people in real life, so I always view it as an anthropological experiment, as if I'm visiting wild tribes... but still am finding the proportion of people in favor of this decision to be surprisingly high.
Why insanely stupid? No, I don't mean you might not be right but it's nice to hear arguments rather than a pointless slight against people you assume fit your category.
> It's an insanely stupid move, but from what I'm seeing on Twitter, it's somehow not that unpopular among the less bright.
Nah. I’m an Indian-American (born in America, never visited India) working at a FANG company here in SF South Bay and I support this policy.
We need fewer immigrants in America for the next 10 years until we can sort out our domestic issues (education, healthcare, taxation, cost of living).
Once the immigrants are gone and birthright tourism / birthright citizenship to non-US citizen parents is also gone (hopefully next week), politicians can no longer blame immigrants for americas problems.
Or we could build more houses, and schools and hospitals. When did we become a country of scarcity instead of builders? Half of downtown down San Francisco is built on the abandoned boats from migrants that were building too fast to bother moving the boats that brought them to the gold rush so they just built a city on top.
We could create special economic zones like china, allow 200 million immigrants into the country with a goal of a billion people to match the population of china and India. Make it a condition of citizenship that they help build ten homes or similar infrastructure. Immigrants could be the solution to all the problems you cite and they certainly aren’t the reason those problems exist.
It’s sad you don’t realize who you’re getting in bed with. H1Bs and their families are only 0.4% of the population and yet they’re being blamed for -all of americas problems. Must be your first rodeo around the american political system if you actually think they will no longer blame you even if that number shrinks to 0.1%. The economic considerations have always been a pretense. Some of them hate you because you’re brown but not the kind of exploitable cheap labour brown that serves them food and cleans their houses. Politicians see an easy scapegoat to blame for their mismanagement of the country and lean on the narrative. Indians keep leaning republican and learning this lesson over and over again.
Or evidence that they are confident their takeover and transition to single party rule was successful a they are not subject to further accountability.
If something seems irrational it’s usually a sign that you don’t understand the underlying logic. This behavior is totally logical if they aren’t worried about losing power.
No, it is not. And if you fall in love and want to get married to someone on a student visa, your fiancée should not need to leave the country for a year or two to wait for paperwork to process. Which is one of the real world impacts of this change.
The green card process can take 9 to 20 months and applying for a green card demonstrates an intent to immigrate so it's highly likely attempts to return on other temporary visas like a student visa will be denied.
So they likely have to wait out the green card process abroad unless they secure a dual-intent visa like an H-1B.
There's also 75 countries that the US has shut down consular processing for so those people may be locked out getting a green card entirely.
Absolutely not. My wife could apply for German permanent residency as well as now German citizenship from within Germany. She has been living in Germany for 10 years now and at no point in the process did she have to go through a German consulate (she is a US citizen).
For many immigration statuses in Sweden, you must leave and apply outside of the country (outside of Schengen for non EU-citizens) to change status. This was even the case before the current right wing government was elected.
Except for the part about requiring you to leave to process your application.
Wait times to process applications depend on your country of origin and visa type. If you are an H1B from India that was already decades approaching never. Same for Brazil and elsewhere.
And that was before Trump. All that was practically halted.
So the racists in the Trump administration - my guess is Stephen Miller types - are literally making it so that LEGAL immigrants have to spend thousands of dollars and time to go submit a form in another country, when they can do it here? Or online? Why?
The cruelty is the point. They want the economic benefit of immigrants but also want them to live in uncertainty and without any easy path to settling down. Complete and utterly stupid.
This is an absurd change that will have catastrophic consequences in both academia and the private sector. Even if you're a US citizen who is "America First", you will feel the impact, and it will be net negative.
I doubt it. We've seen time and time again that what the USCIS considers "extraordinary" are actually very, very ordinary circumstances. Anybody with proof of employment will qualify.
You don't know what you're talking about. This is the very last stage of the GC process. Before everyone had the choice to do AOS or CP. I personally chose CP. Now there's only the choice of CP. But nothing else has changed. It means you need to fly back to your home country for a few days for the interview and then you get your GC on the spot.
This is only true in the cases for folks on longer visas. If you meet the love of your life and marry them on a tourist visa, you'll be forced to leave your spouse and head back to your country of origin for probably about a year while you wait for USCIS to process I-130.
>If you meet the love of your life and marry them on a tourist visa
As others have said, someone entering the US on a tourist or other nonimmigrant visa, then marrying a US citizen, is inherently committing fraud because the marriage demonstrates intent to stay. In the past, the US was nice about it and let people apply to adjust their status without leaving. This loophole is now closed.
You can enter the US on a tourist visa, without any intent to date or meet someone, commiting no fraud, but then encounter someone in the USA, get to know them, and decide to marry that person, and then marry that person. That can happen in 6 months, the length of a tourist visa.
Are you saying that in such cases, the US rules here are and should be that the married couple should live apart for years due to the bylaws of the USCIS?
>and then marry that person. That can happen in 6 months, the length of a tourist visa
As I said, this is inherently a violation of the commitment the visitor made when entering the US on a non-immigrant visa, as much as (say) exceeding the limit on the hours per week an international student can work.
>Are you saying that in such cases, the US rules here are and should be that the married couple should live apart for years due to the bylaws of the USCIS?
First, this is what the law has always said; there is a reason why non-immigrant, immigrant, and dual-intent visa types exist. The USCIS memo reiterates this, while clarifying that the agency will no longer grant the contrary-to-the-law leeway it has heretofore done regarding non-immigrant, non dual-intent visas.
Second, the alternatives of 1) K-1 (fiancee) visa or 2) CR-1 (spousal) visa exist, and have always been the intended means for the person you mentioned in your situation.
The leeway meant that pretty much anyone, including illegal aliens, could obtain a green card (and be exempt from removal during the application process) by marrying a US citizen.
A US citizen is free to marry anyone, regardless of citizenship. There is no automatic guarantee, however, that the couple can both live in the US.
I can assure you I am intimately familiar with the entire process.
>> It means you need to fly back to your home country for a few days for the interview and then you get your GC on the spot.
Not necessarily. That's the best and most optimistic scenario. I know of people who have waited weeks, even months. It depends on a lot of factors. And now there will be a lot more people booking interviews at every consulate so expect wait times to skyrocket.
Let's saying you're dating somebody on a work visa, if you wanted to marry and sponsor their residency, would they now need to return to their home country to wait for the embassy?
The embassies reviewing applications put a LOT of weight on time spent in person, BUT they also require the US applicant to have domicile. So effectively, the only way to proceed is a long-distance marriage that could take years to process a visa for (remember: move abroad, and you could lose the domicile required to sponsor the green card).
So with our shrinking birthrates, our regularly documented & growing "will never marry" population, immigration effectively cut off, what does the future of this country even look like anymore?
yea, i’d say this is rather ridiculous. it places an undue financial burden on someone to uproot their life after they’ve already made community connections just to stay permanently. this seems very much obviously designed to discourage and halt immigration by making it more painful
This is a good thing. Adjustment of status for those within the USA is backlogged- by years for people from certain countries. Going to the home consulate for the final stamp will save years for many people.
F1 and h1 are non-immigrant visa.
American law only allows a person to reside in the country with one Visa type.
The green card is an immigrant visa - and the new visa is issued through an adjustment of status for those inside the USA (backlogged) or by consulates (nearly immediately).
So this is a good thing. It’s easy to get alarmed.
Because America only has a few processing centers in within the US where is that literally hundreds and hundreds of consulates that can now take on this activity they have always been doing this activity but the vast majority of the backlog is caused by the slow processing of the US processing centers.
Each country can only get 8500 gc’s per year. My numbers are probably incorrect, but some countries have literally hundreds and thousands of people in the pipeline while some other countries only have perhaps thousand. The ones with long waiting periods will clearly benefit.
Edit. Via OpenAI
2025, the cap was about 26,323 per country because the total visa pool was larger.
Important details:
1. The cap applies to:
* Employment-based green cards
* Family preference green cards
2. The cap does NOT apply to:
* Immediate relatives of U.S. citizens
* spouses
* parents
* unmarried children under 21
Those categories are uncapped.
3. The cap is based on:
* Country of birth (“chargeability”)
* Not citizenship.
4. In practice, countries like:
* India
* China
* Mexico
* Philippines
hit the cap constantly, causing very large backlogs.
Simple example:
If 500,000 Indians qualify for employment-based green cards, but only ~25k–30k can be allocated annually under the cap system, the remainder wait in line. That is why Indian EB-2 and EB-3 wait times can stretch into decades.
From what I've gathered, the consular route is nowhere near immediate, especially if they are from one of the countries typically backlogged (e.g. India). You're saying that someone who gets married while on F1 + OPT/STEM should leave with their partner, potentially for months if not years, while pursuing the consular route.
No. All it leans that you go to the consulate on your appt and get your immigrant visa stamped - you get an appointment date and that’s it’s. It was a 3 hour process for me. I flew into Frankfurt and flew out the same evening.
This thread has a lot of comments that seem to associate labor regulations and concern for the poor underclass, and immigrants themselves, with racism. Effective, but not in the intended way.
I support this. The United States is too crowded. I don't want to compete with all these new people for housing. American citizens really need to begin advocating for themselves. For their material interests.
That's a reasonable opinion for one to have, but it can coexist with humane timeframes for changing laws over time. Not grandfathering people already here for a change in policy of this magnitude -- this is inhumane.
Despite being able to show 10 years of consistent working history with income far exceeding the minimum, because I didn’t have a job lined up in the US (who would, or could, in that scenario?) we had to ask my wife's elderly parents to sign affidavits of support to prove I wouldn’t become a "public charge".
There were several times where we felt so insulted by the process, the length, the cost, the targeting from scammy law firms, that we almost gave up. People who have never been through the legal immigration process don't quite understand the amount of work it requires and stress it causes. I feel for the thousands of people who now have little certainty over their futures, and it feels necessary to say: people who come here to contribute their skills and experience don't all come along on an H1-B/L1, nor do they only come from white or european countries.
It's pretty normal not to be able to look for work on a tourist visa in most countries - are you suggesting this is unusual? As far as spouses, they used to have an incredibly asinine system where they told you your spouse _could_ work, without sponsorship, if they got a special form, but getting this form was de facto impossible. It was a very Irish approach, in retrospect. The campaign to fix this was, eventually, successful. (https://reformstamp3.wixsite.com/home)
Which is nonsense, it applies to all non immigrant visas such as work visas. But it’s a line you’ll see various people try to claim as if this isn’t devastating to every spouse of a us citizen who now can’t get a greencard without leaving their us based job and family.
So why would you need to leave the country, if you couldn't figure out why you don't want to issue one in the year+ it takes to jump through the hoops
Just a fun fact, getting a green card means signing up for ten YEARS of tax liabilities in the US. And those 10 years start, AFTER you relinquished it...
But it should be just as obvious that there are plenty of immigrants who are also necessary because they bring new ideas, their education, their incredible work ethic, to fill in the gaps that the US clearly has.
There is one thing that unites all of us (and I do mean us, as I am one of them). We all dream of a society where our hard work can become prosperity for ourselves and for everyone else, a plot of fertile soil that is worth sowing. We all come here with a dream.
And I personally don't mind so much that I'm uplifting people that don't agree with my existence. I just wish that they could stay out of our way so we could all benefit.
Without immigration an imminent depopulation crisis is on its way to America.
We are actually blessed to be in demand as an immigration destination as well as a culture and infrastructure uniquely set up for it.
Squandering that advantage to satisfy xenophobic ideology is yet another demonstration of the Republican Party’s lack of fiscal responsibility. See also: completely random war in Iran, ICE budget increases to pay to kick out taxpayers, tax cuts for billionaires, the current record high budget deficit etc.
Melania Trump
Boris Epshteyn
Elaine Chao
Elon Musk
Ted Cruz
Vivek Ramaswamy
Bobby Jindal
Nikki Haley
David Sacks
Sriram Krishnan
Jensen Huang
Satya Nadella
Sundar Pichai
Lisa Su
Sergey Brin
But you are right that it is ending, just wrong about what: it’s the high economic activity that attracted people which is disappearing thanks to the same people that hate migrants.
I'm not sure there's a "just" here: compared to peer countries, the US is either middle-of-the-pack[1] or significantly more accepting of immigrants[2] depending on which number you pick.
(This isn't to somehow imply that the US isn't hostile to its immigrants, because it is. But the question is whether it's more hostile.)
[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-the-share-of-foreig...
[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/stocks-of-foreign-bo...
Pick any other developed country and the process is generally fairly simple. With some you can just apply for a temporary work visa (possibly without a job) or just apply to immigrate. If you stay in many places long enough on a temporary visa you pretty much get residency and ultimately citizenship.
Beyond what's possible, the time frames for doing anything with US immigration is ridiculously long. Like if you, as a US citizen marry someone overseas it can take upwards of 4 years to get a green card for your spouse and they won't be able to visit the US at all in that time. Why? Because filing a marriage petition means you've shown "immigrant intent" so you'll never get a visit visa (B1/B2) again. Also, the president may well just ban your country from getting any visa. 75 countries are currently on that list.
It's also incredibly easy to make a mistake at some point in the process and that may end up getting an approvable case denied or, worse, you end up with an improvidently granted benefit that cannot be repaired, even if it was an honest mistake.
https://www.reuters.com/world/sweden-tighten-citizenship-rul...
The rules now are tougher than US rules for citizenship. Sweden (like e.g., Norway) has a 8 year wait vs US's 5 year wait.
Sweden has minimum income requirements, none in the US.
[1] https://www.migrationsverket.se/en/you-want-to-apply/live-wi...
My salary in the UK was many multiples of this guideline, but _earning potential_ is not considered. Pragmatism is not really a service offered by USCIS, it's too political. To be on-topic: this move will disincentivize smart but not-yet-wealthy people from immigrating to the "land of opportunity". It was already harder than it had to be.
You would also have enough time to actually enjoy life, not just work till death/health issues come in some empty prestige rat race.
Where else would people get opportunities that could match the United States? I can't think of any country that would even come close.
Isn’t that comparative?
If you are in the EU then the US seems like a holy grail because pay is higher. If you have dual citizenship you can probably avail of the EU safety nets if you had to go back.
If you’re in South East Asia, any EU choice is a huge improvement. Lately there has been strong immigration to Germany for example instead of coming to the US.
After naturalization and giving up my original citizenship, I am a little envious of people with dual citizenship of US + any EU country. It really doesn’t get better than that.
One of the reasons pay in the US is higher is because the EU taxes ordinary people fairly heavily to pay for those social services. But also because of systematic cultural differences between the US and EU that lead to the US having a more dynamic economy that generally pays people more.
> If you’re in South East Asia, any EU choice is a huge improvement. Lately there has been strong immigration to Germany for example instead of coming to the US.
Lately Alternative für Deutschland has been getting a lot of votes in Germany; what kinds of rules (on top of the existing ones) do they think should be in place for people in southeast asia trying to immigrate to Germany?
In the US, local and federal taxes plus property taxes are easily 50-60 percent of your income.
Inflation runs higher in NYC than the rest of the country, as well.
$300k is probably in the top 10-15% for software engineers if I had the guess. And I assume the top 10-15% in Paris is substantially more than 80k?
Edit: Okay, I guess $300k is near the median in SF if you’re including stock options. (Media base salary in SF is 150-160k)
I don't think that's a good assumption. 80k is rather high for Paris. That's a Google salary at their small office there (or it was when I checked a few years ago). I think the OP's comparison was pretty reasonable.
Please don't. Europe has enough ethnic tensions. At least the US is built to be an ethnic melting pot. It's much better to go there.
Later, I was recognized for that potential benefit. Last December, I became a citizen.
If you leave the country for more than 6 months, you need to seek prior approval, and you definitely can lose it. I was on Green Card and when I crossed the border, I was questioned by the customs officer as to why I didn't get my citizenship yet because it was 15 years I was on GC and the point of the GC wasn't to be literally permanent. I quickly got my citizenship after that just in case the same thing happened again.
If you get arrested for a major crime, you can lose your GC but you can only lose your citizenship if you lied or committed fraud at the time of your application, or if you committed treason against the government.
Notably, and very relevant, the UK recently made it substantially harder for UK citizens to bring over spouses to the point that even teachers don't meet the income thresholds necessary to qualify.
Australia is more expensive AND takes longer than the United States for the equivalent spousal visa.
Notably, the exact same UK visa you used has been made substantially harder to get since you applied.
I am very familiar with the US, UK and Australian immigration systems. The US is the easiest, cheapest and fastest of those 3.
It's unfortunate there's friction to the process, but it's by design. 15% of American citizens and permanent residents are foreign born, the highest it's been in 50+ years, so people are successfully making it through the process. Ideally we'd have better levers to (1) modulate the rate of immigration, (2) simplify the process of legal immigration, and (3) still somehow limiting illegal immigration, quasi-legal immigration, overstays, etc. This is not the ideal solution.
> it feels necessary to say: people who come here to contribute their skills and experience don't all come along on an H1-B/L1
Do people migrate to "contribute their skills" to a foreign country, or to improve their lives? Maybe I'm a cynic, but I suspect the vast majority of people throughout history have migrated to improve their lives, not to altruistically benefit a foreign country. And that's fine, that's normal. It's what motivates people, and the U.S. has a long history of being shaped by ambitious people, especially immigrants, who wanted to improve their lot in life.
> nor do they only come from white or european countries.
I don't know if that's necessary to be said, because who thinks that? In recent decades, 85%-90% of immigrants to the U.S. are not white. >90% if you include undocumented immigrants. The trajectory of America from a white majority to white minority country is fueling at least some of the immigration backlash today. But I think for most people, it's a feeling (right or wrong) that jobs becoming harder to find, houses are becoming harder to afford, and more and more people are competing for fewer resources.
I think the two are often linked.
> I don't know if that's necessary to be said, because who thinks that?
Effective January 21, 2026, the Department of State paused all visa issuance to immigrant visa applicants who are nationals of seventy-five countries. The overwhelming majority of the affected countries are not predominantly white and are not European.
Is it though? This administration doesn't exactly have a track record of decisions based on carefully thought out policy implications.
Far from a loophole, applying from inside the US is the only reasonable way to apply for a greencard. Depending on the country of origin, there may not even _be_ a US consulate, and where it exists, the wait can stretch into years, and the odds of approval much lower. You can't reasonably get a job at a US firm while being physically located somewhere else and on the other side of an uncertain and greatly attenuated greencard application process. That's just not how this works.
Whoever thought of this is either intentionally malevolent or inexcusably incomprehending of the immigration process.
Instead we're doing exactly the opposite, cutting down on legal immigration as well. Making it hard for me to believe that it was ever about illegal immigration at all.
I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.
This is just an ego problem I suspect. It bruises the ego of MAGA voters to realize that immigrants actually are smarter, they actually do get paid more (and not because they're "taking the jobs" but because they are actually more desirable.)
> I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.
Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically? Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America?
Not all American citizens have the same level of intelligence, nor do all people attempting to or actually succeeding in immigrating to the US. To the extent that "everything nice" including technological development is grounded in the average level of intelligence of the people currently inhabiting a country (which I think is a substantial part of but not the entirety of the explanation), this doesn't necessarily imply that immigration which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric.
And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration (including some like "immigrating illegally, having a natural-born-citizen child on US soil, and having that child sponsor your legal immigration decades later) that have nothing at all to do with how intelligent a given immigrant is.
And of course, immigration itself changes how "mediocre academically" Americans are, by changing who Americans are - an immigrant might eventually become a citizen; or if they don't their children born on US soil will be.
https://yaledailynews.com/articles/international-grad-school...
That's my point to get the Constitution changed (Amendment #28) to allow an immigrant to run for POTUS. We love US more than natural-born citizens. Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's.
Even if it were true, there are wider effects of immigration that you must consider. The purpose of life isn't to increase GDP. It reflects poorly on you that you must cast your opponents as being stupid and spiteful. Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?
Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant. Or are you referring to the Spanish that settled the west? The French in the far south? The Italians and Jews that populated New York? The British and Africans?
I’m painting in broad strokes, but to say “the American People” as if it’s somehow distinct from immigrants is just ladder pulling.
Immigrant (noun) A person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.
That does not apply to most Americans. They were born there.
I'm not American, but this conversation happens a lot in Canada where I'm from too
I was born in Canada, in a Canadian hospital. I've never had any other home than this country.
I'm descended from immigrants, but I am not an immigrant. I'm not considered indigenous either, that's a whole other type of person.
What a strange thing, to be from a place but have many people say "it's not your place, it's stolen" as if I had a say in that. If I went anywhere else, I would be an immigrant there.
Very odd.
No, it couldn't. Trump tells them to vote a certain way, they do it. Look at Massie's primary as an example.
But America being what it is, it attracts those with most potential creating and sustaining a network effect.
But there’s nothing intrinsically good or bad of the US, and it’s quite easy to mess up the equilibrium and go back to the mediocrity you mentioned
Given that they’re underwater for approval rating on immigration it seems both you and they have misread the room. Most people’s objections have to do with immigrants who are violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat. This is what their campaign was highlighting as a problem. They have not been cracking down specifically on those immigrants. For this, they have no mandate.
There never were "violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat." That was a baseless, racist caricature and it's unfortunate that anyone took it seriously.
And we all still remember "the wall," and Trump complaining about immigration from "shithole countries" like Haiti (versus Norway and Sweden, gee I wonder what the qualifying factor is there) and how Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists across the border. The immigration policy of this administration has always been that immigrants (specifically any non-white immigrants) are an existential danger to American culture and safety. You don't try to wall off your entire southern border because you think the problem is a minority of bad actors. The DHS doesn't deploy white nationalist anti-immigrant propaganda[0,1] because it's just concerned about a criminal element.
And they didn't misread the room. Trumpism is first and foremost a white nationalist nativist movement. People wanted the wall. They wanted immigration stopped. "The immigrants were taking our jobs." "Muslims can't assimilate into civilized society." "Europe is basically a war zone because of all of the Muslims and low-IQ sub-Saharan Africans." These are all things Trump supporters have been saying for years and that the American right has been saying since at least 9/11. "Borders, Language Culture" as Michael Savage used to say. It's all been out in the open.
White Christian conservatives still support Trump's immigration policies by a wide margin. He speaks to the people he intends to speak to. I don't know why so many Black people and Latinos signed up for the "Leopards eating your face" party thinking the leopards wouldn't eat their face, but that's on them. But pretending Trump doesn't have a mandate to purge the country of immigrants is just naive - that is the only mandate he actually has.
[0]https://newrepublic.com/article/199094/dhs-neo-nazi-memes-no...
[1]https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/dhs-white-nati...
I'm not so sure.
I think it would play out like this:
1. 20% H1Bs leave; 2. Those migrants are now in countries of origin, looking for work; 3. Many of the big US tech companies will already have offices in those countries, and those that don't can make new offices if they wanted to; 4. many, but likely not all, of those employees are now working for the same employer (or close enough), just in a different jurisdiction; 5. as none of these employees are physically in US hotspots, all the other stuff that happened in those hotspots because of big tech pay, suffers, conversely all the stuff which was suppressed because of those wages may (possibly) return; 6. two of the things that go down are the number of people transitioning from temporary visa to citizenship, and the available talent pool for the local-to-those-places startup and VC scenes.
E.g. https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-we-ha...
> And by the way, I want to make – I want to be very clear. I’m not just talking about illegal immigration, we have way too many legal immigrants coming into this country, too. 1.5 to 1.6 million legal people coming – Ilhan Omar came in legally and she hates the country. She’s a sleeper cell infiltrator of the United States representing Congress. She hates the country. She hates the west. She should be deported back to where she came from, Somalia. Go run for City Council in Mogadishu. The country is not enriched by people like Ilhan Omar.
Not really.
The answer is: have a fair, transparent and function system.
Then - yes - you can totally 'increase' (or decrease) as needed.
'Increase a bit' likely the right thing to do - but it's a completely separate question.
But throwing Green Card holders out is completely insane, grabbing people out of church and schools and putting them into detention without oversight is cruel and inhumane.
The national debate is insane.
Just basic, normal, reasonable policy and process.
That's it.
Like DMV level stuff.
Then you can adjust the numbers one way or another.
So, the idea of illegal immigration as a vice worth cracking down on and punishing has not been consistently applied by the people publicly condemning it (like this current administration), meaning there is a very real sense in which the distinction between illegal and legal immigration is not real.
all laws, including immigration laws, should be enforced consistently and universally, and without bias. and the laws should be changed to make it much simpler and easier to immigrate especially if you are able to already secure employment, housing, and health insurance.
Those that jumped through all the hoops above bar, paid their dues in a messed up system where they bit their upper lip and got through it, and have been extremely frustrated at others trying to game the system.
When I heard the crowd roar every time Trump said “we’re going to kick them out” I knew exactly what the crowd was cheering. Trump never used those moments to say “but America is a nation of immigrants and we celebrate their contributions”. He wanted to rile up a crowd while maintaining a fig-leaf of “oh it’s only illegals who are evil”
You don’t have to have a PhD to understand the appeal and consequences of nativist populism — just the slightest understanding of history.
A lot of those people had no issue with ICE bullying and detaining legal immigrants.
Stephen Miller is upset he never got to experience that.
Immigrants from Europe will some how get an exception depending on their skin color. Same goes for South Africans
1. Illegal immigration is bad, and we should do more to reduce it.
2. Immigration (any kind) is too numerous. Eg someone could say "Nashua, New Hampshire is now 17.2% foreign born and I think that is too high." Within 2. there are multiple separate reasons to have the position. One could think that its bad for assimilation, or one could be upset that the Nashua school system's budget increases are almost completely due to having to hire more ELL staff to accommodate the rapid rise in non-English speakers in a school system that used to be almost entirely English speakers. I'm sure there are more complicated examples but I hope that one is easy to understand.
3. Immigration (any kind) is used to lower wages of the working and middle class via labor and program abuses. At the low end, this used to be a leftist talking point (the kind Bernie Sanders once talked about). At the high end, it is grousing about H1B abuses. Despite many agreeing that th program has large abuses, H1Bs are legal immigrants.
Your idea of an "easy solution" doesn't remotely correspond to a solution for people who think #2 or #3. Even for #1, someone who dislikes illegal immigration does not necessarily want more legal immigration, though that used to be a very common view (eg, Bill Clinton in the 1990s, I think George Bush too). If a person believes #3, increasing the number of legal immigrants may simply increase the corresponding abuses.
n.b. the text above is descriptive, not normative.
> If I walk into your house uninvited, that’s trespassing.
Sure.
What happens if your kid invites round a friend of theirs you don't like?
What happens if you are a kid and your sibling does?
What happens if you rent out a room to a lodger, and the lodger invites someone over?
What happens if you're a tenant in a rental, and the landlord sends in an emergency plumber?
Remember, every single migrant working illegally in your country is someone that another person in your country wanted to employ; if you're in the US, most of those employers will be selling you your food and your houses, which most of you seem to like, while some were South Koreans making data centres which you personally may hate but your pension funds love.
What the lower classes are concerned about is the value of their labor relative to others’, while the upper classes are concerned with getting a good deal by avoiding increases to the labor-cost floor. Bribes/subsidies and offered scams, have worked so far.
If the federal government, as an institution, were genuinely concerned about illegal immigration, it would have a different set of tactics. Start by punishing the sources of capital (fewer people), then property owners (more people), and only afterward the laborers themselves (many people).
What I see is a combination of class warfare and political theater, not a sincere effort to enforce the law. The law is incidental, made obvious by the exceptions the administration has had to carve out for certain industries.
Out groups are always the initial targets for these movements, but as time goes on any form of dissent will cause narcissistic wounding and will be treated accordingly.
What do you think they mean by "100 million"?
The irony is that if anyone thinks they are going to solve this problem - I have a bridge to sell. If GoP solves this then they are going to lose of the biggest talking points in next elections. I can see this being challenged and drama played out for long time saying "other side" is not letting them move forward with it.
All the while the "extraordinary" Green Card will actually be "ordinary" - done by greasing POTUS palms. Because POTUS and his supporters are hell bent on turning America into a third world low trust country.
First, a lot of the immigrants that people complain about now are only immigrants because the US fucked up their country. Venezuela is the poster child for this. There are consqeuences to destabilizing other countries for American corporate interests.
Second, companies like illegal immigration. It allows them to pay people sub-minimum wage in horrible working conditions and if the workers every complain, you just call in ICE to deport them. You pay a small fine for employing undocumented migrants and the next day hire a new batch. You probably even have avoided paying wages to the deported workers.
Third, a lot of attention is paid to people who sneak into the country. This is the minority. Also, "entering without inspection" (that's the legal term) is a civil infraction (unless you've previously been deported; then it's a crime), much like a traffic ticket. You technically aren't a criminal if you do this.
But the majority of undocumented migrants are visa overstayers. They get a legal visa to come to the US, often a visit visa, a student visa or a temporary work permit (eg J1, H2A, H2b) and just don't leave.
And to answer your implied question, it's not about illegal immigration. It's about white supremacy and the exploitation of labor under capitalism.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre, 1944
Let's say hypothetically the UK increased its population by around 3 million since 2020, including one particular influx designed and implemented by Boris Johnson to suppress wage inflation, which had a direct effect on the lower end of the job market for the native population. You could also easily argue it led to a direct surge in popularity of the far right party Reform.
Purely hypothetical of course...
You'd consider that a good thing?
I suppose by “all factors” I mean all factors aside from exploitation and xenophobia, but I hope we could at least move the Overton window back that far.
My understanding is that many of us, perhaps including the author of the comment to which you are responding, would like to see at lease some small, inching movement towards such a system.
For example, you want small inching movement. From what starting point? Inching movement from the near-zero flows of the mid-20th century? Inching movement from the mass flows of the 21st century? Both ideas would have major consequences, and if you are going to advocate for mass social change, you should think it out and advocate with care and thoughtfulness.
Agreed, care and thoughtfulness should be the rule, not the exception. Presently we are getting neither. I’m a software developer, I don’t work in policy; but I believe our immigration position should be aligned with policy goals and I’m not sure we have any of those, either.
In any case, re-categorizing so many legal immigrants in order to imprison them strikes me as pointless and fundamentally wrong.
If I advocated abolition in the 19th century, it would be missing the point to turn around and say "oh yeah? And how many slaves would you like to free per year, and what effects do you expect that to have? Include examples of past slave rebellions"
The obvious assumption is that they mean from where we are right now. We're not going to suddenly be at the mid-20th century again. This comes off as argumentative more than curious (as do your other comments in this thread, for what it's worth).
No, it isn't. It is a change; whether it's acceleration or velocity is an implementation detail. Whether it should be changed suddenly or gradually is the spec.
You are right that the Native Americans were completely misplaced by immigrants, but immigration made the US what it is today and I see no reason it won't continue to make the US a uniquely strong country.
I think it’s self evident that the U.S. benefited greatly from its mass immigration inflows in the 19th and 20th centuries.
"Oh, you support immigration? Write an entire nation's immigration policy. Can't/won't do it? You must be a paid shill."
People are allowed to have opinions without regurgitating policy documents on demand.
I love immigration. We should have lots of immigration! But it should occur within consistently, fairly enforced laws passed by our legislative system. I get that our immigration system is arguably broken and that it's very difficult to pass meaningful legislation, but that doesn't mean we should just allow whoever is president to dictate immigration policy.
Isn’t this straw man? Who said anything about eliminating laws or being inconsistent about legal immigration? The top comment was only pointing out that slowing the flow of legal immigration does not fix illegal immigration and probably makes it worse. Some people don’t love immigration or feel we should have lots, despite the benefits, and sometimes those people say contradictory things.
If there was a legal pickpocketing, and someone claimed to only be opposed to illegal pickpocketing, then it would be reasonable to point out that unless they're lying about their intent a solution to preventing illegal pickpocketing would be to make it all legal.
The analogy falls apart because nobody argues that they are "only" opposed to illegal pickpicketing.
If people are opposed to any form of immigration, then they should just admit that, rather than pretend they're only opposed to illegal immigration.
b. Not opposed to someone taking my money in exchange for goods or services I want.
a. Opposed to someone moving into my country against my will and the law just because they want to, “for a better life”.
b. Not opposed to someone moving into my country because I married them and want them here.
There’s a whole spectrum between a and b, but I think most people are against a.
Legal pickpocketing is taxes you’re opposed to, or wages being garnished.
In theory people who say they’re only against illegal immigration are saying they completely agree with all policies regarding legal immigration, now and maybe into the future. Likely not what these people actually believe because while possible it would be a silly position. They’re probably just saying it to try to find some common ground with very pro immigration people. Likely a fools errand.
I want to keep the US a destination for hard work and smarts and striking out on your own. Don’t shelter your lazy kid, show them the beauty of complexity and mastery. Have them master some difficult skills, whether that’s a second language or botany or math or public speaking or building things. We are all responsible to each other for excellence. Respond to the opportunities for excellence, of what we can build together, dont’t yield to sloth and resentment being satisfied with turning your back on your own potential. The future is awesome and we welcome all who want to contribute! We welcome competition - better to be second best to the best than turning your back and cutting yourself off from the course of history.
If the logic is that people who are born somewhere else shouldn't have any agency over immigration laws, well, why does someone who lives in some town in my country with a negligible immigrant population get a say in who I and my colleagues can invite to work with us, and who I and my neighbors can invite to live with us?
Tying this back to OP's comment, it's hard to see these policy changes as any sort of legitimate protectionism and it's just as hard to divorce them from the justifications given by people who start with "I'm not anti-immigrant".
so there a huge need to have a difficult policy discussion about what to do without cratering the economy.
but when you start removing civil liberties and running around in gangs grabbing random brown people off the streets and sending them to indefinate detention in the middle of nowhere, dumping people in Somalia, claiming you have the right kill anyone you want, you shouldn't be surprised when people start waving around the f word.
You've been propagandized to believe that is happening. Remember when we were grabbing random brown people, including Black Olympian school superintendents right off the streets and sending them to concentration camps?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/27/us/ian-roberts-des-moines-sup...
Months later the truth comes out: illegal alien with guns in his possession, which is a federal crime. Deportation order issued under Biden's administration.
The post-truth era has made the f word effectively meaningless.
1) Someone can be against illegal immigration and for legal immigration.
2) That same person's idea about who should immigrate to the country may exclude most or all of the people who are currently immigrating illegally.
It's not like you can only be against illegal immigration because they forgot to fill out some form. Legal immigration has a component of deciding who gets in.
Being "anti illegal immigrant" doesn't have to imply you let in whoever wants as long as they follow some process. You are taking away the agency of the people to select its immigrants.
USCIS doesn't have the authority to just unlawfully deny a case. It can be challenged in court. They can make your life really difficult. For example, they can put you in removal proceedings if you're an overstayer with a petition that they unlawfully deny and then you're out of status. So now you have to go to immigration court, where the odds are stacked against you, and either get your case approved there or get removal proceedings cancelled. And the administration is holding certain people in removal without bond even if they've been here for decades. And some people, like those on ESTA, have waived their right to see an immigration judge at all.
They prefer what's called "consular processing" (applying outside of the country vs "adjustment of status" in country) is that it takes way longer and the administration has way more power to arbitrarily deny your case, as is the case with certain current banned countries. The Supreme Court ruled the president's power to limit visas to certain countries can't be challenged. The case was from the first Trump term. It's called Trump v. Hawaii [1].
But one thing they are also doing, which is evil, is taking advantage of people come to a USCIS interview without an immigration attorney. They separate the couple and threaten the US citizen that they're committing fraud and to withdraw the case or they get the immigrant to admit things that are false or they just outright deny the case on faulty grounds because people aren't knowledgeable enough to fight back without a professional. It is evil.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Hawaii
"Forcing green card applicants to leave will render many green card applicants’ ineligible because, when they leave the United States, they will trigger the 3- or 10-year bars on receiving an immigrant visa based on accrual of unlawful presence."
https://www.uscis.gov/laws-and-policy/other-resources/unlawf...
Note particularly the following:
> Asylees and asylum applicants: Generally, time while a bona fide asylum application is pending is not counted as unlawful presence.
So unless there's currently a huge backlog of people staying here illegally who are somehow eligible for green cards in spite of this fact, the government changing it's policies to require new applicants do so from overseas is not itself causing these applicants to violate immigration law.
https://refugeerights.org/news-resources/new-data-shows-visa...
With the raw data from 2023-2024 here: https://refugeerights.app.box.com/s/bizdcdev37oknqdwg8p93afi...
USCIS doesn't publish data on consular processing times, but even AoS processing were backlogged 3+ years. https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-processes-and-pr...
The majority of consular offices are, in fact, backlogged.
A number of people, especially in tech sector, legally stay in US while their GC is being processed. They have kids born in the USA. If such people were to leave USA to seek green card:
- the kids must first get visas to their parent's countries
- once reaching the other country, consular offices now have multi year wait lines for getting an appointment with a office to even hear your case.
- parents may stay in that country but what if kids run out of their visa? A number of countries offer citizenship via parents e.g. Indian parents can obtain Indian citizenship for their kids but it also means letting go of the kids' US citizenship. And what if the parent's country does not have such mechanism?
It's completely illogical that a person must first stay in a country for 5 years to become eligible for a green card and then leave for x years to get a green card to come back !! this is just a tactic to get non-immigrant visa holders out of the country.
This is wrong. There is no minimum time in the country for a green card. You are thinking of citizenship. That is different.
We've gone from perpetually punting the football on comprehensive immigration reform, to people saying, "Good, go back home, we don't want you here."
The same people who want to paint the Statue of Liberty gold seem to have no clue what it represents.
On one hand, I'm so relieved that I have been able to dodge everything that the administration has been throwing at immigrant (legal and illegal alike), trying to see what sticks, like mass deportations, border wall expansion, visa restrictions, asylum crackdown, H-1B cuts, and chain Migration Ban.
On the other hand, we cannot apply for citizenship for 3 more years, even though me and my wife have been in the US for combined 25+ years, and paid over $100,000 in taxes last year alone, and it's jarring to imagine what the administration will come up with next to make the process less straightforward than it seems.
Most disturbing is the fact that a lot of people I know who climbed the same ladder will go out and cheer what the administration is doing.
Genuinely curious, what does taxes have to do with it? Everyone pays taxes, legal or illegal in some form.
I don’t think paying your dues should make you more likely to get through the pipeline. After all, you paid those taxes because you made good money, which is what people come here for.
All things that we should be supporting if we are indeed wishing our nation to prosper.
A plurality of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, so we’re essentially turning away someone who is building up our country.
Does anyone know if this mean that I as a US citizen, who has a spouse who has already applied/submitted their application (but has been waiting while the government drags its feet on it for over half a year), will now need to say goodbye? Things were already getting blurry when we moved quickly to get things in when we saw the winds in 24....
This is all so terrifying.
On the other hand I've always wondered if most of America's competitive advantage at driving tech innovation hasn't simply been through capturing the ROI of other more social minded countries investing in public education. It could be a massive long term benefit to Europe and Asia especially if they get to keep the talent they created, and more globally distributed innovation seems like it could have some benefits to global welfare.
The requirement of being permanently obligated to pay us taxes on global income, if you have any kind of global mobility, is not worth it when you look at the situation objectively. The US is the only country that requires this, and signing up is voluntarily.
So while US immigration continues to act as though people will jump through any hoop they put up in order to be granted the extreme privilege of being able to live in the country indefinitely, it’s worth realising it’s not the 70s anymore and thats a goal many people are no longer optimizing for. In fact the opposite - the most talented people I know are all planning their lives to not settle long term in the US.
1) Those who believe that every human born on this planet has a basic right to move to and live in, any country that they want.
2) Those who believe that the people who are currently citizens of countries around the world, have the right to set strict restrictions on who is allowed to move there.
These two schools are fundamentally at odds with each other. Some members of both camps will go to the extreme to enforce their position and demonize anyone in the other camp.
This is an extremely small group of people.
Most of them pretend to be in the group to virtue-signal.
Same with homeless problem. We must not move/clear homeless camps (as long as those camps aren't next to my house, of course).
The Trump administration is not in camp 2.
The Trump administration, as this rule clearly illustrates, is in camp 3: Those who believe that the people who are not currently citizens of your country should never be able to become so, and should be punished for even trying.
The problem is not that the system is "strict" in the sense of holding an incredibly high bar. The problem is that the system is arbitrary - there is no process you can follow that will give you a high degree of confidence that you'll be allowed to enter, or even that a decision _will be made at all_ in a fair manner, no matter who you are (unless you're a personal friend of the administration) - as opposed to you being randomly arrested by ICE halfway through waiting for a decision. And even if there were such a process, you would have no confidence that it wouldn't change retroactively in another week.
It is laughably naive to believe that they are doing this in good faith out of any sense of strictly filtering immigrants. There's exactly one explanation that isn't transparently pretextual, and you and I both know what it is.
This is basically the longtime practice of countries like UAE, and historically it is categorized under camp 2; no need to create a third camp here. It’s not as if no foreigners ever in such countries become citizens – while most immigrants are meant to be guestworkers who eventually return to their own countries, there are still laws to confer citizenship on exemplary foreigners.
The UAE and the US (as of the last year and a half) don't (just) have strict immigration laws. Instead, they have corrupt and abusive immigration systems which operate outside of national and international laws.
Again, the local laws allow for conferring citizenship on exemplary foreigners, which does happen, and so such countries fit easily into camp 2 by which a country has the right to choose who and who not it wishes to make citizens.
Most of the disagreement is where a given country should be on the spectrum of zero immigration and fully open immigration.
You can know we have the right to set strict regulations, and also object to driving smart hardworking people away from your country for no reason.
It seems obvious to me that there is no moral reason that some people should only be allowed to live in certain places.
It helps that a decent portion of the population hates and/or is fearful anyone different from themselves. That is what's allowed for these even more draconian and brutal measures.
My personal preference would be to allow nearly unlimited legal immigration but strip welfare programs for all. In this way we allow anyone and everyone to become an economic participant, voting participant after the naturalization process, and mitigate those immigrating purely for handouts.
But I haven't thought through this policy well. Maybe there is something this seemingly solution is missing.
What about long term immigrants who end up disabled through no fault of their own? Or who get cancer? Or who end up having a child (who is an American citizen) and that child is special needs and the immigrant can't manage a full time job and care for their child? If they get pregnant and end up on bed rest or with a traumatic birth that takes them out of the workforce for a period of time?
There are ways to end up needing to rely on welfare that aren't due to laziness or a desire for handouts.
If the answer is 'kick them out', I'd be worried about what we're teaching our American kids watching. There are two lessons they could pick up, and neither is good for their moral development or sense of self. The first is that anyone who lacks the ability to work has no value, and that will engender greater alienation and isolation as they place all of their self-worth on their ability to earn money. They'll look upon the elderly, children, and caretakers with disdain (Interestingly, this probably won't help the birth rates either...). The second is that they are protected but those people should be disposed of when they're not useful. This will make them arrogant and introduce the idea of dehumanizing other groups, which will further the cracks of division in our society.
It take tremendous effort to immigrate, legally or illegally. Anyone telling you that they are lazy is obviously lying.
That doesn't make any sense. If you want "cheap labor [that] can't complain about mistreatment," you want a weak border, not a strong one, because a weak border creates a larger pool of illegal immigrants to draw from.
A strong border, at a minimum, reduces the supply of illegal immigrants, and may even push the employer into hiring people with legal immigration status who can complain and sue over mistreatment.
> It helps that a decent portion of the population hates and/or is fearful anyone different from themselves. That is what's allowed for these even more draconian and brutal measures.
I'd put it another way: a large part of the population has been put under a lot of stress and pressure, while simultaneously being intensely conditioned to not blame the people actually responsible. That stress has to go somewhere. Don't blame the little guys, even if you find them contemptible because they're not from your culture. Blaming the little guy (for "hat[ing]...anyone different from themselves") is another aspect of the conditioning that protects those actually responsible.
A larger pool with more rights and less fear of being deported. That means it's easier for them to pick and choose the jobs they do or even to start their own businesses.
They could, for example, form a union without the fear of deportation.
Look, if this were all about stopping illegal immigration, there are very fast paths to doing that. A prime one would be punishing not the immigrant, but the employer of the immigrant. Fine every farm in the US that employs an illegal immigrant and you'd quickly see the number of those jobs being worked drop.
But that's not what ICE is about which is why they and legislators haven't done that really basic enforcement.
Heck, at the start of this admin, Trump had to pull back ICE from raiding farms because the business interests of the farmers collided with the xenophobia of Steven Miller.
What you are saying used to happen but not anymore.
What is minimum qualifications? Enough to get an interview?
With so many tech layoffs now it would be nearly impossible for most roles to claim there’s nobody else available, and under the current administration the historical games are no longer just flying below the radar. That hasn’t stopped some companies from still trying though.
Thats obviously extreme but given the abuse in the status quo it’s hard to defend what was going on and whine about this now. Some folks are obviously angry, but that anger is better directed at those that were abusing the system not those trying to fix it.
The H1B system was stupid. That doesn't justify any of what the Trump admin has been doing.
Since USCIS is blocking Adjustment of Status, and the Department of State is blocking green card emission for citizens of 75 countries, this means that if you are from the following countries you are effectively banned from getting a Green Card:
Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, The Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/i...
I never considered illegal immigration, nor will I ever - I value predictable outcomes.
But looking at these new rules, I can't help but think that it really punishes people who want to play by the rules and sets the price for ones that don't to approximately $15k.
Actually, it kind of make sense why only the most desperate try to get into the US , people who have something to lose are naturally repelled by the bureaucracy.
If you have filed I485 and they fail to process it before your current visa expires (D/S ends like F1 OPT). Then what? You just have to leave, abandon AOS and re-apply for CR1?
It’s insane that the simplest immigrant pathway; spousal green card could take 12+ months and may now require temporarily moving and being separated. Guess I actually will be paying $4K for a lawyer (plus the 3-4K just to file the USCIS forms).
I wish they would just have a simple fast lane for the 100% legal, non-complicated case.
Immigration policy in the current administration (which seems to be driven by Stephen Miller) is not based around legalaities, it's based around cutting immigration as much as possible because that's what satisfies Trump's voter base. These people do not care if you 'did it the right way'. They have an atavistic hatred of foreigners.
White immigrants are fine with this administration.
"All but 3 of 6,069 refugees taken in by Trump are White South Africans"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/05/22/trump-south-a...
Even the current right wing party CDU doesn't seem to want to make migration harder, but when the extremist party AfD gets voted into office, an already highly damaged balance will break.
Sad how people become so detected from reality that they make their society irrelevant and destroying a lot of wealth in the process.
To me it feels like the US pretends they don’t need immigrants when:
1. The overwhelming majority of current US residents were immigrants themselves at some point in the last 150 years (only natives were there, everyone else immigrated from somewhere)
2. The US wouldn’t function without illegal immigrants
3. Every country is short of workers in one domain or another. Encouraging immigration in these domains (see how Canada does it for instance) would be the smart move. But instead… yeah let’s make it even harder across the board
2. The US not functioning without illegal immigrants is a bad thing. More often than not, employers like illegal immigrants because they can abuse them in some way or another. If you actually interact with illegal immigrants or the people that employ them, this is clear. “We need modern indentured servitude” is not the country I want to live in. I would rather these industries just be subsidized by the government to whatever extent it takes for US citizens to take the jobs with all of the protections we expect workers to have.
3. Not every country is short of workers. Employers may be short of workers that they can lord over, but refer back to point 2. Pointing to Canada’s policy as an example of a “smart move” is a strange play.
The current administration is certainly not working on the above premises, but I’m floored when I hear supposedly progressive people going on about who is going to work the psychologically scarring meatpacking plants if we don’t take on an undefined number of people who are only here to get shit on for a good paycheck. I have compassion for illegal immigrants, which is exactly why I don’t want them in the US.
My point was that with the sorely lacking rules already in place, illegal immigration is a problem and at the same time there is still a supply problem.
So acting even more high and mighty like it’s the greatest place on earth to be and require people who want in to grovel even more certainly isn’t good policy.
I’m also confused why you think Canada isn’t doing it better? You can immigrate but your profile needs to match what the country needs: its win win, because once you’re there you have a fair chance at a good life (integration, job, etc) vs taking anyone in and then having issues with people who can’t find jobs, be happy in the country, and integrate into society.
But the process around the US visa and immigration program is a lot more hostile than it needs to be. I had the displeasure to deal with this grinder and it’s really showing that the attitude is “you’re less than nothing, it’s up to you to prove you’re worthy of us even reading the forms you filled in and paid for, fuck you very much”
EU countries are working on imigration rules that would allow for bringing imigrant labour without ever extending citizen privileges to them. A sort of permanent uderclass. This is what voters want at this time.
Today's news make this crystal clear: the current admin does not want citizens marrying outside the country, regardless of how quickly the marriage rate among US population is falling.
I suppose little matters from the before days, but I've only been a permanent resident for 2 years so maybe this timeline helps: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Green_Card_Application#Timel...
The explicit purpose of this is to reduce legal immigration, and reduce the number of people becoming citizens.
There is no world in which the same racist, fascist administration doing this does anything remotely like what you describe.
I don't get it.
If you aren’t lucky enough, you’re just screwed.
If they simply showed up or overstayed a visa illegally, then it's actually totally reasonable that before they can be given permanent resident status, they should be demonstrating compliance with immigration laws by not being here illegally.
Yet again with Trump's bizarre mixture of a nugget of a reasonable (and popular) idea with a barrel of nonsense and chaos. It's the same as with tariffs. Tariff things produced by adversaries, that we are well-positioned to make here ourselves and stimulate a good domestic industry with good-paying jobs? Yeah, but also let's tariff a ton of things we need that we don't even freaking make or grow here, and against our geopolitical allies to boot.
This government has a really bad reputation for taking one or two cases and making an example of them and then telling the other 98% they deserve it. I hope at some point this stops and someone rationalizes whatever is going on in my country
In recent years, they've combined yet another favorite, racism, to get that tasty peanut butter chocolatey goodness to get the base angry enough to go to the polls to vote based on that.
I hold on to hope that somehow, someday, we can overcome this nonsense. I have nothing to support this so I get in this sense it makes me a man of faith.
Whats the equivalent policy for other countries? Can you stay like you could prior to this?
Graduate visa's are the same for example, where you cannot apply abroad, so you must be careful not to leave the country between graduating and getting that visa.
Pretty much all forms of permission to stay in the UK other than asylum can only be granted from within the country if you hold an existing long term status. So if you're visiting as a tourist you can't then decide to apply for a spouse visa or even a working holiday or student visa without leaving the country first. If you're already on a student visa or a work visa or similar you can change categories without having to leave.
The graduate visa is essentially an extension to the student visa with slightly different permissions - it makes sense that you can only apply to extend if you're in country and you view it from that lens.
The historic reason behind all this is that there used to be a substantial difference between being granted "leave to enter" and "leave to remain" (out of country vs in country applications). Leave to enter used to be granted by embassies etc and the foreign office, but leave to remain was granted by the home office. Now the home office handles everything in the UK centrally so the distinction is not significant.
It basically means a huge percentage of these people might never come back. Once you go back to your home country, life moves on. Your plans change. Your path changes. And that could be terrible for the economy.
Hundreds of thousands of people either wouldn’t enter the local economy, or they’d be delayed for a very long time. I really don’t see companies being okay with that. Think about all the students who are ready to enter the job market. Instead, they’d have to go back home, wait for a visa, and only then come back. That kills the speed of the economy and makes hiring way more unpredictable.Or at the very least, it would seriously slow things down.
Many critical roles are filled with doctors who are here on visas because there simply aren’t American graduates who want those jobs. I’m talking about jobs being doctors in hospitals and towns and cities that are not the most desirable.
Many of those doctors filling these positions today are immigrants who are on visas. They want to get green cards and stay here. They end up living long term in those communities caring for patients in them over the years.
If this policy goes into effect it will hurt all of that. And actually many of these hospitals and less desirable areas are placed with lots of Trump voters too.
In general if someone has spent years working hard with a visa and is law abiding and contributes to the community I don’t understand the purpose of making immigration harder. And I especially don’t understand why you would make it harder for doctors and engineers and other educated people who are here on visas to get a green card.
Can someone explain the rationale?
The current administration is sending a pretty clear message to immigrants.
How could this ever help to build stronger industries or trade relationships?
If somebody hands you a shit sandwich you don't need to pretend it tastes good.
If you read "the current US administration and their voter base" it sure feels like hate.
I used to visit the US a lot. I haven't been for a long time and as long as the current regime remains in place I'll spend my time and money in places where I can be sure not to be mistreated.
That's not because I fear I would be hated in the places I would actually visit, but because I have no interest in being at the mercy of US immigration. It doesn't matter that the risk isn't great - it is high enough and the potential consequences severe enough that it's put the US in the same category as high crime third world countries for me in terms of risk.
Already 20 years ago it was more stressful to go through immigration in the US, even as a white man from a rich country, than in dictatorships like China. As it stands now, I wouldn't hesitate to visit China, but I would hesitate to even transit the US.
It’s just facts but they’ve been boiling the frog and doing so many idiotic and horrific things at once that people have completely checked out.
This move, like everything the MAGA administration does, will only weaken the US.
Even better for other countries, anyone the US produces who isn't a raging idiot, also are more likely to want to immigrate from the US.
Well, we're continuing to find out. We haven't exactly scraped rocked bottom yet.
Skilled labor immigration is great for everyone involved, and bad only for the countries that suffer the brain drain.
But it's not zero-sum. The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity.
That's a pretty big qualifier!
> The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity
Isn't it the opposite? Creating wealth and technology in India helps a billion quite poor people. Creating wealth in the U.S. helps 300 million already rich people.
It's created by an entire ecosystem that allows a project like that to be conceived and executed in such a way that has benefited the entire world, including the poor in India.
It's a big qualifier, but like I said, it's not zero-sum.
No economist will argue that limiting skilled labor immigration (or any immigration, really!) is an optimal policy for improving the lives of the poor elsewhere. It just doesn't work that way.
The other line of argument is again the fault-tolerance I mentioned above, maybe see Taleb or distributed systems. Maximizing efficiency has trade-offs in resiliency. Yes it might be less efficient for there to be 3 ecosystems in 3 countries instead of 1, but its more resilient to shocks. We saw the risks of highly efficient but single point of failure supply chains materialize just a few years ago during the pandemic.
It's also pretty obvious that the tech companies being in the US benefits the US more than other countries. The big salaries are in the bay area, the tax revenue goes to the US, all the ex-Googlers founding new companies found them in the US etc.. So of course Google being founded in country X would benefit country X more than it being founded in the US.
Exactly. Obviously it’s better for China that BYD and Huawei were founded in China rather than the US. It’s better for Korea that Samsung and LG were founded there instead of the U.S.
It wouldn't have been able to do it without US companies, and it's not particularly a model that can be replicated that easily, though in general, economic policy that focus on exporting goods indeed tend to be the most successful.
Still doesn't mean the US should be preventing Chinese from immigrating here, so it's just utterly besides the point.
The United States was a British colony where demand for raw supplies led to an organic development of railroads, coupled with technological transfer from businessmen in the UK hoping to capitalize on this nascent market.
Textile manufacturing was still a thing and we were in the very early innings of the global Industrial Revolution. The two world wars that destroyed Europe were also immensely helpful to the insulated US.
Why are you asking me questions for which there are easily available answers? Honestly, you might as well have asked an LLM.
Stop looking for evidence that only confirms your biases and start trying to disprove your hypothesis. Only when there's nothing left to disprove can you claim your hypothesis _may_ be right, though you can't ever know for sure.
By the way, immigrant labor was a massive force behind US industrialization so you're just totally lost at this point. Industrialization has always depended on interaction with rich economies. From capital flows to technology transfer, export markets, immigration, empire, or trade networks. No major industrial power developed in total isolation.
Developing countries have structural reasons for why they are underdeveloped. This is a very complicated topic, and one for which there is no shortage of academic interest. I suggest starting from William Easterly's "The Elusive Quest for Growth".
I quote here from the book review MIT Press:
> What is necessary for growth is that government incentives induce investment in collective goods like education, health, and the rule of law
What's Easterly's qualifications? Has he ever successfully improved the economy of a developing country? I'd rather learn what LKY or Park Chung Hee or heck even Deng Xiaoping or Pinochet had to say.
If you want to know Easterly's qualifications, just read his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly
Being ignorant is a choice.
Pinochet is one of several autocratic rulers who put in place frameworks that resulted in economic miracles in their countries.
Especially in Asia and Latin America, I don’t think there’s a single country that tried democracy before economic development that didn’t end up a failure. I’d rather be a Chinese living under effective authoritarian capitalism than an Indian living under dysfunctional social democracy.
> If you want to know Easterly's qualifications, just read his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly
So he’s never done anything? He’s never built an economy or part of an economy?
> Being ignorant is a choice.
Indeed. And confusing credentials for knowledge is a choice too.
Name one of these innovations preferably made during the first 100 years of the revolution, which we can take to have started in 1712 with the first deployment of a practical steam engine built by Thomas Newcomen and John Calley at a coal mine. Certainly it had started by then.
100 years after 1712, all of the decisionmakers in Europe were rapidly waking up to the fact that the industrial revolution was a big deal because steam-driven textile mills, ironworks, and canals were changing Britain’s economy.
By 1812, many hundreds had already contributed some kind of innovation toward that outcome: an improvement in a machine or a process, a scientific or economic or sociological insight useful in industry or a new law or business practice.
Name one of those many hundreds that did not have two parents and four grandparents and eight great-grandparents of British ancestry.
I could probably find other French engineers fleeing the revolution, if need be.
But even if we suppose there are a few more (as you suggest), the involvement of a few white immigrants is not a good argument for non-white immigration.
If the goal is to argue for non-white immigration, the smart tactic would have been to leave the industrial revolution in the UK completely out of the argument so as to avoid creating an opening for someone like me to point out that the critical first 100 years of that revolution was led and innovated by more than 99% Brits with the rest being white immigrants.
A big argument for letting people emigrate is that they owe no real debt to the county where they are born, or the city, or anything like that. They aren't selfs owned by a nobleman. If moving increases their personal lot, why should we stop them?
An Indian’s greatest accomplishment in life is leaving India.
Just take a look at the categories of Green Cards available on USCIS' website[0], and think about how many of them will be unavailable if you're back in your home country.
* Green Card via Family? 18 months, minimum, for approval.
* Green Card via Employment? Well, self-deporting likely means the loss of said job opportunity, thus your ability to convert to LPR status
* via Special Worker? Here's hoping you're not an Iraq of Afghani national that might be persecuted back in said home country for cooperating with the US Government.
* via Refugee or Asylee Status, or as Victims of Abuse? Are we fucking kidding, here? Forcing refugees/asylum seekers/abuse victims back to their home countries is deliberately cruel, and I'm going to be looking for statistics on changes in approvals pre- and post- this policy change to make sure "special circumstances" are actually recognized as such
It's just a despicably cruel policy change that's so overtly xenophobic, it actually reveals the alignment of those reporting on it when it's not called out as such. It's the antithesis to legal immigration in that it all but destroys the process entirely, promoting more illicit behavior (dangerous and clandestine border crossings, exploitation of migrant workers, human trafficking, etc) in the process.
Fuck this regime.
[0]: https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-eligibility-cate...
It is gutter racism.
edit: I wish I could be surprised by the downvotes, but it's gutter racism and I'm proud to point this out! I would be never be quiet about a matter of ethics and conscience just because of startup accelerator social media popularity points. This directly influences many of our friends and colleagues in this field. It is vile, evil racism and directly topical for software startups.
edit 2: the list of immigrants and children of immigrants who have founded software companies that are the absolute backbone of US information infrastructure is embarrassing to write down. Anyone can search for the information, but it's harder to list companies not founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.
There need to be thorough weekly video walkthroughs of all of the detention centers. Otherwise you can expect actual starvation at some point.
Just dropping this here: https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1970251208322621530
I personally think this is the big secondary benefit that the administration is going for.
If the person adjusts status in usa, there are more possibilities for appeal etc.
> A refused green card application might be the end of being ever in usa.
Do you have evidence for your other claim? The main thing you need to prove for a non immigrant visa or VWP is that you won't overstay or have intent to immigrate at the time of application and upon entry. Otherwise it's up to the consular officer like usual. You would need to declare the refusal/denial of course.
What will get you denied is "inadmissibility" if you don't submit a waiver. If you're inadmissible that usually means some serious violation and you've got other problems.
As far as I know, people have been successful in re-applying for EB green cards after being rejected when they've assembled a better packet.
People are deemed to have immigration intent for small things like they don’t have enough ties to their country of residence. An application for immigration is definite proof you had intent to immigrate. You can wait like ten years, but time doesn’t work in your favor (immigration gets harder every year, people get older and handcuffed elsewhere…).
The US government should not give permission to anyone at all to set foot on US soil, unless the mass of existing citizens of the US are comfortable with that person eventually voting as a citizen on what the composition of the government should actually be. And as a US citizen, I am not comfortable with letting the vast majority of people in the world - many of whom are scrambling for any legal opportunity at all that will let them legally reside in the US - vote for the government that passes laws that affect me.
Why? Aren't L1 and H1B "dual intent" visas?
Nothing new there, but under the new rules the former is no longer an option and you'd need to leave immediately. On the plus side consular processing tends to be cheaper and often faster (AOS and all the approvals vs the consular processing fee and a plane ticket).
All this FUD in this entire post is disheartening.
Gemini gets this correct: “The H-1B visa is a nonimmigrant classification that allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign nationals in ‘specialty occupations’ that require highly specialized knowledge and at least a bachelor's degree.”
You are correct about this.
> H1B is also non-immigrant visa, but it is dual intent visa meaning it doesn't have that requirement
You're incorrect about this. The concept of "dual intent" doesn't exist in the Immigration and Naturalization Act. It was created by executive fiat. H1Bs, like other non-immigrant visas, still requires non-immigrant intent. It's different only that it has two carve-outs:
Subsection (b) excludes H1Bs from the "presumption" of immigrant intent that applies to other categories of aliens. Subsection (h) provides that applying for permanent residency "shall not constitute evidence of an intention to abandon a foreign residence" for H1Bs.
So H1Bs must still have non-immigrant intent. It's just that they are carved out of certain presumptions that would automatically establish immigrant intent, which would lead to denial of their visa. It gives the executive flexibility to essentially look the other way when an H1B applies for a green card. But it doesn't confer any legal rights* onto the H1B. The administration can at any time decide that you actually have immigrant intent and yank your visa.
I can only assume that's accidental. You're the 17th most active person on HN, so I'm certain you've seen an overwhelming amount of evidence of how skilled immigrants are immensely beneficial to the US economy.
The H-1B is not the only path to a green card. There are many ways, every case is different, and pretty much all of the paths suck, even if you do everything right.
This decision only makes all of those paths worse.
That's irrelevant. "Justice" means following the rules. Congress gets to decide the immigration laws. Congress has never created a real system for skilled permanent immigrants. The term "H1B" actually comes from 8 USC 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(B).
Subsection (a)(15) literally defines the term "immigrant" to exclude people in the subsequent subsections, including (H)(i)(b). Subsection (a)(15)(H)(i)(b) then reiterates that the category is for someone "who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform services." Congress didn't hide the ball.
It's just an example of how the immigration laws have been a bait-and-switch for decades: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
People who have done everything by "following the rules" are now seeing the US backpedal on what was promised to them via an administrative memo published by USCIS at the behest of the president—not through new legislation enacted by Congress.
I don't know where you're getting your information from, but it's factually incorrect.
And as someone else said, "justice" does not mean following the law. That's the definition of "legal".
It's important to anchor these topics at a certain level of understanding of Law and Economics to discuss optimal policy, otherwise we'll just talk past each other with uninformed political views.
Read 8 USC 1101, specifically subsections (a)(15) & (a)(15)(H)(i)(B). The statute classifies H1Bs among the "nonimmigrant aliens," and states that the category is for someone "who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform services." Does that sound to you like it was mean to be a pathway to permanent residency?
There was never a "promise" in the law. Instead, there were a set of USCIS practices and procedures that amounted to nothing more than writing down what USCIS was currently doing. But USCIS never had authority to turn what Congress created as a temporary worker program into a permanent path to citizenship.
I'm sympathetic to people who put their eggs in the H1B basket. As an immigrant, how are you supposed to understand constitutional law and limits on executive power? But the fact is that the modern H1B regime was created almost entirely by executive fiat and it can be undone by executive fiat as well. (All the 1990 Act did was undo some presumptions but left the executive free to decide at any time that an H1B has immigrant intent, which is a basis for visa revocation.)
You should listen to this NYT podcast on America's immigration system and how its operation in practice is very different from what voters thought they were getting: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
> The four sources of federal and state law are (1) constitutions, (2) statutes and ordinances, (3) rules and regulations, and (4) case law.
https://guides.law.sc.edu/c.php?g=315539&p=10379907
With that in mind, do read CFR 8 § 245.1 Eligibility: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-8/chapter-I/subchapter-B/...
More broadly please read https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-7-part-a
This amounts to much more than "writing down what USCIS was currently doing". This is a specific source of law. These regulations are legally binding as Congress has authorized the agency to issue them.
There's also plenty of case law from USCIS-related adjudicative reviews, meaning specific precedents set by judges who hear cases related to immigration.
After reflecting on your comment, I hope you're not trying to force an argument that any person who's requested an adjustment of status is somehow illegally present in the country, because that would be woefully incorrect.
I also don't appreciate the patronizing remark that I somehow fail to grasp the facts because I'm an immigrant.
I'm not sure why you think people who were born outside of the borders of the United States of America do not understand how liberal democracies work.
Do you actually think immigrants have no concept of constitutional law and limits on executive power? Do you think that knowledge is somehow protected by a magic seal that prevents me from ever obtaining it? Or do you think other countries do not have constitutions or a system of checks and balances? Do you know how many years I've spent studying nations in general and the US specifically? Do you know how many comparative studies I've written? Do you even know what my specific qualifications and degrees are? And I can do this in 5 different languages.
You're way out of your depth and your bias is showing.
Now I'm not sure if you are allowed to re-enter after your interview before your case is decided/you get the visa but I would imagine so (if have valid visa), you would just need to exit again to get the visa later.
I believe the issue with what you're describing is that if you're on a temporary visa, like a student visa, applying for a green card shows intent of immigration so you cannot return to the US on a student visa.
If you have an H-1B already you may be able to do what you're describing. If you're a recent grad in the US this basically locks you out of trying to get a green card until you've already secured an H-1B.
False
You don’t need a job to apply for green card.
Valid visa, yes. But that’s easy.
> don’t know how this will play out for employment based categories
I am only talking about employment based categories if you refer to my original comment. I’d be curious to know what visa categories allow you to file for an employment based greencard without a job?
In practice, though, almost all employers file EB GC petitions for only their current employees, not future ones.
In some ways that industry is losing a tool. Sponsoring a green card used to be the prize they dangle in front of the h1b to keep their nose to the grindstone.
So many great students will be off the market. This will affect to the whole tech space. No way they will be happy with this decision.
Most countries, you get a visa of some kind but you have no way to permanent residency at all unless you marry but you can keep staying there somewhat permanently.
Americans voted for this.
Come to the EU instead, we want more STEM people.
Hong Kong introduced new self-sponsored visas, Mainland introduced new high-tech visas couple months ago
Anyone is entitled an opinion, even when they're wrong.
But perhaps before posting, engage with intellectual curiosity and get informed.
Otherwise you're just posting a layman view that could easily be rebutted.
I wonder how this would work with a K-1 "Fiancé" Visa. Typically a K-1 holder can enter the country as long as they get married within 90 days, and then the family stays together while the I-485 is processed. Now what? Come to the USA, marry the US Citizen, and then you're banished back to your home country?
There's also the K-3 which lets the foreign spouse enter as a non-immigrant to keep the family together while the I-485 is processed. Are they getting rid of that entirely?
This is all totally bonkers, likely not well thought out, and pretty cruel to families, which is completely on-point for this Administration.
Or it has been, and cruelty is the point
Thats why they’re appointed a whole bunch of unqualified people at high positions. This is what happens in the mafia. Those people know that the only reason they’re there is because of the dear leader and not because of their competence, so purely out of self preservation, they will put loyalty to dear leader above every other principle.
Similarly gangs will get even low level people to commit completely unnecessary crimes. Because once you’ve committed a crime, they own you. You’re at their mercy, since you can’t run to the police anymore, without risking jail time yourself.
So you make a whole bunch of your residents criminals, so they’re unable to exercise their rights effectively without threat of being punished for a completely different reason that the government now holds against them.
They’ve started with immigrants because making them criminals is as easy as writing administrative memos, but the same incentives will lead them to start making criminals out of American citizens too. You can already see some of it with the way they’ve criminalized protest against Israel. The next step will be to redefine whatever acts they can as terrorism since Congress granted the executive tremendous power when it comes to terrorism. But they won’t stop there.
If that was true why even go through a whole process. To me it sounds like there is still an approval required meaning the person is not determined to be admissible yet.
The general logic has been that it’s really easy for people to say they want to marry a U.S. citizen, get approved to emigrate, and then change their mind after (the common term for this is visa fraud). So the government grants a series of visas for increasing lengths as you move through that process and prove that it is a bona-fide relationship.
A K1 visa is the last step before getting married, and stipulates that you get married within a short time after entering the country, after which you have to remain married for several years, prove you’re doing things normal married couples do (like live together), and then you can get your permanent residency.
So, in short, it’s not as clear cut as a one-time yes/no decision. You very much live within a prescribed framework for several years until the government is satisfied that your relationship is real.
(Source: personal experience)
One interesting note here is the case of DACA recipients. If they leave the country to adjust status it should triggers a re-entry ban unless they're granted parole (DACA are quasi-illegal but granted a form of amnesty as long as they remain in US). AFAIK parole isn't granted for US consular visits, so it's effectively banishment as punishment for trying to adjust their status to reflect their marriage.
FWIW K1s were never a great visa category. Doing an engagement party with a white dress and posting it on instagram could lead to a "go apply for CR1 instead" rejection.
K1 will obviously be an exception as substantial steps are generally taken at a home consulate.
An entire visa class is not “obviously an exception”, or it would be clear.
I think you can apply for an AOS to a different dual intent visa which could then allow you to apply for a green card if you meet the requirements for that visa.
Maybe something like if you get married while visiting, but even then I believe you need to apply for an adjustment of status to a marriage visa and then apply for a green card.
The IR-1/CR-1 that you describe is how a spouse would apply from outside the country.
> Nonimmigrants, like students, temporary workers, or people on tourist visas, come to the U.S. for a short time and for a specific purpose. Our system is designed for them to leave when their visit is over. Their visit should not function as the first step in the Green Card process.
Do they consider H1B workers to be “temporary” for this purpose? It seems broken and cruel to force them to go back to apply when they’re here legally and could easily just apply here (assuming their visa is still valid).
My Eastern European wife and I recently faced the decision of how to go about getting her a green card. At the time we lived outside the US.
One option was to enter the US on her B1 visa pretending to have no “immigration intent” and then “change our mind” a respectable number of days later and apply for AOS. The process for this was 1.5 to 2 years. I didn’t want to do it for that reason and because I wasn’t comfortable with what amounts to visa fraud, but our attorney presented it as a pretty standard option.
The other option was consular processing. This wasn’t automatic. Our attorney contacted a few consulates in the region where we lived to see if any would accept our case (due to war the consulate in her home country wasn’t handling routine cases). We got approved for consular processing in Budapest.
I had to go once as the US citizen spouse to submit our application packet and do a pro forma interview. Then a few months later it was my wife’s turn to go to the interview.
The process, like any immigration process, was paperwork heavy and nerve wracking. The final interview was very simple and felt like a formality.
In that case once approved she received a visa that would be stamped upon entry to the US and this would count as a temporary green card pending receipt of the physical card.
All of this happened during the second Trump administration so I was expecting a hostile or at least adversarial process. But it was quite the opposite. Total elapsed time was about six months from initial attorney consult to entry into the US as an LPR. It would have been faster if our attorney was more on the ball getting our final interview appointment.
If I were to find myself in need of a green card for a foreign spouse again I would opt for consular processing if given the choice. Now that it’s required I imagine there will be a longer backlog.
Obviously if you need to do this at one of the consulates that no longer offers consular processing that’s a different story. I was fortunate that the Budapest consulate agreed to take our case.
>> admitted into the United States as nonimmigrants to depart rather than pursue adjustment of status. Such aliens are generally expected to pursue an immigrant visa and admission from outside the United States if they wish to reside permanently in this country.
H1-B was already a dual intent visa. Are they trying to create a new visa category?
Whatever they are trying to get to this is a big concern for all H1B employees.
Thankfully H1B is a small visa category.
Under Trump 1 she was fired because they wouldn't renew it and she lost work authorization. Her kids are citizens and she speaks better English than Spanish, she was educated here and is effectively fully integrated. But she's slightly brown, and Stephen Miller says we can't have that.
The are other nits to pick with the analogy, but I’ll leave it at that
In SE Asia there's a whole cottage travel industry taking business and tourist visa holders on a quick trip out of the border in order to return to renew their visa (of course you can also pay for this service under the table).
This is not the case for transitioning from a temporary residence permit to a permanent residence permit, which is the best analogue to the USA’s Green Card. In most European countries, one does that within the country (and often within the same province one lives, at a regional office).
or is it effective all the way back at I-140 time where people would then need to spend years away from the US?
I read that it used to not be like this, that it used to be possible to renew the _visa_ itself from inside the US, but that got changed before my time. I can only imagine that the reason for that was that non-citizens inside the US are entitled to due process, but non-citizens outside the US are not. And denying a visa to somebody outside the US is therefore a lot easier than denying it to somebody inside the US, and essentially cannot be appealed.
When I applied for AOS form H1B to Green Card, I didn't have to leave the US. With this change, I would have had to. The only reason I can think for this change is that denials of AOS would now become unappealable. I hate this.
No, after 9/11 they passed a rule to always collect biometrics before issuing visas and validating them at border entry. The DoS facilities in the US did not have fingerprinting facilities but the consulates and embassies did, so they forced the change. Recently there was a pilot to allow it in the US itself.
In general the law applies equally to everyone associated with the US in any respect so you get due process (in theory) regardless. Specific laws may apply to different classes of people though (see 'enemy combatants').
I am no longer surprised, but still don’t understand why almost all members of Congress are wiling to just let their power slip away like this.
I don't believe that's correct. H1-B is formally a temporary, nonimmigrant work visa/status which permits "dual-intent" (meaning a holder can be openly seeking permanent residence when applying for [or when on] such a visa without that dual intent being immigration fraud).
What this screws over is there was plenty of people from US visa waiver countries who decided K-1 was too hard and just flew over to US and got married. They would then apply for Adjustment of Status. That is big door being shut close because B-1 is non immigrant intent visa.
My room mate from college did this with UK foreign exchange student 20 years ago. She came over on visitor visa, got married and they got a lawyer to fix it all up.
I did consular processing when I got my Green Card. It's the FINAL step fo the GC process. You don't need to be outside the US for all the other stages, in fact I think if you leave during some parts, it would be considered abandoning your application. It just means that while you're in the US, you need to schedule an appointment at the US embassy/consulate in your home country, and fly back. Then you go through the appointment and there on the spot you're approved or rejected. It's a big nerve wracking but unless you lied you will be fine. Then you fly back to the US.
For me CP was much much faster, on the order of months.
That’s a huge unsubstantiated claim.
Change of status was never meant for those without status in the first place or for tourists.
I would love be to hear an immigration lawyer's perspective on this.
Here's the memo directly:
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...
US&A has been the escape hatch for oppressive regime in China/Russia/... for many years, young people from there seek freedom in US, instead of fight for freedom in their own.
Individual freedom is great but collectively they made people who can't migrate have less and less freedom. Some expected US&A compensate that with trade, military and twitter, which all turned out to be disasters.
I'm sorry for anyone stuck in those processes, but for long term US&A giving up on Green card / dual citizenship is not necessarily a bad thing for the world.
Damned if we don’t allow people in and, apparently, damned also if we do allow some in
Your strange argument would actually support this policy: stop letting these people into the USA so that they stay in their own repressive countries and are forced to reform them.
Hundreds of millions of people from abroad shared that belief up until 2 decades ago or so. I don't think they believe it anymore. It's been like watching your awesome high school friend throw away their lives over time.
Think about it: China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population. But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people. Until now.
There used to be a bipartisan agreement that a US advanced degree should come with a green card stapled to it. Even Trump: “You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country."
And China is notoriously xenophobic when it comes to immigration policy - they have a clear “best race” as far as the CCP is concerned and are doubling down on it. If you want to hold China up as a model I don’t think it’s the winning argument that you think it is relative to a pro-immigration argument. White nationalists would agree with you and say to only allow whites in and be more homogenous like China is.
Separately you’re also arguing in favor of only high-skilled immigration which seems kind of suspect don’t you think? No more refugees from Haiti or Syria, for example. Otherwise the US can’t be drawing on the pick of the world’s best.
> But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people.
You also aren’t accounting for the concept of brain drain which has historically been difficult for origin countries to deal with. It’s a little amusing to see folks positively arguing in favor of what would otherwise be considered a colonialist tactic of resource extraction.
I’m critiquing these two points however and not necessarily suggesting a policy, but I think it would be wise to think a little more deeply about these two points.
I’d also add, we are totally fine and the rhetoric around the US no longer being a leading economy and superpower is false. The strength of the country isn’t solely because of immigration. In fact, that may not even be a major factor. Geography for example plays a much greater role, our system of government and laws, our markets and culture of enterprise are far more important. I’d argue tablet kids and the introduction of technology into classrooms is, for example, a much greater problem for American talent than lower rates of skilled immigration.
Immigration is just another policy choice we make, like our system of laws or others. It doesn’t need this moral component to it. Increase the rate of people immigrating in some years, decrease it in others. No big deal. If you want to suggest it’s worthy of a moral crusade then you are barking up the wrong tree because the United States has and is certainly more friendly toward immigrants both now and historically than probably any other country on the planet. You should aim your outrage at countries such as China which severely restrict this moral good.
On visa forums this method is commonly discussed. By entering on an ESTA/B-2 with the intent to marry a US Citizen, they're committing immigration fraud, inherently. You would be denied entry at the border if you admitted to your plans.
The correct way to do this is to file a K-1 visa outside the United States, or marry outside then file a IR-1/CR-1.
Department of Homeland Security is no longer processing Green Cards via AOS. That included UCSIS.
However the STATE DEPARTMENT is still processing it via Consular Processing.
The article makes it sounds like the US is no longer offering Green Cards which is false.
It very specifically lays out common exceptions to this, including for legal immigrants on dual intent visas and those whose only pathway to permanent residency is via adjustment of status.
It also wildly misinterprets the news to claim that the K-1 visa has been effectively ended, even though the memo specifically excludes it.
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...
> However, maintaining lawful status in a dual intent nonimmigrant category is not sufficient, on its own, to warrant a favorable exercise of discretion.
Which basically means that, applying AOS while being in dual-intent category is not favorable and you will have to prove extraordinary circumstance for a simple i-485 AOS on H1B. Lacking the extraordinary circumstance, your application may be denied.
What this basically means for millions of people on H1B (especially from countries like India is), they have to go for consular processing. And given the lack of appointments in India and delays they are facing - you could be stuck for months to years and no company is going to wait for you while you go through the process. So leaving would definitely disqualify them.
H1Bs should jump the queue why? You're arguing that the family of US Citizens should be considered behind temporary immigrant workers with no family ties to the United States, and you should be exempt from the requirements they face.
I am just pointing out this affects all employment visa types.for countries with long delays in counselor processing this effectively kills any chance of getting Green card because no employer will wait that long.
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-green-card-rule-wont-aff...
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...
Footnote 20: However, maintaining lawful status in a dual intent nonimmigrant category is not sufficient, on its own, to warrant a favorable exercise of discretion
https://fam.state.gov/fam/09FAM/09FAM040213.html#M402_13_5_B
Seems extremely clear to me.
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...
> While aliens who were inspected and admitted or paroled may request adjustment of status, as a general matter the discretionary approval of such a request is extraordinary given Congress’s intent that aliens should depart once the purpose for which they sought parole or nonimmigrant admission from DHS has been accomplished.
Is that right?
This could be a big deal for Big Tech. I wonder how personal experience of Musk and Huang will play into how they react.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-22/trump-to-...
> The policy change could impact hundreds of thousands of people a year and potentially reduce legal immigration further amid a sweeping government crackdown, according to immigration-law experts. President Donald Trump’s administration has introduced a series of restrictions affecting everyone from asylum seekers to students and highly skilled workers.
> The new rules generally apply to any foreigner who came to the US on a temporary non-immigrant visa, including students, employees on H-1B or L visas and visitors. The US awards about 1 million green cards a year, though roughly half of those are for foreign relatives being sponsored by an American citizen. Those applications are generally already processed outside of the US.
(POSIWID [The Purpose of a System Is What It Does])
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/us/politics/trump-afrikan...
the wildly corrupt double-standard is breathtaking
There is well documented historical evidence Elon Musk not only illegally overstayed a student visa, he also illegally worked while on that visa AND did illegal drugs publicly while on that visa
Destroyed USAID murdering millions, highlights the President is in the Epstein Files extensively, then six months later is flying on Air Force One, it's all a cruel joke against humanity
politics aside, do you realistically believe that you can view twitter and actually mentally carve out the opinion of a group of people in real life?
that's exactly the issue with twitter.
for one : you're polling twitter users (a TINY subsect of humanity), two : you're extracting opinion from those that seek to broadcast it (an outlier) , and three: twitter never self-exposes the world to a user, it selectively curates and amplifies, and fourth : it's one of the most gamed communications arenas in existence.
you're viewing the world through an itty-bitty twitter-colored monocle and making sweeping accusations across large cohorts, it's not an accurate portrayal of actual human opinion.
Nah. I’m an Indian-American (born in America, never visited India) working at a FANG company here in SF South Bay and I support this policy.
We need fewer immigrants in America for the next 10 years until we can sort out our domestic issues (education, healthcare, taxation, cost of living).
Once the immigrants are gone and birthright tourism / birthright citizenship to non-US citizen parents is also gone (hopefully next week), politicians can no longer blame immigrants for americas problems.
We could create special economic zones like china, allow 200 million immigrants into the country with a goal of a billion people to match the population of china and India. Make it a condition of citizenship that they help build ten homes or similar infrastructure. Immigrants could be the solution to all the problems you cite and they certainly aren’t the reason those problems exist.
If something seems irrational it’s usually a sign that you don’t understand the underlying logic. This behavior is totally logical if they aren’t worried about losing power.
Stay on whatever visa you’re on -> apply for consular processing -> travel for interview -> enter on green card
So they likely have to wait out the green card process abroad unless they secure a dual-intent visa like an H-1B.
There's also 75 countries that the US has shut down consular processing for so those people may be locked out getting a green card entirely.
You could go the fiancé visa route and stay in status while waiting for the green card.
I think what this policy is trying to avoid is the blanket “you can stay while processing even if you’re not in the country legally”
Wait times to process applications depend on your country of origin and visa type. If you are an H1B from India that was already decades approaching never. Same for Brazil and elsewhere.
And that was before Trump. All that was practically halted.
https://infogram.com/figure-3-employment-based-green-card-pe...
The cruelty is the point. They want the economic benefit of immigrants but also want them to live in uncertainty and without any easy path to settling down. Complete and utterly stupid.
As others have said, someone entering the US on a tourist or other nonimmigrant visa, then marrying a US citizen, is inherently committing fraud because the marriage demonstrates intent to stay. In the past, the US was nice about it and let people apply to adjust their status without leaving. This loophole is now closed.
Are you saying that in such cases, the US rules here are and should be that the married couple should live apart for years due to the bylaws of the USCIS?
As I said, this is inherently a violation of the commitment the visitor made when entering the US on a non-immigrant visa, as much as (say) exceeding the limit on the hours per week an international student can work.
>Are you saying that in such cases, the US rules here are and should be that the married couple should live apart for years due to the bylaws of the USCIS?
First, this is what the law has always said; there is a reason why non-immigrant, immigrant, and dual-intent visa types exist. The USCIS memo reiterates this, while clarifying that the agency will no longer grant the contrary-to-the-law leeway it has heretofore done regarding non-immigrant, non dual-intent visas.
Second, the alternatives of 1) K-1 (fiancee) visa or 2) CR-1 (spousal) visa exist, and have always been the intended means for the person you mentioned in your situation.
The leeway meant that pretty much anyone, including illegal aliens, could obtain a green card (and be exempt from removal during the application process) by marrying a US citizen.
A US citizen is free to marry anyone, regardless of citizenship. There is no automatic guarantee, however, that the couple can both live in the US.
I can assure you I am intimately familiar with the entire process.
>> It means you need to fly back to your home country for a few days for the interview and then you get your GC on the spot.
Not necessarily. That's the best and most optimistic scenario. I know of people who have waited weeks, even months. It depends on a lot of factors. And now there will be a lot more people booking interviews at every consulate so expect wait times to skyrocket.
Let's saying you're dating somebody on a work visa, if you wanted to marry and sponsor their residency, would they now need to return to their home country to wait for the embassy?
The embassies reviewing applications put a LOT of weight on time spent in person, BUT they also require the US applicant to have domicile. So effectively, the only way to proceed is a long-distance marriage that could take years to process a visa for (remember: move abroad, and you could lose the domicile required to sponsor the green card).
So with our shrinking birthrates, our regularly documented & growing "will never marry" population, immigration effectively cut off, what does the future of this country even look like anymore?
F1 and h1 are non-immigrant visa.
American law only allows a person to reside in the country with one Visa type.
The green card is an immigrant visa - and the new visa is issued through an adjustment of status for those inside the USA (backlogged) or by consulates (nearly immediately).
So this is a good thing. It’s easy to get alarmed.
Why can't USCIS shard it based on country within the US in a similar fashion?
2025, the cap was about 26,323 per country because the total visa pool was larger.
Important details:
1. The cap applies to: * Employment-based green cards * Family preference green cards 2. The cap does NOT apply to: * Immediate relatives of U.S. citizens * spouses * parents * unmarried children under 21 Those categories are uncapped. 3. The cap is based on: * Country of birth (“chargeability”) * Not citizenship. 4. In practice, countries like: * India * China * Mexico * Philippines hit the cap constantly, causing very large backlogs.
Simple example:
If 500,000 Indians qualify for employment-based green cards, but only ~25k–30k can be allocated annually under the cap system, the remainder wait in line. That is why Indian EB-2 and EB-3 wait times can stretch into decades.
Demand better from your government.
(And this still raises the question of why the consulates supposedly don't have this issue.)
https://www.businessinsider.com/immigration-crackdown-housin...