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.
Unfortunately, I think this is the point. They want to push the needle so that even legal immigration is restricted or difficult (unless you happen to pay them directly)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/us/politics/trump-legal-i...
"intentionally malevolent" -> Stephen Miller's second name. The cruelty is and always was the point.
The UK, the EU, Japan, and Australia all have identical rules to this policy.
I don't think it applies to folks on H or L visas. Wording from the site:
"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. "
When you're in your visa or green card process it's not uncommon to be advised not to travel out of the country...
Yep. You're kind of in jail.
It doesn't mean that you cannot, it just means that it might complicate your already complicated application. So if a family member dies, maybe... But that's it
I've known people who left for a brief period during the GC process on emergency basis and then were put into a literal jail on their return to the USA.
This is true. But you might be conflating two different issues: having to apply for a greencard from outside the country, and being restricted in traveling outside the US during the (potentially very lengthy) pendency of that application.
This.
I cannot be this calm about the administration that is all about the chaos and harm. Thank you for writing what I can't.
It’s intentional malevolence that’s a given from this admin
The secret sauce is bad faith and crime.
I take that as a given, too, especially considering the diabolical architecture of Miller Thought.
These are all non-immigrant visa classes. The understanding is that you are temporarily immigrating to the United States. Why should it be surprising then that it is hard to become a permanent resident/immigrant if you explicitly came on a non-immigrant visa?
All I hear is that there's a subset of people that don't want immigrants at all. And for some godforsaken reason they got hold of the executive, legislative and supreme court
>a subset of people that don't want immigrants at all.
Does anyone have data on what this percentage is? Seems like it could be 55%:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americans-curb-i...
We’re going for round 3 of jingoist isolationist Americans not understanding how the world or their own culture and government works.
Wonder if we’ll get a third world war that we stay out of until halfway through and then pile on at the end.
That's the only conclusion I can see.
Because coming to the United States on a non-immigrant visa is pretty much the only way that a person can hope to become a US citizen (or green card holder) eventually.
H1B and O1 are dual intent..
I don’t see a carve out for spousal or family reunification applications.
Those weren’t services for the benefit of the immigrant. Those were a service to the US citizen who sponsored them and had to sign up to be on the hook to take care of their welfare.
The government was very clear to my spouse that she could divorce me the second her application was granted and I was still on the hook for any welfare she may end up needing.
This is just being anti immigrant. The same way they talk about illegal aliens and then you find out they really mean legal asylum seekers because they don’t like the process.
Or when they use the phrase Heritage Americans to discount recent immigrants.
Or when they just straight up say we have too much legal immigration.
The only surprising thing about this change in policy to me is that they are still keeping a veneer of not being racist on it, instead of just being as open as they have in other cases.
There isn't really such a thing as an immigrant visa. These non-immigrant visas are the only legal route to come here, by and large, excluding a few obvious exceptions like marriage to an American.
Also, it's quite hard to become a permanent resident/immigrant even without the obstacle of this being categorically prohibited. My family, for instance, overcame some very low odds of success to make this happen (highly educated, both PhDs, for what it's worth).
I have learned that most Americans, probably through no fault of their own, have absolutely no understanding of how their own immigration system works. The options for legal immigration were _extremely_ limited and byzantine, and have been for decades, long before Trump.
That's interesting. European countries do have immigrant visas, and I think Canada does too. (As in, a visa that's issued for the sole purpose of letting you immigrate.)
If it seems too interesting it's because it isn't true. There are five functional categories of immigrant visa in America, each with several subcategories: Immediate Relatives (IR), Family Preference (F), Employment Based (EB), Special (S), and Diversity (D). The last one is basically done by lottery.
The US has three classes of immigrant visa. See the bottom of the state department visa resources page.
There is no immigrant visa by that logic. Unless you count the one that costs a million dollars.
Spousal one? I got it outside the US
Yeah, that's one notable exception. Doesn't invalidate the generalisation.
Intentionally malevolent.
> Whoever thought of this is either intentionally malevolent or inexcusably incomprehending of the immigration process.
It’s the former: intentionally malevolent. Trump cabinet members, including Stephen Miller have said this is exactly why.
Not surprised. There are worse things in the works.
> Far from a loophole, applying from inside the US is the only reasonable way to apply for a greencard.
So that's kind of the point, to make the system arbitrary and capricious. It's to make the lives of immigrants more difficult.
For example, when one applies for adjustment of status ("AoS", meaning the I485), there are several things you can also apply for, most notably an Employment Authorization Document ("EAD", I765) and/or Advance Parole ("AP", I131) to allow you to travel.
In years gone by, you'd get the temporary documents in 3-4 months typically and your green card in under a year (after filing the I485, not for the entire process, which can be substantially longer).
So this administration has seemingly started a process for marriage cases where you file an I130 and I485 concurrently (the I130 is to prove you're free to marry and you have legally married, the I485 is to adjust status) where USCIS will approve the I130 but then just sit on the I485, not approving or denying the case, and never issue the EAD or AP so you can't work. Lots of people can't afford to not work for 1-2 years while this all plays out.
But that's the point.
Also, there are rumors that Palantir is getting invovled here. Rumor is that USCIS is sitting on I485 approvals while they wait for a new system to come online that will let USCIS look at way more data, likely including social media data, to find reasons to deny cases, so they don't want to approve cases before it's available. This is uncofirmed but there's a lot of anecodtal data for approved I130, no decision on the I485.
For marriage cases, this administraiton clearly wants people to consular process instead because the administration has broad powers that can't be challenged to simply withhold visas to nationals of certain countries and those bans can't be challenged in court, as per Trump v. Hawaii [1].
This is a problem for people who have made asylum claims because they realistically can't use the passport from whcih they've claimed asylum (if they even have it) and they certainly couldn't or shouldn't go back to their home country. A separate rule generally requires people to use the embassy of their country of birth. Again, that's to make life difficult.
It's not clear to me yet how this rule change affects those on H1Bs that want to adjust. Is the Trump admin going to require H1B holders to leave the country to adjust? That's going to create problems if so. The asylum case and the home country embassy rule mentioned above are two big reasons.
This is just reckless without any responsibility.
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.
> e.g. Indian parents can obtain Indian citizenship for their kids but it also means letting go of the kids' US citizenship
This is not true, India has something called “Overseas Citizenship of India” which is technically not a citizenship even though the name says, but its a life time visa available for US citizens of Indian origin. And you don’t have to give up US citizenship
It’s a visa that you do need to apply for. And it’s not a guaranteed thing. If it doesn’t work out. Kids stay in the US and parents get kicked out?
cruelty is the point in case it wasn’t obvious
> the kids must first get visas to their parent's countries
The bigger issue honestly is that the kids may already have grown up in the American culture and fluent in English and it could massively disrupt their education and well-being to throw them into another system somewhere else, depending on how they were raised and whether they are fluent in the language of the country of their parents. In many cases they are not.
> the kids must first get visas to their parent's countries
In this situation, wouldn't the kids already have citizenship of their parents countries?
No? If you're born in the US you have US citizenship, you're American. You don't just magically get citizenship for your parents home country, at least not for most countries.
You can automatically be a citizen through descent of most countries in Europe and Asia, and everywhere in North America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis#Jus_sanguinis_st...
It’s not automatic, it requires applying and at times can take years of proving in terms of paperwork, that is by definition not automatic. I have personal experience with the Greek, German, and Italian systems, prepare your self for 1-2 years to gain it even if you have rights to it.
The whole concept of getting citizenship where you're born is mostly an American concept. Though, if you do get born in a place where you get citizenship based on location alone, your parents will probably need to figure out a lot of paperwork to sort things out.
Also, in some cases, you may automatically lose your original nationality if you seek an additional one (Spain comes to mind; though in their case you'd need to manually request not to lose your nationality to keep it within a certain time period, IIRC).
Sometimes. In many/most countries, it requires at minimum that both parents be citizens of the same country. In a few countries, dual citizenship is banned completely, so if the kid is a US citizen they cannot be the country's citizen.
A lot of countries don’t provide citizenship automatically without condition by blood. China for example, a kid only inherits citizenship if one parent is a chinese citizen and not a PR of any other country (so kids born to Chinese parents with green cards don’t count, which doesn’t really matter in this case).
Also the USA used to have weird rules about young mothers not transferring citizenship automatically (which the whole Obama birther myth relied on).
> It's completely illogical that a person must first stay in a country for 5 years to become eligible
This is wrong. There is no minimum time in the country for a green card. You are thinking of citizenship. That is different.
Wow. Downvotes for stating an obviously verifiable fact.
HN is now filled with agenda pushers peddling obvious fake information about the US.
Can you think of any other reasons why you might have been downvoted? It seems a little conspiracy-minded to jump to “agenda pushing” I think.
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.
If anything everyone else is under reacting.
You have ICE officers randomly abducting people off appearance alone and then detaining them for days if not weeks. If you were a citizen the whole time, cool who cares.
No one in America has any rights.
That aside, even as someone who's been in this country for generations, I've been exploring options to leave.
America is behind most of the developed world in terms of standards of living. I was in Asia for a while and I felt a fraction of the fear I constantly do at home.
It's not getting better.
GC holder of 25 years with citizen parents. I agree with you and I stress about this daily. It's always been a shitty deal though - we are taxed with no representation in government.
Genuinely curious why didn't you pursue citizenship though? (No pressure to answer of course, that might be a deeply personal thing.)
>we are taxed with no representation in government.
In which country can you emigrate to and be allowed votes in government representation just because you pay taxes? I'm an EU citizen and living in another EU country and am not allowed to vote in that country's government elections, just local ones. If you want to vote at government level then you need to apply and get citizenship which also comes with the responsibility(or obligation more accurately) of military draft.
Everything about this seems pretty fair to me. I'm not sure why not to you. If you're not a citizen you shouldn't be allowed to vote at gov level since you're not subject to a draft, because in case the shit hits the fan militarily, unlike citizens, you can just pack your bags and go back to your home country and avoid dying in the front lines. So why would any country let people who aren't subject to draft vote? Makes no sense. You don't have the same skin in the game as citizens who are draftable just because you pay some taxes.
Now if you're paying taxes in a foreign country where you can't vote, it means you're there voluntarily because you're getting a much better deal than being in your own country where you can vote. Probably you're in the US because you make orders of magnitude more money than in your own country, but nobody in the US dragged you there against your will to work and pay them taxes, you agreed to this situation voluntarily because it also benefits you personally, and you would just as easily leave if it stopped benefiting you.
> and paid over $100,000 in taxes last year alone
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.
I think the point is that they are contributing to the US, and were the best option for their employer, and are supporting their communities, etc.
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.
Someone else would have taken that job maybe for a higher salary.
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
Yeah that’s fair, I feel let down all the time with how my taxes are (ab)used. Not a surprise, It’s been like this as long as I can remember.
You have to do a lot when you get a green card to prove you won't be a burden on the US tax payer. It's a big part of the system and a big part of the anti-immigrant rhetoric
A lot of the anti-immigrant rhetoric involves some version of the lie that immigrants don't pay taxes.
Uncle Sam likes tax payers.
One can reasonably argue that not paying your dues should exclude you from the pipeline.
To show that they're not freeloaders. A lot of right-wingers have a belief that immigrants are implicitly freeloaders, and therefore getting rid of them will make the economy better.
Of course it's just not true. Like most current Republican talking points, it's plainly fabricated; it's an outright lie. But, since a lot of people believe it, it's useful to reminder everyone that its not the case.
Have you tried being white? The trump admin is rolling out the red carpet for white south Africans.
I'm being facetious of course. I hate what maga is doing to our wonderful melting pot.
Not entirely safe even if you naturalize as they are now making noise about stripping citizenship[1]
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-administr...
> me and my wife have been in the US for combined 25+ years, and paid over $100,000 in
Sounds like you may be a good candidate for Trump's gold card.
I'm being fecitious of course, but I'm just pointing out that thinking of citizenship worthiness in monetary terms is something the president has already considered.
i’m fairly confident the gold card is the only kind of immigration they want to encourage now. you either pay up or go home and cross your fingers
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.
Those countries could keep their own talent through economic policy (i.e. fuck you pay me)
That they don’t is entirely their own fault and they deserve to be brain drained. “Talent” are people with agency and not possessions subservient to national interests.
Sure, and now they don’t need to keep their talent through economic policy. The USA is being kind enough to force them to stay in Europe/Asia :)
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 extreme privilege of being forced to pay a major portion of all income you make, regardless of where you earn it, to the us gov indefinitely. And they make it hard for you to apply to do this. Crazy.
There does appear to be a limited walk back for dual intent visa holders (H1B and L1)
“A spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, however, told Semafor that H1-B visa holders and high-skilled workers might not be affected in the near term.”
Source: https://www.semafor.com/article/05/22/2026/trump-orders-gree...
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.
Are you going to allow ER’s to refuse patients and let people die on the street? What if the Patient is unconscious with no identification but looks Hispanic? Can they be turned away?
Stripping away all wefare because of immigration is a bad bad bad idea.
Is this a surprise? This is hardly anything new. The United States was built with slavery.
> 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.
Best I can give you is Russian oligarchs and criminals, and corporate welfare. Deal?
> The current system seems to generate a collection of second-class citizens
Poor choice of words. Illegals are not citizens. That's the whole point.
> have no recourse if they're exploited
The recourse is to go back. In the era when you could just immigrate to the US just by getting on a boat (before the Immigration Act of 1924), about 1/3 of immigrants went back to their home country if they did not make it in the US.
See:
> From 1908 to 1932, 12 million individuals migrated to the United States. Over the same period, four million returned to their source country.
-- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00144... (you have to pirate it to view the full thing)
But now, the expectation of leftists is that the government is somehow supposed to help the failed immigrants.
Most people in the US are immigrants, including white people. Very few white people have a lineage to the revolution. Most came from Europe following WWII or, perhaps, before. This most likely includes you.
The idea that the US is composed of true Americans that have been here since the beginning is an outright Republican fantasy. A delusion to make white immigrants feel better about themselves. But it's just not true.
This has always been a country composed of immigrants, and it's always something we've been proud of. We have long been the melting pot. To think otherwise is anti-American, and you do not belong here.
There are very few Leftists in the USA, and even fewer in government. Who are you talking about?
> 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 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.
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/i...
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.
The average American, at least in my state (Washington), does not hate Mexicans. The people running the federal government seem to, however.
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.
Go to any top STEM PhD program and do a headcount. I don’t know what’s going on now thanks to this wave of xenophobia and funding cut madness, but back when I was in one (Princeton Physics, that was last decade), everywhere I go it was at least 50-50 in terms of international representation. You can also count the massive number of clearly foreign born faculty. It could not be more obvious.
> Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically?
Most of them. We have normalized getting Bs and Cs in our schools. Our school curricula are mediocre, and our culture around education is as well. It is distinctly uncool to care about education here.
> Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America?
Most of our best doctors, scientists, and engineers are all immigrants. Look at the ethnic breakdown of top AI researchers at the top labs.
> which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric.
It's not just intelligence. Immigrants overall have more grit, more entrepreneurial spirit, and more ambition and willingness to succeed than median Americans. It takes a lot to uproot your life and attempt to make it elsewhere. The vast majority of immigrants I've met embody the American spirit far better than most born-and-raised Americans I've met.
> And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration
That we are making harder and needlessly painful, which will in turn reduce the amount of highly intelligent and capable immigrants we get as well.
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.
The smartest aren't uniformly distributed across the Earth.
They almost certainly are, at least before we account for education. Education is, of course, not uniform.
But... the US also has not the best education, so.
That's true. It is possible that the smartest 5% are all here in the USA. But it is statistically unlikely that's true.
You put words in my mouth. I don't claim that the smartest are clustered in the USA.
So your original comment was somewhat of a tangent. the point jedberg made is that it is in the interest of a country with a strong economic and academic base to welcome the smartest people from across the world, since it is unlikely that all the smartest people in the world are in the US.
Yes, but Jedberg makes it sound as though -- given that only a small fraction of the world's population lives in the USA -- the country has little chance of succeeding if it is to go without immigrants. I disagree, and an extreme example I could offer as a counterpoint is Japan: tiny population (relatively), yet outsized performance.
I’m not sure US academia is mediocre. It’s more like… normal?
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
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.
It's not an ego problem. It's a racial one.
> 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.
Oh boy! If we are talking about constitutional amendments I can probably think of a few that would be much more important than that.
>Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's.
Generally, yes.
But then there's Elon Musk.
Peter Thiel too: while a US citizen by birth, he defacto immigrated to the US from elsewhere (as in: moved from another country to settle in the US).
Immigration for rich folks is a bit different, see.
Peter Thiel is a naturalized US citizen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel
Musk was (mostly) great until 2020; Something happened to him during the COVID timeframe.
I'd not want Musk, Thiel, or Palantir guy to run for POTUS. Probably, there should be a clause that if your net worth exceeds the threshold, you shouldn't be eligible to run until you donate all of it to the government, with no option to get it back ever. Some more clauses can be added as well.
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?
By “American People” you mean native Americans?
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.
You don't know the meaning of the word you're using.
Immigrant (noun) A person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.
> 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.
Very odd.
The point is your parents, or their parents, were immigrants. But those very same people we are now trying to restrict from coming here.
Meaning, if we time travel and apply these restrictions, you yourself would have never been a citizen. In fact, you probably wouldn't even exist. Do you see the problem?
That, my friend, is ladder pulling. When you destroy the very conditions that allow you to thrive.
The point is that people who immigrate to USA and Canada will have descendants who will be just like you. Only difference will be their skin color (maybe).
Is Kash Patel any different from Americans who have lived here for generations? Is Rishi Sunak any different from the people who lived in Britain from generations?
It sure is odd! This is something that the educated descendants of colonizers just have to grapple with. I imagine it's still less difficult than being born as someone lacking the systemic privileges.
Unless your people walked across the Bering Strait during the last ice age you're an immigrant.
Which ones?
Certainly if 8,000[1] years ago a tribe walked across and settled, and then 7,000 years ago another group walked across and set up camp next to the descendants of that first tribe who had been there a thousand years, the second group were actually immigrants, right?
And how do we sort it out now, millennia after those various groups arrived, after all that DNA has been mixed together?
My point is just that it's silly to label any race or group "immigrant" or "native" based on what movements we guess from their skin color that their ancestors may have made millennia or centuries ago, or even what their parents did. Yes, I'm very in favor of birthright citizenship, even if people have "anchor babies" in bad faith the baby didn't have any say in it. And no one else of any color had any say in being born in America either.
[1] please substitute correct numbers -- they don't matter
I think it's pretty clear these are shorthand terms for the issues with systemic bias in our modern society.
Pre-colonial North America was certainly not some idyllic pacifist utopia as people like to fetishize. However, any previous ethno-political disputes between those nations is irrelevant compared to the very recent history of the last 200 years.
The genocide of Native Americans in the 19th century happened under the unbroken chain of authority of our current government.
And under treaty with those so victimized. Which is continually forgotten in these sorts of conversations.
I don't know. I do know that, as far as America is concerned, "native" doesn't include the colonizers who showed up 200 years ago when the land was already settled.
Land can only be nonviolently settled exactly once. The arrangement of who had what land 400 years ago when many European-Americans' ancestors started to arrive was merely the then-current state shaped by centuries of violent bloodshed (or "colonization") between one Native tribe and another Native tribe.
I'm saying that pre-colonial-age America was not a place where each tribe came in, found their own piece of virgin land, and lived in peace and harmony. They were not any different than the homo sapiens on other continents, which is to say, smart, determined, and willing to kill outsiders to improve their own tribe's chances of survival.
The only reason of course that they are viewed so sympathetically today is the tragedy of their near-complete destruction, which can be explained very thoroughly by their incredibly bad luck of having almost no domesticable native animals, and their not having gotten Iron Age technology. But in the end their destruction was mostly due to disease, traceable to early Spanish contact, which had absolutely decimated North American societies before almost any human Europeans had set foot on the mainland.[1] Europeans indeed did lots of bad things to those peoples, but I argue this is less proof that "Europeans are uniquely mean" and more proof that humans are brutal when they come into conflict over scarce resources and will press whatever advantages they have, whether it's large numbers of braves with obsidian arrowheads or muskets.
A good read for some perspective on what we can piece together about what pre-colonial America was like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization
> "According to Keeley, among the indigenous peoples of the Americas, only 13% did not engage in wars with their neighbors at least once per year. The natives' pre-Columbian ancient practice of using human scalps as trophies is well documented. Iroquois routinely slowly tortured to death captured enemy warriors (see Captives in American Indian Wars for details)."
You can excuse or justify the genocide of native people by European colonizers any way you want, although it baffles me why so many people want to. But it doesn't matter, they still don't get to call themselves native.
> Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?
No, it couldn't. Trump tells them to vote a certain way, they do it. Look at Massie's primary as an example.
Go on thinking that, but it really won't help the Democrats win if they persist in this attitude. Voters are just looking at what's on offer from both parties, and one party's platform has been judged to be both hostile to their interests and also actively scorns them as people. The other is mostly hostile to their interests and is super corrupt, but it cuts taxes[1] and doesn't belittle them.
The Democrats squeaked out one miraculous win buoyed by the incompetence of Trump's band of corrupt idiots in the early COVID days. But now merely pointing out how incompetent and corrupt Trump is stopped working, as we saw in 2024. Do Democrats have anything left in the playbook besides derision and scorn toward those outside their tent? We will soon see, I guess.
[1] I know the talking points say that the tax cuts "only benefit the rich" but I'm far from a 1%er and can tell you that I'm paying way more taxes in a blue state than I would be in a red state, and also the OBBB improved things for me. Voters in those blue states can see their tax bills and the one thing Democrats can't say is that they don't put a huge tax burden on those who work.
You're just arguing that pandering and short-term-ism works. I won't hold my breath for a Republican caucus that's actually fiscally responsible.
I'm not a Democrat.
> 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.
[0]https://newrepublic.com/article/199094/dhs-neo-nazi-memes-no...
[1]https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/dhs-white-nati...
> "You don't try to wall off your entire southern border because you think the problem is a minority of bad actors."
I would challenge this. If you do believe that there are violent criminals coming through the porous border, whether it's 1% of the illegal immigrants or 100% of them, trying to seal the border off is not irrational. I'm not endorsing the physical wall itself, as I know a ton of illegal migrants are just overstaying visas, and I've heard of ladders and tunnels.
I think what's really compelling, and what the Left can't seem to relate to, is this: Everyone serious does believe the true fact that illegal immigrants have a lower rate of committing crimes than the overall population. But people who are victimized by those crimes have a valid point that those crimes are still incremental crimes - meaning that if we already had 1000 people in $BORDER_STATE who are going to commit violent crimes, letting in 1000 more people, even if only 10 of them (1%) are violent criminals, gives us 1,010 violent criminals. That's more crime than we had before. It's not like we get to trade in 10 of our own criminals for 10 immigrant ones.
Making no effort to control who comes here is irresponsible, because of course if there's a country that doesn't even try to vet you, and would feel guilty making you leave, of course criminals would be excited to go there.
> That's more crime than we had before
In absolute terms yes, but you're forgetting that you are also increasing the victim population, so the per-capita rate is still going to drop!
Assuming criminals more-or-less randomly choose their victims, the number of immigrant criminals hitting native victims is more than offset by native criminals now hitting immigrant victims instead of native ones.
>If you do believe that there are violent criminals coming through the porous border, whether it's 1% of the illegal immigrants or 100% of them, trying to seal the border off is not irrational.
Yes it is. Building a 1900 mile long wall with moats and barbed wire and armed guards ordered to shoot on sight across an entire continent because a fraction of illegal immigrants might be violent criminals is the definition of irrational.
Particularly when the same could be said of the border with Canada but no one is concerned about that at all.
> I'm not endorsing the physical wall itself, as I know a ton of illegal migrants are just overstaying visas, and I've heard of ladders and tunnels.
But Trump was talking about a physical wall. And a physical wall is what Trump supporters voted for.
>Making no effort to control who comes here is irresponsible, because of course if there's a country that doesn't even try to vet you, and would feel guilty making you leave, of course criminals would be excited to go there.
No one is talking about making no effort to control who comes here, that's another right-wing conspiracy point not based in reality. There is a vast degree of possibility between "doing nothing" and "building a wall and sending ICE to kidnap people and shoot them in the streets." There is a degree of vetting which is reasonable and responsible and this is not it. This is paranoia and fear born of racism.
Strangely, his current approval ratings on immigration policy is only about 37%. There appears to be a wide gap between what people thought they were voting for a year and a half ago, and what they are seeing now.
I think there's a wide gap between the consequences they expected and the consequences they got. I also think Trump acting like a buffoon and the Epstein thing affect the way people interpret his policies. If he and his administration weren't so overtly racist about it, they could get away with a lot of what they're doing and maintain broad popular support.
It's the classic "'I never thought leopards would eat my face', complains women who voted for Leopards Eating People's Faces Party".
"The Epstein thing" is an interesting way to refer to an overt pedophile protection racket. And "buffoon" feels a bit short of "malignant narcissist with dementia taking bribes and starting catastrophic wars", yeah?
We’ve also seen that you’re not safe on a green card either.
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.
Why would they stick with the Big Tech companies?
If you just got massively screwed over by them (having upended your entire life in hope of getting a better future, then having that rugpulled), why would you get another job at that company with significantly worse contract terms?
Considering the rest of the world is reacting to the US setting itself on fire by finally stimulating local tech, why not just join one of the local alternatives instead?
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.
"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.
> Then you can adjust the numbers one way or another.
The numbers need to go up.
China, in particular, has an "elite overproduction" problem. We should be welcoming every English-speaking Chinese STEM degree holder with open arms.
Anyone, from anywhere, with a STEM degree and a job offer from a US company, should be in this country. Period.
America needs to be the leader of the knowledge workforce world. We also need a vibrant and wealthy tax base and consumer base.
If we don't do this, China and other up-and-coming nations will increasingly start to displace us, which puts all of our workers at a disadvantage.
1) The US has a much greater 'Elite Over Production' problem than does China. China produces a lot of people with decent education that can' find work but that's not 'Elite Overproduction'.
Frankly EO is just a sign of a developed nation.
2) "Anyone, from anywhere, with a STEM degree and a job offer from a US company, should be in this country"
Since when did citizenship become about 'Economic Production'?
The vast majority of the people of the world don't agree with this - and this is kind of one of the roots of disagreement over migration.
Yes - surely 'educated migrants' are good and helpful, but that's only part of the equation.
3) "If we don't do this, China and other up-and-coming nations will increasingly start to displace us"?
Displace you how exactly?
All of this hints of 'Nationalist Industrial Capitalism' with hints of fear mongering. "But China's Gonna Get Us!" ... listen I get it - but this card is played a bit too hard, too often.
Also absent is the fact that there's a need to help refugees etc.
The US surprisingly takes surprisingly few refugees in from conflicts zones, even those it calamities it participates in.
Consider that a 'Nation' is a 'Community' - not a 'Business Centre' and that education and economic competitiveness are just parts of that consideration.
Ultimately, it's a choice, and those points are not invalid, but probably should be contextualized in the grander scheme of how most people define their communities.
America is the leader of the knowledge workforce world and that aint gonna change. We aren't getting displaced anytime soon. One look at the pay differential makes it clear where incentives lie
Most of them saying they are anti illegal immigrant are lying if you dive into their numbers. It conveniently lines up with the legal asylum seekers.
Usually when I find out someone’s making that deceptive claim and call them out on it they quickly admit that they don’t think asylum is/should be legal
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.
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.
"The people"? Are you sure you're not committing the common sin of conflating vocal people with most people? For example, I publicly condemn illegal immigration, regardless of which industry said immigrants are propping up, while at the same time recognizing that such industries need to be carefully extricated from reliance on illegal immigrants and also that the management of immigration and the definition of illegal immigration needs to be fixed.
As another disconnect, farmers overwhelmingly voted for Trump. I really don't understand how people are using their brains any more.
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.
Threads like these make me realize how wrong people can be. I understand the complexity and can see how misinformed people are. Makes me wonder what happens in other threads where I know little and just take whatever at face value. Eesh.
You see the complexity, but still categorize a noteworthy number of people somewhere as (relatively) reasonable as HN as clearly "wrong"?
It's wickedly complicated, isn't it? I'm distressed by anybody who doesn't change their position from time to time.
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!"
Mine comes to the same conclusion via a different route. I don't want my government telling me where I can or cannot travel to or decide to live, and I want all other governments to do the same.
How many tired or poor huddled masses are breathing free in your home, oh gracious one?
Care to share what other policies of yours you happen to offshore to 19th century ethnic activists?
That "19th century ethnic activist" was born in the US after her family emigrated here more than a century prior fleeing the Inquisition. Her activism was aiding refugees entering New York as they fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe. My ancestors entered this country in the 19th century though that "golden door" as "poor huddled masses" fleeing those same pogroms. I admire that "ethnic activist" not locking the door behind her just because her ancestors happened to make the journey in a prior generation and therefore I echo that mindset. For me, being anti-immigration would be like spitting on all their graves.
This country was built on the backs of immigrants and slaves which instills in me the belief that even more central than freedom, there is no ideal more core to the United States as a nation than immigration.
Well, why are you posting on HN instead of manning the border? Or are you "offshoring" immigration enforcement to someone who doesn't sit behind a keyboard on a Saturday afternoon?
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.
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.
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.
You really weren't paying close attention to their rhetoric, then.
But you obviously knew what they really meant to accomplish, right? How could you not, being a faculty with a PhD. And yet you supported them anyways.
I have a high school education and I saw this coming before he even ran for president. Were you around for the "Obama was born in Kenya" stuff?
I’m also an immigrant.
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 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.
> I hear "I'm not anti immigrant, I'm anti illegal immigrant" a lot.
A lot of those people had no issue with ICE bullying and detaining legal immigrants.
Or citizens who look like a immigrants.
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.
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.
The "anti illegal immigrant" crowd ignores, or more likely supports, the systemic racism built into the current immigration system put in place by racist lawmakers throughout the country.
This new policy is no different and is a trap to kick out and never accept back more non-white immigrants.
How is a scheme systemically racist when >50% of 13M green card holders are from Latin/South America and Caribbean?
You can't be serious.
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.
It took us 12-15 years to get a GC (depends on how you count).
People who fraudulently or illegally come in have had it easier. And I was in the top 1% earner, built things that everyone here on HN has used. I’ve contributed a lot and struggled to get recognized. People don’t know how much of a mess this is. They claim they want smart people to come to the US. The system isn’t setup for it.
Anyone who uses this line is a racist.
Some people.
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”
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.
This was from the official DHS account -- https://xcancel.com/DHSgov/status/2006472108222853298
What do you think they mean by "100 million"?
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.
The reality is that people who say that are certainly anti-immigration, they just know people don’t like when they say that
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.
Everybody across the world only wants a certain type of immigrant. The salient difference is whether the definition of "certain type" is petty or not (e.g. based on skin color vs based on qualifications).
Narrator: it was petty
Trump grew up when anybody not white legally could be treated as less than. He lost this legal ability in his formative years in college.
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
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.
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.
There are deeper lesson here.
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.
I agree. I think there are ways to do that that could get more support than the way we're currently doing things.
Imagine if we began processing immigration applications at a rate ten- or a hundredfold of what we currently do. Imagine if just about anyone could get in, barring things like people with actual serious criminal records, etc. Imagine if when you got in via that system, you got some kind of long-term resident visa, which required you to pay an additional tax for, say, the next 10 years. Also imagine that this long-term resident visa gave you a path to citizenship, on condition of permanently renouncing all other citizenships you might hold. In other words, imagine that becoming a legal immigrant was far less onerous in process, but slightly more onerous in official requirements.
Such a plan could be framed as encouraging immigrants who want to "put down roots", and that kind of immigration is much more plausibly spun as beneficial, because people who move to a place to live permanently do not want it to be sucky. By making the process simpler but applying clear costs (e.g., extra tax), it also gives people an easy to way to demonstrate that they want to do things the right way.
Also, making the process more straightforward makes it much more politically palatable to deport people who violate it (which will still happen). A large part of the "bleeding-heart" leftist perspective towards immigrants stems from a sense that many people who immigrate illegally do so because "they had no other choice". If the bar to legal immigration is lowered so that it becomes a live option, this argument is harder to make.
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.
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'm not anti immigrant, I just really care about paperwork \s
Democrats actively encouraged more than 10 million illegals to pour into the country during the previous administration. They lied about it and downplayed it for three years, and then (when election season rolled around) they talked tough about their plan to "seal the border"... which was another lie, as the bill they proposed would have allowed illegal immigration to continue at up to ~6X the historical average rate without requiring any action whatsoever to "seal the border". When the American people vote for mass deportations, those were called "fascism" and the basic enforcement of immigration law is actively, even physically opposed.
But an inconvenient process change has you clutching your pearls and crying "bad faith"? Yikes.
I'm curious what you think "actively encouraged" means here?
The Democrat election messaging that caused border encounters to ~3X immediately after Biden was elected, obviously.
https://archive.is/QKk0l#selection-923.73-930.0
https://dgcjnpzq7j07id.archive.is/QKk0l/41e225be79dbd90e86c6...
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.
And I will stop assuming that people know what the word fascist actually means
"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."
~ Jean-Paul Sartre, 1944
This is a quite interesting paragraph, because you can rewrite it to today's extremist (both far left & far right):
"Never believe that far-left woke extremists are completely unaware of the absurdity of their assertions. They know that their ideological mandates are fragile, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their moderate or conservative adversary who is obliged to use language responsibly, since he still believes in universal standards of logic. The ideological zealots have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by enforcing shifting definitions and linguistic traps, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by objective evidence but to intimidate, socially ostracize, and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent or weaponize moral outrage, loftily indicating by some accusation of bigotry or systemic harm 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.
Purely hypothetical of course...
You'd consider that a good thing?
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.
You could keep the vetting system and still increase legal immigration a lot. Those are two separate issues.
Thats the other way to say what i just said. Its not as good a way to say it for this specific issue because it doesn't hilight the differences that matter to this particular discussion
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.
> This administration is doing things that are illegal. They're getting sued and they're losing. Constantly.
Source?
Court Listener is basically an open source listing of dispositions on essentially all cases, but definitely all major ones. It’s a wonderful resource.
Why on earth would they need to wait years?
From the article:
"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:
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.
That note is grossly wrong though, ICE was/is putting them in jail while they appear for immigration hearing at courts.
Says right in the comment.
Consular processing isn't that backlogged for majority of countries that's what i meant.
That's just plainly untrue.
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.
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.
Do you have any personal experience with the immigration system at all?
As an Iranian, it took 4 months for me to get a F1 visa. Now it's completely banned.
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.
They still do the tiny print in a Sunday newspaper, they just also now are supposed to post on LinkedIn and the website (aka normal hiring process).
Interesting that there is a difference between minimum qualifications and actually qualified to do the job.
What is minimum qualifications? Enough to get an interview?
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.
an undergrad for most of the jobs.
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.
It sounds like you're trying to defend going nuclear on green cards by arguing about a quirk of the H1B.
The H1B system was stupid. That doesn't justify any of what the Trump admin has been doing.
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.
Agreed. I don't really know how the current process works, but I would assume there is some level of oversight, meaning that errant (unqualified) applicants shouldn't detract from a qualified h1b under the current system any more than a centralized one. Tying a profile to a human (gov can do this) should at least help with determining whether an applicant is qualified (not that they are an actual fit for the team) which could provide some proxy for fitness of the current pool.
You've just described what already has to occur for PERM, you have to post on the respective State Workforce Agency website.
So punish/disincentivize employers. This is a burden on the presumptive legal immigrant.
Exactly this. The difference in the pitch to voters (labor market test) vs the actual implementation (box checking sham), just shows how dishonest the whole tech industry and immigration lobby is about this. The actual solution is somewhere in the middle, but it will likely never happen because those with political capital and high social status benefit enormously from low wage h1b/opt/l1 workers. The people who are hurt by these immigration programs don't have high social status so nobody cares.
Ironic that liberals turn into libertarian boot likers for mega corps when it comes to immigration.
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.
And don't forget that US consulates in 75 countries, or approximately a third of the globe, have stopped conducting Green Card interviews.
> 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"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/05/22/trump-south-a...
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.
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
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.
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...
> I wish they would just have a simple fast lane for the 100% legal, non-complicated case.
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 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.
> 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".
This seems entirely reasonable. You had as much time as you could have liked to apply for jobs after deciding to try the USA. Fortunately you were able to take advantage of an alternative that didn’t require that.
I’m not really sure what you were going for writing that. You think 10 years working in country A should entitle you to a work permit from country B?
> nor do they only come from white or european countries.
Why should that matter? If country B decides to only allow white and / or Europeans to apply to live and work in country B, that is entirely fair. It’s not people-from-outside-country-B’s privilege to decide what country B does or doesn’t do.
Discrimination is a human right.
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.
Sure, but AFAIK a green card is more like indefinate leave to remain: it's not a visa as such, but a thing you can apply for after you have already lived in the country for some amount of time (on a visa of some other form, generally one which allows you to legally stay for the required time in the country) which gives the right to stay permanently. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to require leaving the country to apply first.
I see, that is different indeed, and rather silly to force you to apply from abroad!
Seems like it's a ploy to get all the undesirables out of the country, then it's "oops your application was denied, or it takes years to be approved, you can't come back. Sorry not sorry!"
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.
Do they have yo quit their job to leave the county?
If you’re on a work visa you can’t work from a foreign country.
How is this the same? You can't apply for a green card on a holiday/tourist/non-working visa. You have to be already in the country for many years before you can do that.
This is pretty normal for most countries' visa processes. You often have to leave to renew a visa.
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...
Wrong - green card is visa
OK so apparently when you file for an IR-1 visa, the IR-1 is the sticker they put in your passport that gets you into the country. But once you get the card, it replaces the visa. So the card is not the visa.
Today I learned. Before this thread, I was under the same impression as bluesea.
https://guides.sll.texas.gov/immigration-law/visas-green-car...
A green card is literally not a visa
It’s a type of visa with benefits afforded a more temporary form.
A green card like a visa can be revoked. Citizenship gets a bit more interesting with the current administration.
A green card is literally not a visa in US Law.
In other contexts, it literally is.
"Green card" literally refers to US permanent residency cards; it's called that because the physical cards issued by the US are/were green. "Other contexts" are riffing on actual green cards as a metaphor, and if speakers in other contexts want to talk about legal specificities, they should use an accurate term...
The equivalent of greencard in most countries (permanent residency) usually requires that you're in the country, not outside, and the process is heavily reliant on you being present in country and able to show history of legal (temporary) residence.
The majority of people granted greencards are family/relative sponsored who apply outside the US. Only in the past 15 years have employee sponsored greencards surged, most of whom have temporary visas.
I think the biggest question the US needs to ask itself is do we want to be normal like most countries or better?
At this point the US is the kid eating glue, it looks like.
USA has been far better for over 100 years. But that had to end at some point. So now we're seeing it end.
It did not "have" to end, it's merely a political choice by one political faction being forced upon the entire nation.
It's unfortunate, by and large the republican voters seem to have looked at the wreckage of the USSR and the continual looting and decline in quality of life that countries like Russia are enjoying under a kleptocratic regime, and they took their fingers out of their collective noses for just long enough to say "yeah I want that for here!".
People hate to be reminded of this, but that "faction" is the voters, in record numbers for the party.
Not really, voters didn't want this, and they hate it when they are told what's happening. The media silently accepted Trump's lie at face value when he said he knew nothing about Project 2025, despite anybody with half a brain realizing it was a lie. Reporters acted like they had less than half a brain, so that they wouldn't get bopped on their nose by their editors, who in turn were already bowing down to Trump.
The "faction" lied about their intentions in order to be elected. That in itself isn't uncommon, but what is uncommon is the degree to which it lied. Most Republican voters, when told about the actual policies being implemented by elected Republicans, don't believe the reports, and assume that nobody would be enacting such stupid policy. Yet the voters keep voting for them.
> voters didn't want this
Yes they did. Of course they didn't want to be targeted themselves, but the rhetoric was very explicit about what would happen, and they already had a preview of it in 2016 and voted even more favorably for this regime this time around.
> The media silently accepted Trump's lie at face value when he said he knew nothing about Project 2025
Not true. The media was very vocal about it, and it was obvious that he was on board with it.
> Most Republican voters, when told about the actual policies being implemented by elected Republicans, don't believe the reports, and assume that nobody would be enacting such stupid policy.
This isn't true. The recent ouster of Thomas Massie is a clear example of this. However, even if that were true, Republican voters still overwhelmingly prefer this to the alternative (Democrats), and polls show this today.
> Yet the voters keep voting for them.
Indeed. Not sure how you can acknowledge this but somehow believe it's not what the voters want.
> The recent ouster of Thomas Massie is a clear example of this
How?
The outcome of his election was a referendum on Trump's performance among engaged Republican voters.
First, you're making a big logical error by replacing "voters" with "Republican voters" or the even more narrow, extreme, and unrepresentative group of "Republican primary voters".
If people knew they were voting for Project 2025, why would Trump disavow any connection to it during the campaign? It doesn't make any sense.
> Republican voters still overwhelmingly prefer this to the alternative (Democrats), and polls show this today.
Republican voters care less about policy than about the team. Take key Democratic policies, and present them in polls without the Democratic label, and Republicans support them. Add in the label and they don't support them.
It's not hard to understand that politics is mostly treated as sports-team affiliation these days.
Republicans don't vote for Republicans because of policies, they vote for Republicans because they identify as Republicans.
And, claiming that the Massie vote, of just the extreme primary voters, represents the public's will? That's ridiculous. Massie still got something like 45% of the vote, among that extreme and unrepresentative bloc of voters, after Trump going hard after Massie for trying to release the Epstein files.
The Massie vote is about extremist Republican's subservience to Trump, not about whether anybody actually likes policies. People despise Trump's Epstein coverup.
Trump's platform was literally 24 bullet points in ALL CAPS: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-pa...
The first two items were:
"1. SEAL THE BORDER, AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION"
"2. CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY"
You're acting like Trump's immigration policy was buried in some "Project 2025" whitepaper nobody has ever read.
Also, his immigration policy remains popular. According to Harvard-Harris, "Deporting all immigrants who are here illegally" remains above water at 55% support (including 33% of Democrats), 45% oppose: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/HHP... (p. 26)
You mean the elected one?
100 years?
In the 1920s and 1930s the US had:
- Forced labor
- Peonage
- Debt servitude
- Jim crow laws
The 19th amendment was ratified in 1920, so that barely missed the cutoff.
The US has not been some beacon of moral righteousness for the majority of its existence.
USA accepted more immigrants between 1900 and 1980 than every other western country combined.
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.)
[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-the-share-of-foreig...
[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/stocks-of-foreign-bo...
The parent post says it’s the high economic activity that attracted people even though the US has been more hostile than average by every other measure. So it's as if the US was a honeypot with a flyswatter.
By the way, your [2] is useless to prove your point: you can't compare absolute numbers (for instance Iceland vs the US).
I would suggest that the proper metric is not the number of immigrants, which after all the parent commentator implied would be the case because of higher economics drawing them in, but a combination of the following
1. the amount of violence directed against immigrants legally allowed in by governmental forces.
2. the chance of legally allowed in immigrants will have immigration status changed without due process.
3. what percentage of Immigrants fear that 1 or 2 will happen to them.
I believe these two conditions seem to exist in the United States currently, although not sure how many immigrants it affects.
I am unsure if there are other countries that have a similar situation, I would expect if there are they must be relatively few in number.
The closest type of situation would be, I suppose, racial oppression focused on particular groups that have become undesirable according to a country's government.
DO you have a good reason why?
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.
> Who does the farming? Who does the cleaning? Who builds the buildings? Who are the line cooks? That should be obvious.
Exclusively immigrants? Is that what you’re arguing?
Only green card holders in the US do those jobs?
I think there are many jobs Americans have decided the just don’t want to do - at a large scale. That said many do.
There is a completely different dynamic with job shops like wipro and others sponsoring “high skilled visas” which are only used to undercut certain labor markets.
I'm not against tightening up the constraints to prevent what becomes indentured servitude dressed up in red, white, and blue. That doesn't help the American people or those who carry within them the American dream. But fixing that is not everyone's actual intent, and that does really bother me.
Whoa there. What's wrong with "undercutting labor markets"? Last I heard, when a profession (e.g. doctors) decides to limit the number of practicioners in order to charge a higher price to the public, that's a bad thing. It benefits the people currently employed in that profession now, but it hurts others who wants to join, and it hurts the public who wants to get the service (e.g. healthcare). The sum of hurt is greater than the sum of help. Cartels are harmful; they don't stop being harmful just because there are borders involved.
I mean, it's one thing if you think immigrants commit more crimes or use more taxpayer money. These are both false, but at least the argument could hypothetically work. But if you say that even perfectly law-abiding, non-welfare-using, good-work-performing hypothetical immigrants shouldn't be allowed in because they would "undercut labor markets", that's plain nonsense. Such nice hypothetical immigrants should be invited in large numbers and everyone would win from it.
Well, not everyone.
Those having their labour under-cut aren’t going to directly benefit.
That's an argument against everything. Cheap washing machines? Undercut the labor of washers, let's ban them. Inviting Einstein? He creates more science per dollar of salary than our best scientists, so let's not invite him. Allowing families to have five kids? No, that might flood the labor market, so three kids max.
The whole logic of "let's allow new things" rests on "let's allow old things to be outcompeted". It's a good thing. It's just so weird that people forget about it when borders are involved. Think logically for a second. The US has 300M people, and there's a lot of wealth disparity between different areas. Would individual areas in the US benefit from closing their labor market to other areas? Would "no workers from out of town" lead to a better economy for the town? Why did the EU go to such pains to ensure free movement of goods and labor, are they on crack?
You don’t even have to think that hard about it.
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 spent on kicking out taxpayers/customers, tax cuts for billionaires, the current record high budget deficit, $1.8 billion fund for Trump brownshirts, etc.
> Without immigration an imminent depopulation crisis is on its way to America.
Most countries have this same issue. Not all, but the global population rise, if current trends continue will reverse.
Can you explain to me your understanding of why that is?
And can you also explain your understanding of why Israel is the only Western country that has a fertility rate above replacement?
<< Without immigration an imminent depopulation crisis is on its way to America.
You may not realize this, but it appears to be the goal in this case.
You're putting the cart in front of the horse. If the US economy didn't need low-wage immigrant workers, we wouldn't be complaining about them in the first place, because they would've gone somewhere else where the jobs are.
The fact they're coming the US literally means its economy needs them.
Of course we could all wax philosophical and say "Nobody needs a Frappuccino every other day, we just want it," but then nobody needs to live in a prosperous economy anyway.
> The fact they're coming the US literally means its economy needs them.
Not necessarily. As just one example, it could mean one of their family immigrated for a well paying job, and now they want their parents, or other family, to join them and they don’t have skills in a high paying industry.
The presence of low income wage earners does not, by force of nature nor economics, require them.
Having said that, I tend to against minimum wage policy.
I wish i could ill find the video, the farms in CA certainly do need labor. In the 90s when there was another - people south of the border are taking jobs bs - an interview er asked people waiting for for support at a welfare office in Salinas (lots of farms) offering jobs in the fields. Unanimous nope.
They are needed and often do more than those that are citizens.
Easy fix.
Remove, or at least tighten the requirements, for welfare.
Your argument seems to be the equivalent of: if the (illegal? surely some of them) immigrants could get welfare they also wouldn’t do those jobs.
As welfare increases to the point where it starts to competes with jobs, it seems sensible to expect welfare will compete with jobs. Especially when you take in to consideration the expenses welfare recipients don’t incur as a result of not having to attend the workplace nor dress for such.
A hundred years? Maybe after WW2. The Great Depression was pretty rough over there.
Far better than who?
Indeed, but there are counterexamples as well. In the UAE you enter as a tourist and get a resident visa while you're there. They take away your passport for at least a couple of weeks so you can't leave either.
As I recall, we had to drive to the US border and turn around to "enter Canada" to process our landed immigrant letters. That was a while ago, so it's possible that there is more involved now... Was curious as they asked about our stuff and car(s), and we pointed out "at home, in Canada" which got a smile.
Canada requires you to (re)enter under your newly granted status in some circumstances, but that is entirely different from requiring you to leave the country before you can apply for a change of status, and to remain outside of the country while the application is processed. I was free to come and go from Canada as a temporary visitor while I waited to get my PR, and I had the option of applying from within the country as a non resident as well, with some caveats.
Think my European buddy had to go back home to renew his work permit. Could not do that within Canada.
is that normal? in UK you can extend a visa or apply for ILR without leaving the country.
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.
Sweden is portrayed as beacon of human rights, let's use them as an example.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.migrationsverket.se/en/you-want-to-apply/live-wi...
And for US green cards for marriage you can get them in 10 to 24 months (Before this change).
https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/how-long-doe...
Funnily, I had a German friend complain about this change and then I came across this Reddit thread.
Many European countries actually adopt a similar policy. Off the top of my head, the Netherlands requires those who want to become a resident to obtain an MVV visa from a consulate abroad, even if you are already in the Netherlands legally, except for a small list of allied countries.
Germany also has similar rules, forbidding short stay individuals from becoming a long-term resident without interviewing abroad. It also ensures that any individuals who are denied are already abroad, without the need to enforce their departure.
That’s not true. Germany explicitly allows you to stay in the country to transition from a temporary visa to long term.
> However, the law provides several exceptions where you can apply for the new residence title while staying in Germany with your current permit. These exceptions allow a switch from a temporary purpose (like studies) to a more permanent one
These timelines are wildly optimistic. Boundless is selling a service and I'd recommend nobody actually uses it because you're really paying for nothing. Things like "you are responsible for the information you provide". Part of the reason you get an immigration attorney is to identify likely issues, go with you for your interview, know when (or even if) to apply for an immigration benefit and to put their name as the preparer (ie putting their reputation and career on the line for their advice).
Boundless seems like knowing a guy in the neighbourhood who helps you fill out immigration forms, typically called "notarios". Some will call themselves "paralegals" without working for an actual lawyer. It's a scammy business.
So here's the general process.
1. Petitioner (US citizen or LPR) files an I130 and I130A for their overseas spouse. That requires a lot of documentation to prove your status, that it's a bona fide marriage, biographic information for your spouse, proof that you're both free to marry (ie evidence of previous marriages and that you're divorced/single);
2. USCIS spends 12-15 months processing this. It then gets sent to the National Visa Center ("NVC") who spend another 3+ months looking at the documents, after which you're "documentarily qualified" ("DQ");
3. At this point, your foreign spouse can now make an appointment with an embassy or consulate for an immigrant visa interview. Depending on their country this may be realtively quick (within 1-2 months) or really long (12+ months);
4. The foreign spouse will need to get a medical exam done to check for vaccines, communicable diseases (eg TB), etc. This has to be done within a certain period of the interview;
5. The interview happens and the officer asks whatever they want to ask. If it's approved, your pay the fee and your passport is stamped. You're given a packet to hand over to CBP when you enter the US. It can be denied. The officer may ask for more information, which can add months of delay. Or it can go into a limbo called "admin processing";
6. The spouse travels to the US and is now a permanent resident, assuming CBP lets them in (they have discretion not to btw). You may then have to wait for months for your green card and you're waiting for that to get your SSN so you can work, get a bank account, get on a lease, etc.
It's more realistic to say this will take 2-2.5 years and maybe take 4+. In that entire time the foreign spouse won't get any kind of visa to visit the US so if you want to be with your spouse, you need to live in another country or visit often for a very long time.
So how can go wrong? Lots of ways. Here's a non-exhaustive list:
1. The foreign spouse's entire immigration history is under scrutiny. If they visited their then partner(before getting married) and didn't tell the embassy or CBP about that, it can raise misrep[resentation] issues. and may just cause delays;
2. If they've ever applied for a visa and been denied, this too will be scrutinized;
3. Ideally you only need a police report for the country you live in (to prove no criminal history) and that's relatively easy to get. It might not be. Or you may need it for a bunch of countries if you've lived in multiple over the previous 5 years;
4. USCIS gets to decide where your interview is going to be. Prior to this administration, that could be where you were living. For example, if you were from Mali but living and working in the UK, then you could schedule it in the UK. Now the administration has decided you must be interviewed in your country of birth. If that country has no US embassy (eg Afghanistan) then maybe your country of residence can be used or it might be a country neighbouring your country of birth;
5. What if you applied for asylum from that country? Let's say you are from belarus but claimed (and received) asylum in the UK. You might spend a year trying to tell USCIS that you can't travel to Belarus for your interview;
6. How did the US citizen (or LPR) get their green card? Was it through marriage? This is what USCIS calls a "pivot case" and they view it harshly, particularly if, for example, a Ghana man was married in Ghana, travelled to the US, got divorced in the US, married a US citizen, got citizenship themselves, got divorced and then married somebody else from Ghana. USCIS is increasingly taking the position that this may well be immigration fraud, arguing the man had multiple wives, the divorce was a sham and the second spouse was their spouse all along. It's up to you to prove that's not the case. In this administration that can lead to revocation of their green card or even denaturalization;
7. Was the foreign spouse ever in a cultural or religious marriage? This gets real tricky because what counts as "married" and "divorced" varies by country and, depending on the country, can be hard to prove. Also, some countries have a lot of falsified divorce decrees (eg Nigeria). This can add months as you have to prove they were free to marry;
8. The president may come along and decide to ban visa issuance to your foreign spouse's country. USCIS seemingly takes the broadest definition of this. So if you were born in one of those countries OR have ever had citizen, you're covered by the ban. There's no judicial recourse for this, thanks to Trump v. Hawaii. If so, you're just in limbo probably until Trump leaves office;
9. The black hole after the interview can be "administrative processing". This can mean anything. It can mean something as simple as "we don't like this case". IIRC I heard that 85% of cases in admin processing ultimately get approved but the case may sit in limbo for years and may take a court challenge to resolve it;
10. If you end up taking too long after your interview, your medical exam may expire and you have to do it again. Hopefully the embassy officer asks you for an updated copy but they don't have to be that nice;
11. Between the interview and coming to the US things can happen that USCIS or CBP argue are of material interest. Maybe you get charged with something, even if it's just a traffic offense. You might not fill out the forms correctly. You might not even be aware of it. It might not stop USCIS or CBP making a big deal out of it; and
12. CBP can arbitrarily decide to deny you entry at a port-of-entry even with a valid immigrant visa stamp in your passport for pretty much any reason.
I dare you to find any marriage immigration benefit that's as capricious, arbitrary, time-consuming, restrictive and Byzantine as the US system.
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.
> This policy is some attempt to address flows of quasi-legal immigration.
Is it though? This administration doesn't exactly have a track record of decisions based on carefully thought out policy implications.
> 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.
You do realize that the overwhelming majority of countries in the world at not predominantly white, do you?
When Trump explicitly invites only white people from South Africa, a majority black nation, I think the intention is pretty clear.
> have migrated to improve their lives, not to altruistically benefit a foreign country
These are not mutually exclusive. I want a better life, and I also have career ambition and skills that I'm willing to deploy in a place that will give me a better life in return.
Well…your motivation is not altruistic to the host country in that case, it’s selfish.
You want a better life, the country providing it is arbitrary as long as it accepts the currency that you can provide for that better life by your skill set.
If it was altruistic you would emigrate because you believe in the country you are emigrating to even if it meant your life was worse.
I'm saying most people are motivated by self interest, not that you have nothing to offer in return.
> Do people migrate to "contribute their skills" to a foreign country, or to improve their lives?
People come to improve their lives.
Their employers hire them to improve their lives.
Both end up better off!
More people are impacted by mass immigration than immigrants and employers.
Correct, and it is overall a positive impact. There is marginal increased competition for a limited number of professions, and a meaningful boost to local economies
This policy is a further extension of this administration’s public, explicit and frequently repeated goal of ethnic cleansing. Acting like this is a rational policy response to any real problem is ridiculous.
Both the far right and far left throw around accusations of "ethnic cleansing." Both are ridiculous, but considering the U.S. population shifted from 85% white to 55% white in the last few decades, and even today most immigrants come from Mexico, India, China, etc., there really doesn't seem to be much evidence that we're actively trying to limit the flow of non-white people into America. Besides that, there are valid reasons why people want to limit or increase immigration that don't justify hysterical accusations of ethnic cleansing.
Ethic cleansing is something much worse when that race you are "cleansing" is already living there (Israel removing Palestinian from Gaza)
The accusations is just racism. The fact that Trump gave extra fast visas to white South Afrikaans makes you think that there were some racial reasoning there.
In the last decades the whole world is more global.
The uncertainty is one of the main reasons why I didn't bother to go the F1->H1B route and ended up leaving the US again.... but that was a decade ago.
They undid public charge from my memory. It doesn’t exist anymore.
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.
How recently? As of about 2010, it was very much still there. I understand that is 16 years ago.
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.
Under what administration was your process?
Trump, early 2017. I'm aware there was some attempt by the Trump admin to change "public charge" terminology in late 2018.
I am pretty sure you’re talking about the time when the doctor asks you to lift your dick to check that you don’t have an STD or something .
Best moment of the process.
Whoah. I never had that bit LOL. You got special treatment :) They did an eye test and made me get some vaccination records from when I was a kid.
The craziest bit I found was the GC interview where they test your spousal relationship. Expected questions like "What side of the bed do you sleep on?", "Who takes out the garbage?" -- instead they spent 30 minutes interrogating my wife about the military base she was born on and spent the first 6 months of her life at ("Who was the commanding officer at the time?"). It was like something out of a KGB script.
The USA don't owe you citizenship. It's on you to prove that your presence there would be of benefit to the other citizens.
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.
Green Cards aren't citizenship.
They're permanent residency, so other than voting rights effectively the same thing.
Lots of other differences.
1. Citizens have a right to enter at ports of entry, can refuse to hand over social media accounts, etc. Greencard holders are still at the discretion of border officials.
2. Citizens can wander the world and live abroad for however long they fancy and always be allowed to return to their country of citizenship when things go awry. Greencard holders can't do that.
3. Citizens get consular protection, greencard holders don't.
Well, based on the state your in you can still vote citizenship or not.
Which state allows this?
California and New York are the most famous examples but asking perplexity I got:
As of the current 2026 rules, the states that do not require ID at the polls are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin, plus Delaware has a special affidavit process if you do not have ID
https://www.usvotefoundation.org/2026-in-person-voter-id-pol...
First of all, not true, but second of all, thats a pretty important difference in a so called democracy.
I suggest you go and try out an immigration system. You have no idea.
I lived in central Europe for two years. Had to wait in line for 20 hours halfway through my time there to renew my visa, otherwise it wasn't much of an issue.
Ok so you know what a visa is then.
So on your visa if you did anything bad, what would happen? Get your visa taken?
Here's one big difference. Do something bad, your green card might be taken. When you're a citizen? Nothing happens
And that's just one example...
No, you're wrong. You can lose their Green Card.
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.
>No, you're wrong. You can lose their Green Card.
Didn't know that.
>If you leave the country for more than 6 months, you need to seek prior approval, and you definitely can lose it.
Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
>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.
That sounds eminently reasonable to me.
It doesn't matter that it sounds reasonable to you.
The point wasn't that these difference are unreasonable.
It was that they are substantial, and absolutely exist, making your "green card is pretty much the same as citizenship" statement false.
>Didn't know that.
We know. This is why we're telling you these things.
Now you know.
And there's much more for you to find out.
... no. As someone who has had both, I can tell you there's _quite_ a difference.
Wish granted: You are no longer a citizen because you never "proved you were beneficial". Please remit $100,000 to the Citizenship Payment Service immediately to avoid being downgraded to serfdom. /s
Framing it that way is backwards and anti-democratic. Democratic citizenship is something the government "owes" you because it is imposing control on your life. It is not some kind of magnanimous gift of club membership, you already deserved to have a say in what's being done to you.
That's why most Americans (and their children) have never once been required to "prove" that they are "beneficial", and it's why people the government is controlling in jails are still citizens rather than objects.
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?
Your implication is that the US has an outsized level of difficulty in immigration. This is nonsense. The UK, Australia and Europe are harder.
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.
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.
Did you just pick other generally racist countries with unfriendly immigration policies to prove that all other countries have such systems?
It's a two tier system where the best outcome appears to be to simply break the law completely and illegally.
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.
however, though, how about those people that are illegals just... dont?
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.
Most people come here for the economic and professional opportunities. I imagine that very few people move to the United States for the lifestyle.
Where else would people get opportunities that could match the United States? I can't think of any country that would even come close.
> 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.
> 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.
Depends on whether you actually want to enter the US. If you don't, its citizenship is a burden like no other citizenship: Banks want nothing to do with you and you pay extra taxes that no other nation requires from you. Oh, and should you decide on giving it up - that's cumbersome and costs a bunch of dollars, from what I've heard.
So from someone that at a max would want to visit the US only as a tourist: Having only european citizenship is better than dual european/US citizenship to me.
> 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?
> 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?
The AfD is in no position to put legislation regarding immigration in place, that is federal law. Nevertheless, southeast asian immigrants are not particularly in the eyes of the public.
Dunno man.. while there are nicer places, I used to live in EU country and, while I do have some fond memories, US lifestyle is soooo much more comfy.
What is it about the US you enjoy so? As someone who migrated to Europe from another country (and has never had the privilege of visiting the states) I can certainly think of ways I’d imagine America is better, and vice versa, but comfy is a surprising description. Genuinely curious
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.
> 300k in SF or NYC is FAR from early retirement unless you live 'frugally' - Manhattan average rents are 5K for 1 bed
You don’t have to retire in the US. As others have pointed out, nobody comes here for the lifestyle.
Immigrants like us are literally the holy grail of immigration. Come in during our most productive years, work hard for 10 to 20 years, go back home before you need any of the social and health care stuff you paid into.
Yeah, assuming you don't marry in the US, and don't have kids. But surely, you can think about it in your home country after working 20 of the best years of your life.
You can marry in the US and have kids and still move somewhere else 20 years later. Don’t Americans move to Florida or whatever to retire? If you’re moving that far you can just as well leave the country lol
$300k is also on the high end. Most devs have a very difficult time getting hired at companies that pay that much.
$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)
From personal experience, in Paris 80k would be a very good salary for a senior engineer at a startup with solid funding. AI startups/big tech would pay around 50% more, but those roles are very rare.
Most people would make way less, at big French companies you won't make 80k until late in your career as an IC (they don't have a staff+ track).
So 80k sounds like a decent guess for the top 10-15%.
>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.
Top graduates in France make 40-50k. This is the reality I have seen. Salaries are often tabulated with limited range.
It's definitely on the high end. Besides the fact that most startup equity ends up being worthless, you can't wait on a four year cliff to pay your rent.
>$300k is also on the high end.
Of course, but 80k is also on the high-end for Paris jobs as well and buying an apartment in or around Paris is not cheap at all. And most companies in France, even in tech, except maybe the few high-end international ones like FANGS or Mistral and Datadog, explicitly request French language for their workers, whereas English is enough for most US jobs.
I'm EU citizen and looked towards working in France even for the lower wages, but the French language mandates for most jobs are really off putting, even in European companies like Airbus.
Like I'm willing to learn the language, but I'd need at least 2-3 years to get remotely fluent, and it's just not worth the added effort, just for the opportunity to get the average Europoor wages that I can anyway get with just English and my mother tongue anywhere else in EU without any additional effort.
Even in my small Eastern European home town I hear more and more french speakers in the city center every year, and when I talk to them I understand they're all here to study medicine or get junior tech jobs, which is insane to me and speaks volumes on how bad the French jobs market must be for the youth when Eastern Europe is now an immigration hotspot for the french when 20 years ago it was the opposite.
So no, Paris/France is no European SV equivalent, not by a long shot, even by the low European standards. Amsterdam is probably the closest thing to SV the EU has, after London left, but housing and CoL there is insane and even that has significantly fewer VC funding than SV and even London, which highlight just how poor the EU is by comparison to the US at tech funding.
Like I want to get the EU to the top an catch up to the US, but I don't see how that's possible with such limited tech funding and glass ceilings based on having the right nationality and language requirements. EU will never beat the US, at least not in my lifetime.
> Even in my small Eastern European home town I hear more and more french speakers in the city center every year, and when I talk to them I understand they're all here to study medicine or get junior tech jobs, which is insane to me and speaks volumes on how bad the French jobs market must be for the youth when Eastern Europe is now an immigration hotspot for the french when 20 years ago it was the opposite.
It's often mere fiscal arbitrage. Look at the Belgians in Sofia for example. Euro zone, simpler and more stable administration, much cheaper, better climate, good food. Ridiculously lower taxes. Work remotely for Belgian customers. Pay 10% tax instead of 53.5% + 25+% employer social security contributions + 13.07% employee side. Even in a junior position, working for a Belgian client, you are so much cheaper to them while your net income is so much higher.
Most American's don't have that opportunity either or don't want to make the sacrifice of living in soul crushing circumstances.
Nobody in my European country needs to work at 70.
But there are VERY few countries on this planet that actually saved for retirement.
> 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.
> 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.
But out of the pool of people who come from poor countries, who don't have jobs lined up in the U.S, and aren't here on a skilled worker visa, a large fraction of them will end up relying on welfare benefits.
Family-based visas are a huge loophole in U.S. If you look at most of the immigrant ghettos in the country, they're fueled by family reunification. In my own extended family we have several people, who came here based on my dad's sponsorship, who are a drain on the government. (The sponsorship commitment is basically never enforced.)
The internal memo on this is interesting: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...
Essentially they're trying to change the rules by aggressive re-interpretation of the existing legal framework, and not actually changing any laws or regulations.
I don't follow all of it, but it seems to be arguing that the "ordinary consular process", leaving the country and applying for a visa from abroad, is the long-established default, and that "adjustment of status", where your immigration/green card status changes while you're already in the US, is merely an extraordinary exception and "a matter of discretion and administrative grace." Even though applying for a green card while in-country (an "adjustment") seems like the only sane and reasonable process.
It feels goofy watching them marshal decades of prior case law to try to frame this as just a "reminder" rather than admitting this is a real change. (Since changing laws is harder I assume)
On a related topic, the number of H1Bs brought in by big tech has been insane. Have you seen mtn view castro lately?
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.
That's a huge oversimplification though. Group 1 would mostly consist of some of the most ardent social progressives and some hippies, and the Group 2 is most everyone else and basically the policy in every country currently in existence.
In reality most people are somewhere in the spectrum of group 2:
* There are those who believe everyone economically net positive should be allowed.
* There are those who believe everyone who are a good cultural fit (for their personal criteria and biases) should be allowed.
* There are those who believe only exceptional people with rare talents should be allowed.
* There are those who believe people should only be allowed if they meet some definition of greater good.
* There are those who believe partner visas should be allowed/disallowed.
* There are those who believe only the wealthy people who'll spend or invest their wealth in the country should be allowed. (=various kinds of golden visas)
* There are those who believe no one except for certain race(s), nationality(es) or religion(s) should be allowed.
* There are those who believe no one should be allowed.
* ..Different combinations of above options..
* ?? (Many other possibilities)
> 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.
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).
Everybody who has a different moral opinion than yours holds that opinion for the sole reason that they believe it will make them look better to their peers.
This simplification is very small. #2 is almost literally self evidently true.
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.
I would say that #1 is almost self evidently true (I mean, obviously it's not because so many people disagree).
It seems obvious to me that there is no moral reason that some people should only be allowed to live in certain places.
It’s not about morality. It’s about human nature and economy. It’s like saying everybody should have the same amount of money. The result of such thinking would destroy the coin, and alternate forms of money would be created by the people.
Having all countries open the borders to anyone (ignoring security risks for the sake of the argument) would mean all poor people would emigrate to rich countries and strain the economy, while their home country would collapse from lack of workforce.
This is your brain on capitalism. Why are some countries poorer than others? Do hundreds of years of colonialism, imperial extraction and the global division of labor have anything to do with it, or are the blacks just lazy and stupid?
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.
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. Most 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
There are apparently 20+ million of them who entered the U.S. illegally, along with millions more who think it is a crime to deport them (even the criminals).
I am genuenly curious what do you think would happen if every country were to apply 1.
I don’t think this is realistic at all.
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.
Number must go up
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.
> The polarization of politics has become so intense
> The same people who want to paint the Statue of Liberty gold seem to have no clue what it represents
You seem to be lamenting political polarization and in the same breath making character attacks on one side of the isle. Pick one.
can we not call a spade a spade anymore? what part of cruelly cancelling green card applications fits with “give me your tired, your poor?”
> cruelly cancelling
This is assigning intent without evidence, as is common in tribal politics. A non-charged assessment might use the phrase "abrupt cancelling."
We cannot create a better republic without constructive discourse, and we cannot have constructive discourse when we default to characterizing the views, concerns, and actions of those we disagree with as rooted in moral failure. Even if it is true from time to time.
> This is assigning intent without evidence, as is common in tribal politics
You are calling for constructive discourse and yet your response is an accusation of dishonesty. A non-charged assessment might use the phrase "without presenting evidence".
Immigrants are the low hanging fruit to attack, and the best to blame all your suffering on, meanwhile, the real issue is wealth distribution. Since covid, the very few people got mega wealthier while the majority suffered, do you just leave it as is for people to find out? No, you push other distractions like immigrants, race rage baits, and other nonsense to keep people busy fighting each other.
Oh they have a clue. They just want to rub it in.
"Look how prosperous we got off your backs, suckers!" is the intended message.
It's taunting.
> The same people who want to paint the Statue of Liberty gold seem to have no clue what it represents.
Well, yes. The current administration and the republican party as a whole are composed of fascists and thieves who steal from hardworking citizens like you and I to fund vanity projects like a ballroom and "Arc de Triomphe but bigger and gold".
They're shitting on the history of our country and all the people who have sacrificed to make this place what it is today, and they're doing it just to enrich themselves.
Frankly they are traitors and I hope that in time the wheel of history will deal with them as traitors deserve.
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.
I don't get it.
This administration has made it clear in no uncertain words or actions. They don’t want immigrants. And if you think this is bad policy, please stop voting for them. Please vote for the alternative candidates. This is the easiest way to fix this nonsense.
That makes sense to me. If you come on a non-immigrant visa, you can’t become a permanent resident easily. it’s a privilege, not a right. Other countries like the UAE also take a lot of foreign workers but do not want them become PRs or citizens and there are tons of people moving there for opportunities. The labor is needed but they don’t want these people permanently. You made your money, now leave
That doesn't make any sense. The US enjoys its position of economic power because it has the reputation and wealth to attract skilled people and keep them here.
Nice way to destroy the US economy over the next few decades, if you consider who made the country rich since WW2.
H1-B wasn't invented until 1990...
H1-B isnt what made the US economy rich, it’s what made Silicon Valley richer.
May the world extend Americans the hospitality that the US has extended to the world in the last year.
As a naturalized American citizen, I hope the world extends Americans who leave the same hospitality the US extended for decades before the last year.
That would be amazing.
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.
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...
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.)
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...
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.
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.
Not an expert but I'm pretty sure that constitution > statutes and ordinances > rules and regulations. Meaning that USCIS must follow the intent of the law when publishing regulations. In the case of H1B the law is clear that it gives a specific status of temporary worker distinct to the immigrant status. USCIS itself acknowledges it:
https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/us-citizenship-...
> 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.
The hierarchy of the law does not preclude USCIS from providing a path to adjust status while in the US. Nothing in the constitution or any statute or ordinance prohibits that.
The H-1B is not "the first step" in a Green Card process. That's why there's an adjustment of status!
You go from non-immigrant to immigrant status and it's not a foregone conclusion. The requirements for the Green Card are entirely different from the H-1B. It's a separate process, with its own rules, fees, timelines.
The "adjustment of status" is simply a way for workers and their families to remain in the US legally while the green card process runs its course, instead of requiring them to uproot their existence (which at that point is often in the 7-10+ year range, if they studied here before the H-1B). Why would we want people to leave and quit their jobs and _then_ give them a green card? They will be in a worse position to contribute to the economy then.
These people pay thousands or millions in taxes and take nothing back. Making their transition to permanent resident smooth is in the interest of every American.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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!”
Justice doesn’t mean following the law. It is possible to have an unjust law. Like red lining or slavery. Or civil forfeiture. Etc
As a US citizen I am confused. H1-B and similar are supposed to be non-immigrant visas for temporary workers. Why was it allowed to permanently immigrate under those visas to begin with? We have immigrant visas like the E-1 for routes to permanent immigration.
H1B is considered “dual intent”
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 all so terrifying.
I'm so happy for my friends that got green cards before this insanity.
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?
For those who're in the US, the courts can stop the government. The ones more at risk are non-citizens who are abroad.
If you have enough money to hire lawyers or can figure out how to get in contact with a law firm willing to work with you for the exposure, sure.
If you aren’t lucky enough, you’re just screwed.
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.
no. the supreme Court got rid of that last year
[citation needed]
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".
Can they though? Hasn’t the government already ignored plenty of injunctions against them?
And will they? This administration has appointed a significant fraction of judges.
Do you have some examples?
I don't feel scared of or concerned about immigration. That's it. I don't know where that's coming from.
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.
> they will not be able to obtain non-immigration visas in the future
Why? Aren't L1 and H1B "dual intent" visas?
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.
My H1B coworker has paid $180k more in taxes than I have. We are the same age. He has fewer years working in USA than I have as a citizen. We calculated this by the data exposed by the mySocialSecurity website.
I get to vote and he does not.
Edit: s/green card/H1B/
Well the fundamental question is does one see the US as a nation or some economic zone/factory where your worth is determined by how much you produce.
In the first case the paid taxes argument is pointless.
Uncle Sam likes tax payers.
I believe the current administration, in general, appreciates those with $$.
> 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.
Asylum is an international concept negotiated by treaty. You apply when you arrive - that's true everywhere.
> It's insanely expensive and very arduous administratively to get a visa for the UK as the spouse of a British citizen
How expensive is it?
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.
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.
How is this good in any way?
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.
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.
Specialization is for insects. And on the contrary of what you say the real world show plenty of reasons to diversify: For example, the success of China with renewables and EVs shows exactly that:
Every single EV company in the US wanted to be like Tesla, it was like an idée fixe, most of them failed miserably compared to BYD.
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.
I think the parent is saying it's good because immigrants will go elsewhere and the US will continue to decline. Which will be good for humanity.
I think it's sarcasm
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.
Yes exactly. One country sucking up all the best talent is not good for the world, its a single point of failure.
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.
The U.S. built an industrial economy by itself, without any developed country offshoring work to it. Why do you think China couldn’t?
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.
At this point it's hard to take your opinion seriously if you think we should model economic policy after Pinochet.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
This is the correct answer. Concentration of talent creates cross pollination and collaborative learning. The innovation is then exported.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Isambard_Brunel, who constructed the first underwater tunnel (but had a productive career in England before that).
I could probably find other French engineers fleeing the revolution, if need be.
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.
My goal here isn’t to argue any position. Don’t impute random motives to me. You made an improbable claim and now you’re sore about it.
Often when a comment is made in response to your comment, the intended audience won't be you. For example, I am much more interested in whether the example of the industrial revolution in the UK is an evidence for the value of immigration or evidence against the value of immigration than in anything you wrote, so even though you did not commit to a position on it, it remained my main goal when writing my second comment to continue arguing my position on it -- to anyone that might be reading.
The words beginning, "The French-born engineer Marc Isambard Brunel," in my previous (second) comment I already had waiting on my hard drive when I posted my first comment (the challenge). It would have made my first comment longer and harder to follow if I had included the fact that already knew about MI Brunel.
It was more important for me to write in such a way that people would have the patience to keep on reading than to avoid any situation in which I might come out looking like I don't know everything. Really! It is OK with me that you came out of this exchange looking like you knew something I did not.
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?
The problem with this thinking is assuming that countries are equivalent in terms of opportunity and life.
India does not have the same opportunities that America does to have a good and successful life. This isn’t just due to the country being relatively poor but due to structural issues along with corruption. Then there are other issues too. Environmental issues. Too many issues to list.
It’s disingenuous to suggest that a families or individuals should stay behind to change this. Also isnt it a loss for everyone? If smart people come to America and take advantage of opportunities and accomplish things that help many people what good is it to say no to this. That they must stay in the home country and inevitably not accomplish as much due to all these issues. Even if Elon Musk and Jensen Huang had stayed in their home countries they certainly could not have accomplished the same amount they did in America. Both South Africa and Taiwan in that period lacked the opportunities.
Also what is the rationale behind an American saying to people not to come to America and improve it but to stay back? Individual Indians aren’t any different from individual Americans beyond their accent. The children of these immigrants are indistinguishable from Americans who have been here for generations (aside from skin color). I really don’t understand why Americans wouldn’t want the brain gain from having smart people come here. Also if a surgeon is operating on you would you care what skin color or accent they had? Doesn’t make sense to me.
> 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?
An Indian’s greatest accomplishment in life is leaving India.
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.
US consulates have halted green card processing in 75 countries.
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?
Yes, the wait time is in the US. You just leave the country for the appointment.
All this FUD in this entire post is disheartening.
For F-1/OPT there is no 'pending immigrant visa case' status that lets them remain in-country after OPT expires.
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.
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.
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.
Also not a lawyer.
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.
> You need to be have a job and be on a valid visa to even apply for a green card.
False
You don’t need a job to apply for green card.
Valid visa, yes. But that’s easy.
If you read my full comment:
> 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?
EB1-A and EB2 NIW are the usual categories. Both allow you to self petition without an offer of employment.
My understanding is that the EB green cards are for a job offer, and not the current job.
In practice, though, almost all employers file EB GC petitions for only their current employees, not future ones.
It’s amazing to see someone do literally all of the opposite things to create a successful business, country, economy and world.
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.
Which is so puzzling to me given Trump's impeccable record as a successful and prudent businessman.
The dude bankrupted a casino.
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.
Come to the EU instead, we want more STEM people.
I find the amount of people chiming in on something they do not understand to be disheartening.
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.
> doctrine of consular nonreviewability protects any denial from judicial review, and there is no administrative appeals process.
I personally think this is the big secondary benefit that the administration is going for.
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.
> The DHS has made many communications that were openly white supremacist
Just dropping this here: https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1970251208322621530
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.
The president isn't a king. If Congress weren't cowards this would be trivially preventable.
Forget the French, the new meme for cowards who retreat at the first opportunity should be the American Congress.
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.
> likely not well thought out
Or it has been, and cruelty is the point
I wonder how this would have applied to Melania
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.
(Source: personal experience)
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.
There is no carve out in this memo that says it’s only for B1/B2. Or that K-1 is excluded.
An entire visa class is not “obviously an exception”, or it would be clear.
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.
What if you obtain a B2 visa to attend a conference in the US, and a year later receive and employment opportunity?
The number of people commenting who are grossly misinformed yet feel very confident is very very high.
Many comments are calling legitimate facts as “wrong”.
People don’t event know the difference between a visa and a permanent resident status and yet feel compelled to talk about foreign born people coming to America, “non- western” or “non-European” immigrants.
Do better HN audience. This is very disappointing.
This is how it works for legal immigrants for many countries.
Can you name some of these countries please?
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).
Your second paragraph is about visa runs, which are a totally different beast. These don't involve any changes of status, it's simply resetting your tourist stay.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
Fuck this regime.
[0]: https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-eligibility-cate...
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.
What a strange comment. Foreigners are not inherently people of color…
More than 80% of people applying for US Green Cards are not white.
Argentina is orders of magnitude more white than the US and yet, argentinians face the same issues as morocans in the US migration system.
We will take all of the white South Africans
Why not both?
Just FYI, some of us down vote for complaining about down votes.
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.
Can someone explain the rationale?
> because there simply aren’t American graduates who want those jobs.
Facts are just invented in these debates. Here is an actual fact: in the 2026 residency match cycle, about 6.5% of U.S. MD seniors went unmatched, resulting in approximately 1,300 to 1,400 U.S. MD students failing to secure a position initially.
No need to say “ Facts are just invented in these debates.” Especially when what you are talking about is different from what I’m talking about.
I’m not talking about residency. I’m talking about jobs post residency. There are hospitalist jobs in areas that are in desperate need of doctors. And these jobs are staffed with doctors who are on visas. Outpatient jobs too. These jobs are in locations or hospital systems that are important and that American graduates do not want to go to.
the number of doctors on j1 extensions the us is going to lose over this is going to seriously impact us healthcare. it's also not uncommon for doctors to practice on an o1 and they'll be impacted also
From the USCIS policy directive.
>> 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.
> Whatever they are trying to get to this is a big concern for all H1B employees.
Thankfully H1B is a small visa category.
Curious how the tech lobby will react. You would hope Musk and Huang might take their own personal experience into account.
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.
Absolutely. I don't think they will be happy.
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.
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.
most countries actually let you apply for permanent residency once you've hit a set number of years, usually around 5 or 10, on work visas
You think either of them care about other human beings? They have continuously demonstrated they only care about themselves.
Musk has no problem "pulling the ladder behind him", and Huang's only duty is to shareholders - which means kissing Trump's ring to avoid retaliation.
Americans voted for this.
Anecdote time:
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.
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.
There really is no rhyme or reason to this insanity. Even someone who wants less immigration shouldn't be able to see this as anything other than insanity. The current administration is pathetic beyond belief.
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.
Apparently you haven't travelled much in the US. Outside the major cities it can be pretty desolate.
I don't think we're too crowded, but it definitely doesn't make sense in the era of AI and tech layoffs to continue the H1B/green card status quo.
Guess what? America's homebuilding is powered by immigrant workers.
https://www.businessinsider.com/immigration-crackdown-housin...
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.
it is way easier to immigrate to China, no kidding.
Hong Kong introduced new self-sponsored visas, Mainland introduced new high-tech visas couple months ago
Easier to get a temporary talent visa? Maybe, for some profiles. Easier to get permanent residence? Almost certainly not. The U.S. green card system is backlogged and maddening, but it is still a mass immigration system. China’s green card is closer to an exceptional-status program (it's 100x harder to get a green card in China than a green card in USA).
Also if you really want to immigrate to a country you eventually probably want to become a citizen of said country right? USA has pathways for this (albeit getting harder with this new admin). However in China it's nearly impossible.
Companies don’t want their H1s getting a green card and the freedom that comes with it.
Is this just for when applying for I-485 that you have to make a quick entry/exit trip,
or is it effective all the way back at I-140 time where people would then need to spend years away from the US?
Quick exit/entry trip unless you're from one of 75 countries in which the US consulate is literally not hearing cases.
Doesn't it take a few months to process a green card application?
There are many different kinds of green card and many can take much longer. Moreover, US consulates currently aren't processing them in 75 countries.
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.
Silicon Valley bigwigs supported this administration vocally. I am starting to doubt that their interests and morality align with mine.
Is this intended to ensure that students and H1-Bs will not have a path to residency unless they disrupt their lives here?
It is intended to disrupt immigration full stop and especially brown immigration.
I notice India being omitted from the list of affected countries though. That’s the major contributor to “brown immigration”
Isn't this about applying for a green card directly from a non-immigrant visa, e.g. student? H1-B is an immigrant visa.
H1-B is defined as “non-immigrant.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa
> H1-B is an immigrant visa.
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).
Ah you're right, I mixed up immigrant and dual intent.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> but unless you lied you will be fine.
That’s a huge unsubstantiated claim.
Not to speak on the anguish that this would undoubtedly cause but economically? This is like shooting yourself in the kneecap. America doesn’t nearly have the social security net of European countries and ours is already overburdened. Without younger, immigrant workers paying into our social security net the US govt will either need to print money (double digit inflation) or start raiding the evil tech bros RSUs for Medicare money.
Being a natvist is an expensive proposition. Expect your retirement to decrease in real value and struggle to find acceptable healthcare as you age (healthcare in the US is increasingly staffed by immigrants, especially nursing).
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.
But then why change the renewal process for the people who were already fingerprinted for the original visa?
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').
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.
This is them working their way up through "purges" of undesireables. Remember it first started with illegal immigrants. Now it's expanding the classes of who counts as illegal. First forcing green card holders to become illegal. Next they'll make it illegal to speak out against the government, be a union organizer, trans person, non-Christian, anyone who gets or helps someone get an abortion (actually that's already illegal), socialists/social democrats, anyone who supports Palestine.
By 2029 the gloves will come off. The internment camps of today will be dwarfed by what comes next. If you think I'm crazy, look at what they've already said in the past. They are not kidding anymore.
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.
I think it is hard for citizens to understand how precarious it feels to be an immigrant in the present political climate in the US and Europe. I'm a permanent resident in France, I'm white, I have a EU passport, I have a job, I'm OK. But, my naturalization request has already been denied twice, because I couldn't provide some arbitrary document the government demands, and they keep changing the rules, just for the fun of it or so it seems, it's quite insulting.
I really feel for immigrants that are less fortunate than me. we all just want to have dignity, find a job (anyway the low-paying jobs are done by immigrants) and provide for our kids. What's wrong with that? How is this taking advantage of our host country?
Frankly, the present discourse around African/Arab immigration seems to me to resemble a lot the kind of rhetoric around the millions of Jewish Russian immigrants who fled pogroms to Poland and western Europe a 120 years ago. I find the similarities quite striking. The blatant racism, the conspiracy theories, the fascist propaganda, all in order to whitewash (pun intended) a corrupt regime of thieves and sycophants. Absolutely disgusting!
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?
You are misreading this. K-1 can come and stay since it’s considered an immigrant visa.
This screws over anyone who enters the country on visitor/temp work or student visa since those visas are not immigrant visa. You would be expected to leave the country and apply for GC overseas if you got married on one of those.
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.
It’s an overly upsetting policy, but comparing me to a slave because of my US citizenship seems… distasteful.
The are other nits to pick with the analogy, but I’ll leave it at that
I'm talking about the whole world. The immigration systems are like controlling which pastures different herds are allowed to graze.
What barns you can live in, perhaps, but not what pastures you can graze in.
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.
Holy shit why is this comment buried?! This is exactly the purpose.
No, this also affects anyone under employment based immigration petitions unrelated to marrying a US citizen.
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"
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...
Footnote 20 on page 4:
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.
O-1 is a dual intent visa, as is L-1, as is H-1B, so I have no idea what you're talking about?
No, the O-1 is not officially dual intent: https://www.wegreened.com/o1-visa
Complete nonsense. It is.
https://fam.state.gov/fam/09FAM/09FAM040213.html#M402_13_5_B
Do you know why many sources state that it is not dual intent or that it is "quasi 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."
Seems extremely clear to me.
Maybe it does close that loophole, but the effects are much, much broader and more harmful: https://www.cato.org/blog/dhs-quits-granting-green-cards-alm...
This article is intentionally misleading.
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.
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.
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...
No the memo specifically says:
> 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.
So, it's exactly as I said.
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-green-card-rule-wont-aff...
Given our population problems, I can't think of a single rational reason why we'd want to stop this from happening.
Our population problems, in that we need immigration to avoid population decline? Our total fertility rate is 1.6.
Exactly that. And really, it's still not going to be enough.
It is absolutely NOT specific to the very limited situation you are describing, which is already a big red flag when processing applications.
"USCIS acknowledges exceptions including nonimmigrant categories with dual intent and immigrant categories where only adjustment of status provides a pathway to permanent resident status"
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...
The literal next line after your quote is:
> 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.
This appears to close off the method by which all the "dreamers" I'm familiar with got GC/citizenship, which is by marriage.
This does not seem to target NIWs but rather those who use change of status as a way of extending their stay.
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-...
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 an insanely stupid move, but from what I'm seeing on Twitter, it's somehow not that unpopular among the less bright.
> 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.
If you think this is going to immunize you from the worst of what the MAGA movement has to offer I think you're in for a rude awakening.
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.
I was under the impression that this is roughly how it works (assume equivalency) in most European countries is it not?
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.
Why wouldn’t your spouse just stay on the student visa? From what I gather it’s purely the processing that is overseas.
Stay on whatever visa you’re on -> apply for consular processing -> travel for interview -> enter on green card
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.
Right. But logically it makes sense - unless you have a valid visa you’re not allowed to stay.
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”
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.
Again worth asking VC Bros if the light touch on their crypto bags was worth all this ethnonationalism?
If you recall, Andreesen said he’s not into introspection. Don’t think this is a thing they’d think about.
Also, a lot of these guys are simply straight-up ignoring the news today. They got their bag and they believe it will keep them safe.
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.
Is that right?
Aren’t h1b’s time limited? 1-2 renewals?
Yes - the rule is that the application for Adjustment of Status can't happen while you're already in the US.
next headline: trump closes consulates in nonwhite countries
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.
Only after losing in court, time and time again. This will take expensive lawyers and a lot of heartache to get any clear answers.
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.
The US consulate is currently not hearing cases in 75 countries.
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.
So, love and families, none of that counts for shit beneath the boots of bureaucracy? Send the kids away from their mother, she didn't navigate the Kafkaesque trap correctly so now we must ruin their lives. Nothing about that seems... Wrong? Because up until yesterday, the policy of the United States was that such a thing WAS wrong.
> 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.
While you, like USCIS, may be correct that technically the de-jure rules state that there is no automatic guarantee that spouses cannot both live together in the US, the de-facto reality up until yesterday, for all of living memory is that YES, spouses are guaranteed to be able to live together.
>> You don't know what you're talking about.
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.
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).
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])
Another immigration policy that would have negatively effected Trump's own wife. Oh well, she got hers.
This could be a big deal for Big Tech. I wonder how personal experience of Musk and Huang will play into how they react.
Step 324 of how to make Russia great again.
That's how it works for legal immigrants, yes.
Trump is still trying to distract from the magnitude of the Epstein network.
Not long ago, new accusations came about, involving more superrich - see here https://wsvn.com/news/us-world/former-miami-beach-mayor-accu... and elsewhere, really just a few hours ago; and from the last few days. So here I am wondering ... how can there be an investigation in the USA, but even many weeks afterwards, they keep on finding more and more people that MAY have been involved here? Of course it is guilty-unless-proven-otherwise-in-court, but the key question here is why the investigation "reveals" more and more victims? Should this not already be revealed? Or is the investigation deliberately crippled?
Something no longer works in the USA here. The "we are against immigration" is just the carrot on the stick before the donkey. Or the "let's bomb Iran ... oh wait, inflation now goes up". This is literally an administration that worships chaos and executes pillaging while implementing chaos.
Don't worry, the are letting in white South Africans
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
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.
TBH I think that is fair.
Have you been through an immigration process?
Who are you?
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 seems like it could have some ramifications.
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
How to destroy the greatest country on earth.
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.
> the greatest country on earth.
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.
Step 1: tell ourselves we are the greatest on earth?
... by what metric is/was the us 'the greatest country on earth'?
We just dropped three points to 81% on the Freedom House freedom index, so it's certainly not that.
Petrodollar is gone now. Only ships paying in Yuan can exit the Strait.
What the Trump administration has done, and is doing, to people wildly obscene — and I think evil.
Let's not mince words. My heart goes out to everyone impacted by all this.
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.
Why is it "nearly immediately" at a consulate but "backlogged" in the US? Why can't that be fixed?
This is not true. It is not nearly immediate at US consulate and backlogged in US. The parent doesn't know what they are talking about.
I went thru CP myself. It saved me 3 years
"Didn't happen to me so therefore it won't happen to anyone."
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.
So why not… expand the processing centers?
Maybe consulates are idling
USCIS serializes it and they have a limited number of workers. CP shards it based on country so it will be much faster for many people.
That's a what, not a why.
Why can't USCIS shard it based on country within the US in a similar fashion?
The whole immigration system could easily be reformed and modernized if efficiency and speeding up the legal route to citizenship were the goal.
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.
Because it’s literally not better than the DmV
The Oakland CA DMV, which is the one I live closest to, is quite nice. I've never had a bad time there.
My county's DMV is fast and helpful.
Demand better from your government.
(And this still raises the question of why the consulates supposedly don't have this issue.)
DMV (at-least in Bay Area) is exponentially better and straighforward than any of processes around immigration / visa renewals.
Exactly. An extra points for using HN lingo.:)
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.
Consulates are not nearly immediately. You have to wait months-years for appointments at some.
Wow. As someone who just went through this process myself (leaving the US to get a green card via consular processing), I can only hope they hire more people to handle the increased case load. You need a medical exam and there were only 2 people available in my country to do that, which added 2 months to my application time (where I could not return to the US)