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abalashov 4 hours ago [-]
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.
cloche 1 hours ago [-]
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)
I have an exercise question based on real world events: if 1/10/100 million people would enter your state/nation overnight/year, overburdening your social services, housing, childcare, healthcare, etc. would it matter if the way they entered was legal or not? Since the end result to the public services and social cohesion is the same.
Laws are made up constructs anyway, they're not real, so whether something is legal or not just depends on if the privileged people in government declare it to be legal or not, but not if the citizens who now have to suffer the consequences of mass migration approved of it, because they were never asked to begin with. So if the government just waves its magic wand and declares that migration wave to now be legal, because the corporations want cheap labor and landlords want more tenants, it doesn't change anything for the better for the citizen that the negative externalities they're now experiencing has been the cause of something done legally to them and not illegal.
So then of course citizens will also want limits to legal migration as well, when they see politicians have no limits for legal migration, that accounts for publically available resources, and the number exceed what people perceive to be a burden for them and the services they depend on.
In short, I see it this way: If you[the government] can't take care of the 100 million citizens already in your country, why should we[the voters] trust you'd suddenly be able to take care and provide for 10 million more? Food for thought.
Edit: Aaaaand... it was already downvote bombed in less than 10 minutes with no counter argument.
nielsbot 2 minutes ago [-]
Immigration is a net positive for social services, housing, childcare, healthcare, etc. over the long term. This country was built by immigrants.
There can be negative effects with large inflows locally, but that's a policy failure that can be addressed.
slg 24 minutes ago [-]
These hypotheticals tend to accidentally reveal a disturbing worldview in the way they treat immigration as a natural phenomenon rather than people with agency of their own. It's dehumanizing.
For example, where does that 99,999,999th person sleep on the night they arrive in this country? What is there immediate plan? How and why did they come here? Your hypothetical has them almost emerging from the ether as an inherent problem rather than a person making an active decision to move to somewhere they think they will have a better life. If we stop providing them a better life, they'll stop coming. But the primary path to doing that is making life worse for everyone already here and none of us should want that.
joe_mamba 17 minutes ago [-]
>For example, where does that 99,999,999th person sleep on the night they arrive in this country? What is there immediate plan?
My government pays for their housing using our tax money.
>How and why did they come here?
See above.
>as an inherent problem rather than a person making an active decision to move to somewhere they think they will have a better life.
It's not an inherent problem, it's a manufactured one by policy makers, and it's also not a problem taxpayers should be force to pay for against their will.
Like if the US lights up the middle east again for the nth time in a row, creating another wave of migrants, it's not the responsibility of taxpayers from Austria or Slovenia for example, to now house those people who chose to come there.
Like I feel for them and their situation, but I didn't create that problem and I don't want my tax money going to fix it. The US should take care of them, but I can't force the US to do it, but that also doesn't mean our taxpayers should be forced to be patsies in this, and be exploited for charity via emotional appeals, for issues others created.
Sure, wars and mass migrations have existed for thousands of years and the world didn't end because of it, but you know what hasn't exited for thousands of years? Welfare states.
You can either have a welfare state that provides everyone in the country what they need from taxes, or you can have open border that lets anyone in, but you can't have both of them combined at the same time. Your nations welfare state can't be the world's charity and still be expected to be solvent.
slg 1 minutes ago [-]
>My government pays for their housing using our tax money.
Name the government. What country can I show up to tomorrow and get free housing for an extended period of time?
>It's not an inherent problem, it's a manufactured one by policy makers, and it's also not a problem taxpayers should be force to pay for against their will.
People having free will is not a "manufactured problem". What a weird way to describe it.
>Like if the US lights up the middle east again for the nth time in a row, creating another wave of refugees, it's not the responsibility of taxpayers from Austria or Slovenia for example, to now house those people who chose to come there.
Who said Austria and Slovenia had to provide free housing? These goalposts moved pretty quickly from whether we should allow open immigration to whether we have a responsibility to provide social services for immigrants that we don't even provide our own citizens.
>Like I feel for them and their situation, but I didn't create that problem and I don't want my tax money going to fix it. The US should take care of them, but I can't force the US to do it, but that also doesn't mean our taxpayers should be patsies in this, exploited via emotional appeals for issues others created.
This can apply to literally any government service. I didn't start the fire, so why should my tax dollars go to paying firefighters to stop your house from burning down? That just as effective an argument as you're making and the end result is literal anarchy with no government to actually provide services.
You also seem to be conceptually merging immigrants and refugees which are two distinct groups of people that only sometimes overlap.
rohansood15 31 minutes ago [-]
Let's say the government can't care for 100M people because of lack of doctors. Now they could train one over 10 years, or you could have one of the smartest doctors in the world come be 100M+1. Would you take that?
Now expand that across socio-economic spectrum (not enough plumbers, teachers, AI experts, researchers etc). That is what legal immigration is meant for.
invalidOrTaken 8 minutes ago [-]
But if the justification for immigration is prior immigration, is there a stopping point here? Like, after you import a bunch of doctors, is it going to turn out that now you need a bunch of fast food workers, back and forth?
joe_mamba 26 minutes ago [-]
> or you could have one of the smartest doctors in the world come be 100M+1. Would you take that?
In which case do 1 million of doctors and only doctors and nothing else show up at your borders because if that were the case everyone would take them in no questions asked.
That's the classic bait and switch. Merkel also told Germans they're getting "doctors and engineers" in 2015 and the only thing that increases is sexual assaults rates, crime and welfare spending.
>That is what legal immigration is meant for.
In theory yes, but just like Germany, in practice the system has always been abused to dupe voters to accept anything other than doctors. Doctors are so in demand that every country has its doors opened to them anyway. We just want the doors shut to people who aren't doctors.
10 minutes ago [-]
djeastm 13 minutes ago [-]
>it was already downvote bombed in less than 10 minutes with no counter argument
Your submissions to HN evince a pattern that suggests engagement with you would likely fall on deaf ears.
blizdiddy 22 minutes ago [-]
You fell for a scapegoat completely uncritically, it’s embarrassing. The state sabotages its own safety net and gives tax cuts to the rich, and you go along as they blame immigrants. Pathetic. All of your submissions are xenophobic trash. Find Jesus or anything else, I’m sure your family sick of these rants too.
immigrants don't need to be 'taken care off' because legal immigrants in the US are net social contributors (in fact particularly large ones because the US government didn't subsidize their upbringing and education).
Five minutes on Google would have told you this, that is why "folks I'm just asking questions" gets downvoted, everyone can see through these pseudo gullible provocations
indianwashlet 12 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
salthearth 29 minutes ago [-]
You can't complain immigrants are flooding your boarder while your government is actively working on destabilizing the world. Such arguments are extremely malicious and hence why everyone is downvoting you.
You want a hermitical state, it has to go both ways. You lock yourself in, but also stop fucking around with military and non-military interventions on every contanent on earth.
joe_mamba 24 minutes ago [-]
>while your government is actively working on destabilizing the world
I live in Europe, small landlocked country. My government isn't destabilizing anyone but still has some of the highest migration rates per capita in OECD.
davidw 16 minutes ago [-]
Yes, despite some talk about "getting in line and doing things the right way", they hate immigrants, legal or not.
rajup 1 hours ago [-]
"intentionally malevolent" -> Stephen Miller's second name. The cruelty is and always was the point.
abalashov 48 minutes ago [-]
This is true. I resisted this conclusion for a long time, imagining it was tendentious, but there is really no other way to understand his rhetoric and his actions.
tahoemph999 49 minutes ago [-]
I thought his second name was Goebbles?
mycall 11 minutes ago [-]
You should double check Project 2025 before solely blaming Miller.
radsj 1 hours ago [-]
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. "
abalashov 45 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure I share your optimism. What is a worker on an H-class visa, if not a "temporary worker"?
I read this with the assumption that "nonimmigrant visa" applies to every category of visa listed here under "Nonimmigrant Visa Categories":
It specifically lists H1B as non-immigrant visa on that page, so if you are here working at Google you must leave the country.
TehCorwiz 15 minutes ago [-]
The cruelty is the point. They want people to leave so they can refuse to allow them back in. That's the goal. It's not more complicated than that.
hvb2 4 hours ago [-]
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
qingcharles 3 hours ago [-]
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.
19 minutes ago [-]
QuantumFunnel 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
array_key_first 2 hours ago [-]
This maybe doesn't feel like an lol type comment. It really stinks that our processes are this broken, and frankly it's a bit embarrassing.
abalashov 3 hours ago [-]
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.
susiecambria 2 hours ago [-]
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.
confuseddesi 3 hours ago [-]
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?
nextaccountic 2 hours ago [-]
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
Jblx2 55 minutes ago [-]
>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%:
I'd be willing to bet at least 10% of those 55% are married to or in relationships with immigrants and are going to say "Not like that!" when their loved ones are forced to leave the country. FAFO is coming for them.
Dig1t 5 minutes ago [-]
Trump campaigned on reducing immigration, he won the popular vote. A huge portion of this country wants to reduce immigration of all kinds. This is what we voted for.
abalashov 2 hours ago [-]
That's the only conclusion I can see.
lovich 1 hours ago [-]
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.
feelingsonice 3 hours ago [-]
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.
05 3 hours ago [-]
H1B and O1 are dual intent..
abalashov 2 hours ago [-]
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.
throw-the-towel 2 hours ago [-]
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.)
bmelton 1 hours ago [-]
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.
bigmadshoe 43 minutes ago [-]
How many people become permanent residents of the US through these visas, as opposed to the others?
wang_li 2 hours ago [-]
The US has three classes of immigrant visa. See the bottom of the state department visa resources page.
I know you believe that, and I know that's what the State Dept calls them, but they're not really how most legal immigrants come here and aren't available to most of the people who apply for greencards today.
As a practical matter, all these immigrant visas pretty much entail a greencard soon thereafter. In other words, to get them is about as easy as getting a greencard in the first place, give or take, more or less.
The discussion here is really about legal workers, students and others on temporary visas who convert to permanent status.
lanakei 50 minutes ago [-]
An immigrant visa is basically the same thing as a green card, i.e. permanent legal residency. Once you have an immigrant visa, you can enter the US and receive your green card in the mail a few weeks later with no additional work. After five years, you can apply for citizenship. You have unlimited rights to work and live in the US.
However, ignoring family-sponsored routes, it is extremely difficult to get an immigrant visa in the first place, usually requiring years + $10k+ of fees to work your way up to it. You also need a sponsor to pay the fees (legally, you can't pay it yourself). Therefore, the vast majority of people start on a non-immigrant (temporary, restricted employment) visa and eventually ask their employer to sponsor a green card.
When people say "if you wanted to immigrate, you should just get an immigrant visa", they usually assume any other route is a hack or loophole. But it's actually the most common way to immigrate by far. You can, of course, interview for a job from abroad and ask the employer to directly sponsor an immigrant visa, but they'd have to wait years (best case) until you could actually step foot in their office. Plus they'd be forking over thousands in legal fees for an employee they haven't even seen in person. Nobody would do this, so the commonly accepted way is to bring an employee over as a temporary worker first and then apply for a green card while they're in the country.
By the way, the same checks apply for immigrant visa applications both inside and outside the US. You might think that employers are scamming the government by turning purported temporary immigrants into permanent ones, but the exact same qualifications checks, eligibility requirements, waitlists and quotas apply if you do the process inside vs. outside the US. It's entirely possible, and common, for green card applications to get denied (and the applicant's location doesn't factor in to this).
lovich 1 hours ago [-]
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.
MagicMoonlight 3 hours ago [-]
There is no immigrant visa by that logic. Unless you count the one that costs a million dollars.
sjhatfield 2 hours ago [-]
Spousal one? I got it outside the US
abalashov 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that's one notable exception. Doesn't invalidate the generalisation.
hluska 49 minutes ago [-]
I’m pretty sure it did.
ycui7 19 minutes ago [-]
I think what this actually means is that you can apply permanent residency in the US, but you can only get the physical green card outside of the US when the case is approved. So, the last step to get the card need to from outside the country.
robotresearcher 1 minutes ago [-]
What is the point of that?
They might as well mail it to your home. That’s what happens today.
hibgymnb 4 hours ago [-]
It’s intentional malevolence that’s a given from this admin
abalashov 4 hours ago [-]
I take that as a given, too, especially considering the diabolical architecture of Miller Thought.
Gibbon1 1 hours ago [-]
The secret sauce is bad faith and crime.
BLKNSLVR 37 minutes ago [-]
Thankfully, malevolence, bad faith, and crime are unsustainable as governmental motivations.
Unfortunately, they do stir the populace in a cadence long enough that prior examples are are only fragments of memory.
More unfortunately, however, is that the time it takes to heal from such governments is similar to said cadence.
thallium205 55 minutes ago [-]
The UK, the EU, Japan, and Australia all have identical rules to this policy.
cinntaile 47 minutes ago [-]
In the EU you can apply for a permanent residency card when you're in the country. One of the prerequisites is how long you have been in the country where you're applying. It seems unlikely the other countries have the same policy as the US has now.
The whole system of US of needing to leave the country to even renew visas is absolutely bizarre and does not have analogues in most other countries (at least EU/UK)
brandelune 31 minutes ago [-]
You apply for permanent residency in Japan from Japan.
cinntaile 21 minutes ago [-]
Which is also the only way that makes sense... Permanent residency but you have to be... Outside the country? lol
nielsbot 17 minutes ago [-]
Don't assume incompetence at this point--Miller (and Trump) are anti-immigrant, full stop.
runjake 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
plombe 2 hours ago [-]
Not surprised. There are worse things in the works.
Arete314159 2 hours ago [-]
Intentionally malevolent.
ourmandave 49 minutes ago [-]
intentionally malevolent
Everything anti-immigration under both Trump terms comes directly from the fascist Stephen Miller. From blocking Muslim countries to trying to end birth right citizenship.
Of course he has full support from Trump who usually lies about knowing fascists he's had lunch with or tells to "stand back and stand by."
And endlessly lies to demonize immigrants. "They're not sending their best." "They're eating the cats and dogs."
SPLC has an article on Miller if you want to waste your time.
> 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.
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.
robofanatic 3 hours ago [-]
> 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
Aniket-N 3 hours ago [-]
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?
qurren 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cybercatgurrl 1 hours ago [-]
cruelty is the point in case it wasn’t obvious
thesmtsolver2 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
thesmtsolver2 3 hours ago [-]
Wow. Downvotes for stating an obviously verifiable fact.
HN is now filled with agenda pushers peddling obvious fake information about the US.
ohyoutravel 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nairboon 4 hours ago [-]
> 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?
seanmcdirmid 3 hours ago [-]
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).
array_key_first 2 hours ago [-]
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.
skupig 2 hours ago [-]
You can automatically be a citizen through descent of most countries in Europe and Asia, and everywhere in North America.
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.
rolandog 1 hours ago [-]
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).
jeroenhd 1 hours ago [-]
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.
tetromino_ 1 hours ago [-]
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.
esalman 6 hours ago [-]
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.
pixelatedindex 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bonsai_spool 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ipaddr 1 hours ago [-]
Someone else would have taken that job maybe for a higher salary.
bonsai_spool 39 minutes ago [-]
At a certain point, there aren't enough Americans for these jobs. So the choice is to let other nations absorb these skilled laborers, or simply hire the best people.
It's funny how we forget about meritocracy as soon as the median American is threatened.
parineum 45 minutes ago [-]
> So we’re essentially turning away someone who is building up our country.
They're not being turned away. There's a requirement to be in the country for 5 years with a green card before citizenship. It seems to me that they are just upset that they have to follow the rules which aren't hurting them at all.
bonsai_spool 40 minutes ago [-]
> They're not being turned away.
They are actually in fact being told to return to their country before completing a process that previously - legally! - could be done in the US. That = being turned away
> There's a requirement to be in the country for 5 years with a green card before citizenship.
That is absolutely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Until next week, or whenever the current system is again upended haphazardly.
> It seems to me that they are just upset that they have to follow the rules which aren't hurting them at all.
It seems to me that they were all following the rules. The rules are now being capriciously changed with sly marketing words to confuse everyone.
harimau777 22 minutes ago [-]
> which aren't hearting them at all.
They are effectively being ruled by a system that they have no say in. That's incompatible with America's democratic values. Of course it's reasonable that we don't allow non-citizens the vote; the problem as I see it is that if someone has worked here for 25 years for all intents and purposes they are a citizen, the government just doesn't formally recognize the reality of their situation.
imajoredinecon 5 hours ago [-]
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
pixelatedindex 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jezzamon 3 hours ago [-]
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
tybstar 4 hours ago [-]
A lot of the anti-immigrant rhetoric involves some version of the lie that immigrants don't pay taxes.
throw-the-towel 2 hours ago [-]
One can reasonably argue that not paying your dues should exclude you from the pipeline.
adi_kurian 1 hours ago [-]
Uncle Sam likes tax payers.
3 hours ago [-]
array_key_first 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Underphil 5 hours ago [-]
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.
999900000999 4 hours ago [-]
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.
BowBun 2 hours ago [-]
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.
throw-the-towel 2 hours ago [-]
Genuinely curious why didn't you pursue citizenship though? (No pressure to answer of course, that might be a deeply personal thing.)
joe_mamba 1 hours ago [-]
>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.
frogperson 2 hours ago [-]
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.
thegjp210 21 minutes ago [-]
America is not an economic opportunity zone.
lovich 60 minutes ago [-]
Not entirely safe even if you naturalize as they are now making noise about stripping citizenship[1]
> 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.
cybercatgurrl 1 hours ago [-]
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
koalaman 12 hours ago [-]
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.
rangestransform 3 hours ago [-]
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.
jjtwixman 3 hours ago [-]
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 :)
itkovian_ 5 hours ago [-]
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.
itkovian_ 2 hours ago [-]
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.
parineum 41 minutes ago [-]
> It’s definitely not the best place in the world to live for quality of life, on basically any metric.
I guess these immigrants must be stupid.
yongjik 6 minutes ago [-]
Whenever I see these kind of discussions on HN, I'm reminded that ICE murdered two US citizens in daylight, and there were Americans defending the murder. There were commenters here defending it.
I see no reason why they should change their opinions since then, so I assume these people are still commenting among us.
cogman10 12 hours ago [-]
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.
hellojesus 11 hours ago [-]
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.
alistairSH 10 hours ago [-]
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.
wombatpm 1 hours ago [-]
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.
bognition 11 hours ago [-]
Is this a surprise? This is hardly anything new. The United States was built with slavery.
Mezzie 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jfengel 11 hours ago [-]
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.
voakbasda 11 hours ago [-]
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”.
mkw5053 6 hours ago [-]
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.
actionfromafar 11 hours ago [-]
Best I can give you is Russian oligarchs and criminals, and corporate welfare. Deal?
xdennis 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
But now, the expectation of leftists is that the government is somehow supposed to help the failed immigrants.
array_key_first 2 hours ago [-]
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.
platevoltage 1 hours ago [-]
There are very few Leftists in the USA, and even fewer in government. Who are you talking about?
palmotea 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
sokoloff 11 hours ago [-]
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”.
cogman10 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
geertj 1 hours ago [-]
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.”
That “might” is rather load-bearing for something you are literally staking your future on, though.
fredrb 1 days ago [-]
This news has to be read alongside the immigration visa emission pause for 75 countries by DOS[1].
Since USCIS is blocking Adjustment of Status, and the Department of State is blocking green card emission for citizens of 75 countries, this means that if you are from the following countries you are effectively banned from getting a Green Card:
Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, The Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
I'm from one of the countries on the list. Not only is there no way to legally immigrate to the US anymore, but just visiting US once requires me to give an interest-free loan of up to $15k to the US government. Yeah, no, thank you.
I never considered illegal immigration, nor will I ever - I value predictable outcomes.
But looking at these new rules, I can't help but think that it really punishes people who want to play by the rules and sets the price for ones that don't to approximately $15k.
xtracto 6 hours ago [-]
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.
galleywest200 2 hours ago [-]
The average American, at least in my state (Washington), does not hate Mexicans. The people running the federal government seem to, however.
sieabahlpark 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ashley95 24 minutes ago [-]
For those not very familiar with the US immigration system: it can be very confusing and the naming of things is rarely related to their function due to a very thick layer of legal fiction in how it works.
The system sorely lacks reform to align the legal fiction with reality, which is precisely why this news release may sound entirely sensible for the uninitiated.
jfengel 12 hours ago [-]
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.
cmiles74 11 hours ago [-]
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.
11 hours ago [-]
leoqa 6 hours ago [-]
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.
solenoid0937 6 hours ago [-]
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.)
JuniperMesos 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
oefrha 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Edit: And before you mention O-1 and friends for highly accomplished individuals (maybe that's not affected for now? Honestly have no idea), this kind of policy has wide ranging second order effects even if it doesn't affect top talent directly. Like I said I was U.S. educated myself, once I would encourage bright minds from elsewhere to pursue a higher education in the U.S., now I heavily advise them from even setting foot in the U.S.
solenoid0937 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jedberg 6 hours ago [-]
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.
hallole 5 hours ago [-]
The smartest aren't uniformly distributed across the Earth.
array_key_first 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jedberg 5 hours ago [-]
That's true. It is possible that the smartest 5% are all here in the USA. But it is statistically unlikely that's true.
hallole 5 hours ago [-]
You put words in my mouth. I don't claim that the smartest are clustered in the USA.
unethical_ban 4 hours ago [-]
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.
hallole 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jerkstate 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jedberg 5 hours ago [-]
No? Not sure how you reached that conclusion. I'm just stating that the USA needs immigrants if we want to increase our median intelligence because we can't possibly have the smartest people in the world born here.
jerkstate 4 hours ago [-]
so in order to increase our median intelligence, we should make the process super easy?
anon84873628 3 hours ago [-]
Obviously those smart people are going to go where they feel welcome, rather than climbing through obstacles designed purely for humiliation and malevolence.
unethical_ban 4 hours ago [-]
Yes.
Why should immigration be kafkaesque? It is in the US interest to have a pipeline of smart, hard-working, innovative people come to this country. The US is/was in many ways a great country for them to come, but we are not the only international destination for such talent. Why would we want to put up such artificial barriers to entry, if we agree on the premises I laid out?
The purpose of this is to discourage legal immigration.
jerkstate 3 hours ago [-]
So what prevents the incompetent and lazy from immigrating?
solenoid0937 3 hours ago [-]
Someone immigrating is almost certainly less incompetent and lazy than the median American. Immigration requires uprooting your entire life, and it requires entrepreneurial spirit and grit. That's why many immigrant groups dramatically out-earn American-born citizens.
TBH most immigrants I've met better embody the American spirit than most Americans.
jerkstate 3 hours ago [-]
What about the immigrant groups that don’t dramatically out-earn American-born citizens?
lovich 48 minutes ago [-]
Why do you hate immigrants?
Also, beyond the US getting the benefit of motivated workers coming here and the intelligent ones, we’re brain draining other countries.
It’s a legitimate tool to weaken other countries worldwide and we’re just throwing it away because people believe the lies coming from people like JD Vance[1] about immigrants eating their cats and dogs
Asking basic questions about finances and job searches/security, perhaps? Do you have any original ideas or assertions to make, or do you only ask sealioning questions?
SpicyLemonZest 5 hours ago [-]
The current American immigration process is not figure-out-able. As any immigration lawyer will tell you, there's strategies with higher or lower chances of success, but there's nothing at all like a roadmap which will definitely lead to permanent residency if you follow it well.
ori_b 5 hours ago [-]
The smartest 5% are able to figure out where they're not welcome.
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
seanmcdirmid 5 hours ago [-]
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.
genxy 5 hours ago [-]
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.
mandeepj 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
Oh boy! If we are talking about constitutional amendments I can probably think of a few that would be much more important than that.
alterom 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
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.
deeg 6 hours ago [-]
It's not an ego problem. It's a racial one.
hallole 5 hours ago [-]
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?
james_marks 5 hours ago [-]
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.
gorwell 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bluefirebrand 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
array_key_first 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ViktorRay 3 hours ago [-]
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?
anon84873628 3 hours ago [-]
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.
krapp 5 hours ago [-]
Unless your people walked across the Bering Strait during the last ice age you're an immigrant.
xp84 4 hours ago [-]
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
anon84873628 3 hours ago [-]
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.
tadfisher 2 hours ago [-]
And under treaty with those so victimized. Which is continually forgotten in these sorts of conversations.
krapp 4 hours ago [-]
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.
xp84 3 hours ago [-]
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.
> "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.
5 hours ago [-]
platevoltage 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
xp84 3 hours ago [-]
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.
anon84873628 3 hours ago [-]
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.
platevoltage 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not a Democrat.
p_j_w 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
krapp 4 hours ago [-]
>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.
> "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.
crote 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
krapp 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
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.
krapp 3 hours ago [-]
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.
crote 1 hours ago [-]
It's the classic "'I never thought leopards would eat my face', complains women who voted for Leopards Eating People's Faces Party".
anon84873628 3 hours ago [-]
"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?
kentm 5 hours ago [-]
We’ve also seen that you’re not safe on a green card either.
sunshowers 5 hours ago [-]
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.
6 hours ago [-]
thatfrenchguy 6 hours ago [-]
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
ben_w 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
crote 1 hours ago [-]
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?
platevoltage 5 hours ago [-]
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.
bluegatty 5 hours ago [-]
"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.
echelon 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bluegatty 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jatora 2 hours ago [-]
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
bluegatty 52 minutes ago [-]
"We aren't getting displaced anytime soon. One look at the pay differential makes it clear where incentives lie"
This is a bit myopic, partly because it diminishes Chinese capabilities - they're definitely ahead in a few areas, notably battery tech, advanced manufacturing, and in some product categories like robotics, (arguably EVs) and they have demonstrated leadership in industrial capacity for many others, like Solar Panels, other things. They're less than 1 year behind on AI (admittedly, they 'distill' and do a lot of copying but there's legit Engineering going on).
When you put that altogether, and the pace of progress, it's formidable.
China does it with 'domestic talent' whereas US R&D and 'Tech Exceptionalism' would literally not exist without outsiders, who make up up to 1/2 of the primary innovations, companies etc.. Tesla, Nvidia, OpenAI, Google - so many critical people from Europe, Asia etc. None of the 'Godfathers of AI' are American (which I find odd actually). Europe in particular makes a ton of primary contributions which are leveraged by others.
It's not a reason to say 'anyone from tech can be a citizen' but immigration has to be recognized as a critical ingredient, maybe the most critical.
ern 6 hours ago [-]
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".
postflopclarity 6 hours ago [-]
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.
didgetmaster 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Fraterkes 4 hours ago [-]
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.
happytoexplain 4 hours ago [-]
"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.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
As another disconnect, farmers overwhelmingly voted for Trump. I really don't understand how people are using their brains any more.
3 hours ago [-]
stego-tech 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Aniket-N 3 hours ago [-]
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.
happytoexplain 1 hours ago [-]
You see the complexity, but still categorize a noteworthy number of people somewhere as (relatively) reasonable as HN as clearly "wrong"?
zulux 9 hours ago [-]
It's wickedly complicated, isn't it? I'm distressed by anybody who doesn't change their position from time to time.
slg 6 hours ago [-]
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!"
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
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.
neverbehind 3 hours ago [-]
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?
slg 2 hours ago [-]
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.
neverbehind 25 minutes ago [-]
Right, so don't answer any of the questions and just get on your soapbox about how persecuted your special interest group is. What a shocker the rest of the country is growing tired of your antics.
tadfisher 2 hours ago [-]
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?
neverbehind 31 minutes ago [-]
To own the libs, what else?
postflopclarity 6 hours ago [-]
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.
happytoexplain 12 hours ago [-]
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.
tty456 4 hours ago [-]
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.
caminante 3 hours ago [-]
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.
cmiles8 10 hours ago [-]
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.
behnamoh 6 hours ago [-]
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.
valleyer 6 hours ago [-]
You really weren't paying close attention to their rhetoric, then.
friendlyasparag 5 hours ago [-]
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.
muglug 6 hours ago [-]
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.
platevoltage 58 minutes ago [-]
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?
rubyfan 11 hours ago [-]
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.
p_j_w 5 hours ago [-]
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.
JCattheATM 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cwillu 10 hours ago [-]
Or citizens who look like a immigrants.
JuniperMesos 4 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of voices explicitly saying that there are too many legal immigrants coming to the US under existing US immigration law, whose presence is not good for the majority of existing Americans despite not being illegal.
> And by the way, I want to make – I want to be very clear. I’m not just talking about illegal immigration, we have way too many legal immigrants coming into this country, too. 1.5 to 1.6 million legal people coming – Ilhan Omar came in legally and she hates the country. She’s a sleeper cell infiltrator of the United States representing Congress. She hates the country. She hates the west. She should be deported back to where she came from, Somalia. Go run for City Council in Mogadishu. The country is not enriched by people like Ilhan Omar.
rwmj 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Aniket-N 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mikelitoris 6 hours ago [-]
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”
frogperson 2 hours ago [-]
Anyone who uses this line is a racist.
happytoexplain 2 hours ago [-]
Some people.
Georgelemental 11 hours ago [-]
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
peyton 11 hours ago [-]
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?
ben_w 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Supermancho 9 hours ago [-]
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.
TheOtherHobbes 6 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
hibgymnb 4 hours ago [-]
The reality is that people who say that are certainly anti-immigration, they just know people don’t like when they say that
SecretDreams 5 hours ago [-]
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.
happytoexplain 4 hours ago [-]
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).
SecretDreams 3 hours ago [-]
Narrator: it was petty
Larrikin 5 hours ago [-]
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
seanmcdirmid 6 hours ago [-]
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.
thisisit 7 hours ago [-]
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.
lovich 52 minutes ago [-]
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
jmyeet 5 hours ago [-]
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.
BrenBarn 4 hours ago [-]
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.
kadomony 6 hours ago [-]
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.
tstrimple 7 hours ago [-]
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.
platevoltage 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not anti immigrant, I just really care about paperwork \s
georgemcbay 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
EnPissant 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lanstin 10 hours ago [-]
In this case the people brought up in the United States are sacrificing the well fare of their own children to preserve their own fears. I think that is wrong.
I want to keep the US a destination for hard work and smarts and striking out on your own. Don’t shelter your lazy kid, show them the beauty of complexity and mastery. Have them master some difficult skills, whether that’s a second language or botany or math or public speaking or building things. We are all responsible to each other for excellence. Respond to the opportunities for excellence, of what we can build together, dont’t yield to sloth and resentment being satisfied with turning your back on your own potential. The future is awesome and we welcome all who want to contribute! We welcome competition - better to be second best to the best than turning your back and cutting yourself off from the course of history.
kalkin 5 hours ago [-]
Lots of things are wrong with giving people the power to make choices that affect the whole world, while excluding others who are equally or more affected, based on where they happened to be born.
If the logic is that people who are born somewhere else shouldn't have any agency over immigration laws, well, why does someone who lives in some town in my country with a negligible immigrant population get a say in who I and my colleagues can invite to work with us, and who I and my neighbors can invite to live with us?
jfengel 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
EnPissant 9 hours ago [-]
> I hear "I'm not anti immigrant, I'm anti illegal immigrant" a lot. To which there is an easy solution: increase the number of legal immigrants we allow.
Being "anti illegal immigrant" doesn't have to imply you let in whoever wants as long as they follow some process. You are taking away the agency of the people to select its immigrants.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 11 hours ago [-]
If someone says they're not anti immigrant and then turns around to say immigration should be more difficult, there's an obvious logical disconnect in their worldview. It doesn't matter about illegal vs. legal: they want to make immigration more difficult, after claiming they are not against immigration. The comment does not claim there's anything wrong with the policy choice, just that the following policy preference betrays the initial statement as false.
sokoloff 11 hours ago [-]
It doesn’t seem inherently contradictory for someone to think “I’m not anti-immigrant” and “my ideal target for legal immigration is at 80% of its current rate”.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10 hours ago [-]
I think I see where you're coming from. To use an example, Switzerland has tight immigration controls due to the policies which grant citizens and permanent residents certain welfare benefits, since they don't want those to be leeched by people who do not contribute as much back. That is against immigration while not being anti-immigrant; the point is that the immigration itself does not motivate the policy which limits immigration, instead being motivated by the existence and meaning of other policies (a kind of protectionism).
Tying this back to OP's comment, it's hard to see these policy changes as any sort of legitimate protectionism and it's just as hard to divorce them from the justifications given by people who start with "I'm not anti-immigrant".
singpolyma3 4 hours ago [-]
Um. Yes. Those are obviously contradictory.
sokoloff 4 hours ago [-]
How so?
If legal immigration was at 40% of its current level and I wanted legal immigration to double from there, would that still be anti-immigrant?
Or does having any limit whatsoever mean that you're opposed to a thing?
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
I'm totally for it! I just wish there was less of it.
I don't know how else to read that.
throwawaypath 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
singpolyma3 4 hours ago [-]
If the borders are often then no one is coming in illegally
throwawaypath 3 hours ago [-]
Broken bot output?
singpolyma3 2 hours ago [-]
s/often/open stupid iPhone
throwawaypath 46 minutes ago [-]
"If the front door is open it's not trespassing" is obviously a troll take.
convolvatron 10 hours ago [-]
there are quite a number of issues with the situation as it was evolved. lots of people are intersted as a matter of policy in admitting that the US is largely functional because of immigrant labor, but relying in illegal immigration to fill those roles hasn't been great for the structure of the country or the laborers themselves. and to be clear this is not just harvesting the crops, and raisin the children, and building the houses, its also doctors and engineers and all sort of other professions.
so there a huge need to have a difficult policy discussion about what to do without cratering the economy.
but when you start removing civil liberties and running around in gangs grabbing random brown people off the streets and sending them to indefinate detention in the middle of nowhere, dumping people in Somalia, claiming you have the right kill anyone you want, you shouldn't be surprised when people start waving around the f word.
throwawaypath 6 hours ago [-]
>but when you start removing civil liberties and running around in gangs grabbing random brown people off the streets and sending them to indefinate detention in the middle of nowhere, dumping people in Somalia, claiming you have the right kill anyone you want, you shouldn't be surprised when people start waving around the f word.
You've been propagandized to believe that is happening. Remember when we were grabbing random brown people, including Black Olympian school superintendents right off the streets and sending them to concentration camps?
Months later the truth comes out: illegal alien with guns in his possession, which is a federal crime. Deportation order issued under Biden's administration.
The post-truth era has made the f word effectively meaningless.
jazzypants 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe they saw the roving bands of masked militants roaming the streets and grabbing people without warrants with their own eyes like I did.
throwawaypath 4 hours ago [-]
Masked ICE officers grabbing people with open warrants and deportation orders is what I saw with my own eyes.
jazzypants 3 hours ago [-]
A piece of paper signed by your boss isn't the same as a real warrant signed by a judge.
No real lawyer will ever tell you that an "administrative warrant" is a real thing that lets jackbooted thugs enter your home and detain you. It's absurd and disgusting, and you should feel dirty for defending it.
Sending masked goons to pull people off the streets is unconditionally fascist, and the people who participated are criminals who all belong in prison. If some of the goons were particularly conscientious and never arrested someone without good cause, that's great, and perhaps if they prove that we can shorten their sentences.
EnPissant 10 hours ago [-]
The following things are not in contradiction:
1) Someone can be against illegal immigration and for legal immigration.
2) That same person's idea about who should immigrate to the country may exclude most or all of the people who are currently immigrating illegally.
It's not like you can only be against illegal immigration because they forgot to fill out some form. Legal immigration has a component of deciding who gets in.
santoshalper 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
romaaeterna 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ilinx 12 hours ago [-]
It’s sad that pragmatically adjusting quotas is never the loudest argument in the room. I’m in favor of greatly increasing legal immigration, providing paths for safe work and citizenship (when that’s the goal). I’ll admit that my idea of an ideal system is probably not palatable for many. But if we could start from anywhere near a sane baseline, I’d understand wanting to gradually find sustainable quotas that take all factors into account. I’m done with purity tests and letting perfect be the enemy of good.
I suppose by “all factors” I mean all factors aside from exploitation and xenophobia, but I hope we could at least move the Overton window back that far.
romaaeterna 11 hours ago [-]
Okay. Let's choose a small random country as a basis for your immigration ideas. Ie., Rwanda (pop 14.8m) or Israel (pop 10.24m). What is the quantity of immigration flow that you want, who and from where and on what basis of admission over what time period. What are your intended demographic, social, and political shifts that you say are going to be "not palatable" for the people living there now? In fact, please expand on exactly how "not palatable" you expect your plans to be for them.
cmiles74 11 hours ago [-]
This strikes me as an unreasonable demand on the author of the comment. Part of the point of the current system was (at least at some point) to have knowledgeable people, armed with the available facts, figures and theories make some attempt at balancing the safety of the incoming people against (at the very least) their economic impact on the country. From there some rudimentary guard rails (quotas, visa type, etc.) would be set. I suspect few of us in this forum feel comfortable making these decisions from behind a phone, tablet or laptop.
My understanding is that many of us, perhaps including the author of the comment to which you are responding, would like to see at lease some small, inching movement towards such a system.
romaaeterna 11 hours ago [-]
On the contrary, asking for well-thought out political thought is the most reasonable demand in the world. If you have an idea about health care, national defense, or trade policy, I expect thought and numbers, not vague platitudes.
For example, you want small inching movement. From what starting point? Inching movement from the near-zero flows of the mid-20th century? Inching movement from the mass flows of the 21st century? Both ideas would have major consequences, and if you are going to advocate for mass social change, you should think it out and advocate with care and thoughtfulness.
cmiles74 9 hours ago [-]
I’d take rapid movement, honestly, I simply think it unlikely. In terms of what kind of change, I was speaking of movement toward a rational system with clear goals, with decisions made by knowledgeable people. With that in mind any movement, I think, should be estimated from the present. We can’t change the past!
Agreed, care and thoughtfulness should be the rule, not the exception. Presently we are getting neither. I’m a software developer, I don’t work in policy; but I believe our immigration position should be aligned with policy goals and I’m not sure we have any of those, either.
In any case, re-categorizing so many legal immigrants in order to imprison them strikes me as pointless and fundamentally wrong.
sobellian 11 hours ago [-]
Why do we need to quantify an exact quota to qualify as well thought out political thought? Some people think about this issue from the basis of fundamental freedoms. Innocent, productive people deserve the opportunity to move where they obtain the most prosperity.
If I advocated abolition in the 19th century, it would be missing the point to turn around and say "oh yeah? And how many slaves would you like to free per year, and what effects do you expect that to have? Include examples of past slave rebellions"
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 11 hours ago [-]
> For example, you want small inching movement. From what starting point?
The obvious assumption is that they mean from where we are right now. We're not going to suddenly be at the mid-20th century again. This comes off as argumentative more than curious (as do your other comments in this thread, for what it's worth).
romaaeterna 10 hours ago [-]
Advocating for small inching change to a rate is different from advocating from small inching change. Easy example: if you are in a car with an accelerator pedal depressed.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10 hours ago [-]
> Advocating for small inching change to a rate is different from advocating from small inching change.
No, it isn't. It is a change; whether it's acceleration or velocity is an implementation detail. Whether it should be changed suddenly or gradually is the spec.
matwood 11 hours ago [-]
The US's strength is/was in part because of immigration. The best and brightest want to come to the US to go to school and then they often stay for the enormous opportunities only available in the US. I want any immigrant that wants to come to the US given a reasonable path to make that happen.
You are right that the Native Americans were completely misplaced by immigrants, but immigration made the US what it is today and I see no reason it won't continue to make the US a uniquely strong country.
romaaeterna 11 hours ago [-]
You may be interested to learn that American immigration flows were higher or lower at various times (nearly zero for long periods). As you allude to with Native Americans, the effects of the different flows were not uniform on all people, and instead caused various negative and positive effects. The period of Americans great post-WWII economic and military rise came during its longest period of immigration moratorium, during which its population was fairly homogeneous. In recent decades, America has begun to decline economically and militarily relative to China, a country not subject to these "strengthening flows". Odd case.
sobellian 12 hours ago [-]
The citizenry would probably fare no worse than with the arrival of the Irish, the Italians, or the Germans. What are you expecting, for the Indians or Chinese to sack DC aux Visigoths?
the_gastropod 11 hours ago [-]
“Open borders” was pretty much standard across the world prior to World War 1. These tightly controlled immigration policies are, historically speaking, incredibly new.
I think it’s self evident that the U.S. benefited greatly from its mass immigration inflows in the 19th and 20th centuries.
gib444 11 hours ago [-]
It's a different world now
romaaeterna 11 hours ago [-]
Your statement has no basis whatsoever in reality. The US, for example, had a four-decade moratorium on immigration beginning in 1924. Mass immigration flows appeared at various times and places in the past (often accompanied by bloodshed and suffering), but it's highly incorrect to imagine that 21st-century 1st world demographic shifts are some sort of historical norm.
Timon3 6 hours ago [-]
How is the moratorium of any relevance considering WW1 ended a few years before 1924?
margalabargala 12 hours ago [-]
Are you serious?
"Oh, you support immigration? Write an entire nation's immigration policy. Can't/won't do it? You must be a paid shill."
People are allowed to have opinions without regurgitating policy documents on demand.
dmm 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lanstin 10 hours ago [-]
People coming to live in your area, not your personal home, to work hard for opportunities, are in no material way like pick pockets. Your analogy is so extreme I am tempted to assume you argue in bad faith. The economic success of the United States, its simultaneous growth and flexibility and prosperity is directly caused by our heightened skills to welcome immigrants and make use of their talents and desire for success (compared to other countries with similar demographics). We are awesome at welcoming people into a modern society that values smarts, individual diversity, getting along with neighbors of differing backgrounds, hard work, risk taking, striking out on your own, the NBA, good home cooked food, fast food, and Taylor Swift, and getting them to enjoy these things also.
dmm 10 hours ago [-]
I didn't say they were pickpockets. I was trying to point out the absurdity of correcting illegal activity by simply eliminating laws.
I love immigration. We should have lots of immigration! But it should occur within consistently, fairly enforced laws passed by our legislative system. I get that our immigration system is arguably broken and that it's very difficult to pass meaningful legislation, but that doesn't mean we should just allow whoever is president to dictate immigration policy.
lanstin 9 hours ago [-]
So the thing to analogize is that DHS is acting like a junior high school gang, enforcing ever shifting rules and norms capriciously for the fun of bullying to score points with the onlookers. The bullied folks are not analogous to pick pockets. We have laws, laws under which TPS is legal for ever, under which we don’t round up and export people without criminal records, laws under which people pay taxes and raise their families here; all of this suffering being caused by Miller is not for the effects of the policies but for the demonstration of cruelty, contempt for differences, and a distraction from the roll back of a middle class centric economy where hard work and education were a pathway to a good family life.
dmm 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah it was a bad comment. I really misunderstood the grandparent.
6 hours ago [-]
dahart 5 hours ago [-]
> I was trying to point out the absurdity of correcting illegal activity by simply eliminating laws.
Isn’t this straw man? Who said anything about eliminating laws or being inconsistent about legal immigration? The top comment was only pointing out that slowing the flow of legal immigration does not fix illegal immigration and probably makes it worse. Some people don’t love immigration or feel we should have lots, despite the benefits, and sometimes those people say contradictory things.
throw-away_42 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, it would be utterly absurd to decriminalize cannabis. Oh, wait...
shigawire 9 hours ago [-]
It is to make a system where people are less incentivized to commit crimes.
vidarh 6 hours ago [-]
This comparison is flawed because there is not legal pickpocketing, but there is legal immigration.
If there was a legal pickpocketing, and someone claimed to only be opposed to illegal pickpocketing, then it would be reasonable to point out that unless they're lying about their intent a solution to preventing illegal pickpocketing would be to make it all legal.
The analogy falls apart because nobody argues that they are "only" opposed to illegal pickpicketing.
If people are opposed to any form of immigration, then they should just admit that, rather than pretend they're only opposed to illegal immigration.
atom_arranger 5 hours ago [-]
a. Opposed to someone taking my money against my will and the law just because they want to, “for a better life”.
b. Not opposed to someone taking my money in exchange for goods or services I want.
a. Opposed to someone moving into my country against my will and the law just because they want to, “for a better life”.
b. Not opposed to someone moving into my country because I married them and want them here.
There’s a whole spectrum between a and b, but I think most people are against a.
Legal pickpocketing is taxes you’re opposed to, or wages being garnished.
In theory people who say they’re only against illegal immigration are saying they completely agree with all policies regarding legal immigration, now and maybe into the future. Likely not what these people actually believe because while possible it would be a silly position. They’re probably just saying it to try to find some common ground with very pro immigration people. Likely a fools errand.
vidarh 2 hours ago [-]
You've invented a whole new set of categories of pickpocketing that most people would disagree has anything to do with pickpocketing to justify a flawed argument.
To your last paragraph, no, they are not. There is no automatic implication that people will not change their minds depending on the situation. The argument is not that they can never change their minds, but that it is deceitful to pretend to only oppose illegal immigration in current circumstances and then go on to demonstrate they are also opposed to the currently legal immigration.
marcusverus 4 hours ago [-]
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.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
I'm curious what you think "actively encouraged" means here?
marcusverus 1 hours ago [-]
The Democrat election messaging that caused border encounters to ~3X immediately after Biden was elected, obviously.
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.
grosswait 12 hours ago [-]
And I will stop assuming that people know what the word fascist actually means
kibwen 11 hours ago [-]
"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
euio757 3 hours ago [-]
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"
koe123 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gib444 11 hours ago [-]
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?
snapplebobapple 8 hours ago [-]
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.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
You could keep the vetting system and still increase legal immigration a lot. Those are two separate issues.
snapplebobapple 59 minutes ago [-]
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
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)
scottyeager 12 hours ago [-]
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.
jmyeet 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Court Listener is basically an open source listing of dispositions on essentially all cases, but definitely all major ones. It’s a wonderful resource.
coolThingsFirst 12 hours ago [-]
Why on earth would they need to wait years?
SyneRyder 11 hours ago [-]
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."
timr 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that's a wild leap to conclusions. The "accrual of unlawful presence" is when you overstay a visa, or otherwise stay in the USA illegally. Here's the definition:
> Asylees and asylum applicants: Generally, time while a bona fide asylum application is pending is not counted as unlawful presence.
So unless there's currently a huge backlog of people staying here illegally who are somehow eligible for green cards in spite of this fact, the government changing it's policies to require new applicants do so from overseas is not itself causing these applicants to violate immigration law.
handle584 9 hours ago [-]
That note is grossly wrong though, ICE was/is putting them in jail while they appear for immigration hearing at courts.
6 hours ago [-]
lazide 12 hours ago [-]
Says right in the comment.
coolThingsFirst 12 hours ago [-]
Consular processing isn't that backlogged for majority of countries that's what i meant.
The majority of consular offices are, in fact, backlogged.
wtmt 9 hours ago [-]
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.
EricDeb 3 hours ago [-]
Do you have any personal experience with the immigration system at all?
behnamoh 6 hours ago [-]
As an Iranian, it took 4 months for me to get a F1 visa. Now it's completely banned.
5 hours ago [-]
cmiles8 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dwa3592 11 hours ago [-]
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.
ianhawes 6 hours ago [-]
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).
OptionOfT 10 hours ago [-]
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?
cmiles8 10 hours ago [-]
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.
dwa3592 4 hours ago [-]
an undergrad for most of the jobs.
hellojesus 11 hours ago [-]
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.
cmiles8 11 hours ago [-]
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.
bsimpson 11 hours ago [-]
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.
sokoloff 10 hours ago [-]
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.
hellojesus 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ianhawes 6 hours ago [-]
You've just described what already has to occur for PERM, you have to post on the respective State Workforce Agency website.
mpalmer 5 hours ago [-]
So punish/disincentivize employers. This is a burden on the presumptive legal immigrant.
nceqs3 1 hours ago [-]
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.
12 hours ago [-]
KingMachiavelli 20 hours ago [-]
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.
airstrike 20 hours ago [-]
And don't forget that US consulates in 75 countries, or approximately a third of the globe, have stopped conducting Green Card interviews.
anigbrowl 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
esseph 18 hours ago [-]
> 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"
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.
bulbar 20 hours ago [-]
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.
ornornor 20 hours ago [-]
> 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
seabird 17 hours ago [-]
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.
ornornor 16 hours ago [-]
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”
chewz 15 hours ago [-]
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.
Glawen 9 hours ago [-]
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
arjie 6 hours ago [-]
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 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.
danielrmay 6 hours ago [-]
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.
philipallstar 6 hours ago [-]
This is pretty normal for most countries' visa processes. You often have to leave to renew a visa.
hvb2 4 hours ago [-]
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...
bluesea 3 hours ago [-]
Wrong - green card is visa
cheschire 2 hours ago [-]
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.
"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...
jmspring 3 hours ago [-]
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.
p_l 3 hours ago [-]
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.
gventura18 2 hours ago [-]
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.
sega_sai 8 minutes ago [-]
It is false. It is not the case for UK and several EU countries at the very least
jimkleiber 6 hours ago [-]
I think the biggest question the US needs to ask itself is do we want to be normal like most countries or better?
3 hours ago [-]
WesolyKubeczek 3 hours ago [-]
At this point the US is the kid eating glue, it looks like.
petcat 6 hours ago [-]
USA has been far better for over 100 years. But that had to end at some point. So now we're seeing it end.
epistasis 6 hours ago [-]
It did not "have" to end, it's merely a political choice by one political faction being forced upon the entire nation.
solid_fuel 3 hours ago [-]
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!".
root_axis 4 hours ago [-]
People hate to be reminded of this, but that "faction" is the voters, in record numbers for the party.
epistasis 4 hours ago [-]
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.
root_axis 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
lazyasciiart 3 hours ago [-]
> The recent ouster of Thomas Massie is a clear example of this
How?
root_axis 2 hours ago [-]
The outcome of his election was a referendum on Trump's performance among engaged Republican voters.
epistasis 2 hours ago [-]
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.
"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)
lazide 4 hours ago [-]
You mean the elected one?
4 hours ago [-]
fcarraldo 2 hours ago [-]
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.
petcat 1 hours ago [-]
USA accepted more immigrants between 1900 and 1980 than every other western country combined.
huxley 6 hours ago [-]
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.
woodruffw 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
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).
woodruffw 36 minutes ago [-]
I don’t think I agree that it’s hostile by every other measure. The US’s immigration system is cruel and capricious, but assimilating into the US seems to be a lot easier than, for example, France or Germany. The US is unusual among its peer countries in not requiring immigrants to speak the “official” language fluently, in accepting public displays of ethnic or religious background that aren’t ambiently European Christian, etc.
(Again, I must emphasize that this does not make the US good. Only that the bar is perhaps lower than people who are assimilated into any particular country may realize.)
bryanrasmussen 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nephihaha 4 hours ago [-]
A hundred years? Maybe after WW2. The Great Depression was pretty rough over there.
behringer 4 hours ago [-]
Far better than who?
platevoltage 5 hours ago [-]
DO you have a good reason why?
petcat 5 hours ago [-]
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.
striking 5 hours ago [-]
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.
thrownthatway 1 hours ago [-]
> 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?
jmspring 3 hours ago [-]
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.
striking 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cousin_it 2 hours ago [-]
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.
thrownthatway 1 hours ago [-]
Well, not everyone.
Those having their labour under-cut aren’t going to directly benefit.
55 minutes ago [-]
dangus 4 hours ago [-]
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.
thrownthatway 1 hours ago [-]
> 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?
dangus 32 minutes ago [-]
To be honest, the depopulation crisis is not something we are likely to be able to stop in the long term. But curtailing immigration certainly won't help, and the US would be uniquely positioned as an immigration destination to weather the storm of rapid depopulation better than other countries if it continued its status as an immigration center.
Recommended reading:
After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People
Or really any other book on the subject, I'm not married to that one, it's not a perfect book it's just one that's easy to find because of the distinctive cover.
I don't care to get into talking about Israel. It's a country with the population of Ohio, so if it's an anomaly, it's an anomaly. The only discussion I can get into that country is going to get distasteful.
iugtmkbdfil834 3 hours ago [-]
<< 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.
yongjik 3 hours ago [-]
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.
thrownthatway 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jmspring 3 hours ago [-]
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.
thrownthatway 1 hours ago [-]
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.
dangus 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
866-RON-0-FEZ 4 hours ago [-]
> Vivek Ramaswamy
> Bobby Jindal
> Nikki Haley
All natural-born American citizens born in the US.
Why did you quietly remove these names from your sarcastic comment when confronted about it?
dangus 48 minutes ago [-]
It was an honest mistake, I legitimately thought they weren’t born in this country.
We could easily extend this to second generation immigrants if we want to make xenophobes look even dumber.
Imagine the American tech industry without Steve Jobs, for example.
tomp 3 hours ago [-]
Melania Trump wasn't on "low wage immigrant worker" visa (H1B) but on a "exceptional ability" visa (O1).
Didn't check the others...
dangus 47 minutes ago [-]
You’re getting close to understanding my point.
joe_mamba 4 hours ago [-]
Low quality bait comment, cherry picking a few kids of well educated well-off immigrants who turned out to be rockstars growing up under the exceptional US economic conditions. It's called the exception, not the rule. If those kids were to grow up in some underdeveloped country, none of them would have achieved anything noteworthy which proves the US itself and the conditions it offers is the secret sauce, not immigrants alone by themselves.
Also, some people on your list are absolute red flags I would rather not have in my country, which is proving my point that good border controls and strict visas are essential.
dangus 49 minutes ago [-]
It’s amazing how close and how far you are at understanding my point simultaneously.
Without committing to some wildly contradictory logic, the xenophobic political party in charge of this country cannot be simultaneously in favor of mass deportations, denaturalization, and generally closing the borders while being against denaturalizing and deporting Melania Trump and Elon Musk for obvious visa violations. There is also contradiction in the way the right wing has gotten cozy with big tech companies run by immigrants who entered the country on the H1B visa they demonize so fervently.
Just imagine the outcry if Obama was from South Africa and was standing behind the president's desk talking about how he's running a new illegal government agency.
nephihaha 4 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk was from a rich Canadian-South African family that owned mines.
grishka 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jleyank 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dghlsakjg 3 hours ago [-]
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.
jleyank 3 hours ago [-]
Think my European buddy had to go back home to renew his work permit. Could not do that within Canada.
nialv7 2 hours ago [-]
is that normal? in UK you can extend a visa or apply for ILR without leaving the country.
6 hours ago [-]
jmyeet 6 hours ago [-]
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.
thesmtsolver2 5 hours ago [-]
Sweden is portrayed as beacon of human rights, let's use them as an example.
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.
enaaem 5 hours ago [-]
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.
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
jmyeet 1 hours ago [-]
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.
6 hours ago [-]
beAbU 6 hours ago [-]
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.
rcxdude 3 hours ago [-]
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.
beAbU 3 hours ago [-]
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!"
2 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
CalRobert 5 hours ago [-]
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)
AnotherGoodName 4 hours ago [-]
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.
thrownthatway 2 hours ago [-]
Do they have yo quit their job to leave the county?
AnotherGoodName 1 hours ago [-]
If you’re on a work visa you can’t work from a foreign country.
thrownthatway 6 minutes ago [-]
That doesn’t answer my question.
csomar 3 hours ago [-]
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.
PlanksVariable 5 hours ago [-]
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.
simonw 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
4 hours ago [-]
danielrmay 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
blindriver 4 hours ago [-]
You do realize that the overwhelming majority of countries in the world at not predominantly white, do you?
paulryanrogers 2 hours ago [-]
When Trump explicitly invites only white people from South Africa, a majority black nation, I think the intention is pretty clear.
thrownthatway 11 minutes ago [-]
Are you trying to claim that the white people in Zimbabwe and South Africa are responsible for wrecking those countries?
White people are, and have been, target and killed in those place.
qurren 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kcplate 2 hours ago [-]
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.
qurren 28 minutes ago [-]
> your motivation is not altruistic to the host country in that case, it’s selfish
There is nothing wrong with that. I'm selfish, you're selfish, the government is selfish, everyone in the host country is selfish. It's human nature. We all want good lives. That's the reason a transactional economy exists. It's good for the country's GDP and overall economy to welcome outside talent, and that outside talent enjoys being rewarded for their contributions, and over time, their new place of residence becomes a part of their cultural identity. That's how things usually work.
Not everyone is a saint.
> 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.
Reality check: 99% of people would take a better life over a worse life. And there's nothing wrong with that. The entire world is built with this as a base assumption.
Also, reality check: Life in the US kinda sucks unless you have a well-paying skilled job or a lot of money. In either case you'll be contributing to the economy.
thrownthatway 3 minutes ago [-]
Fine. No one’s likely to argue you’re wrong.
And it seems you agree: people don’t move to a new place to contribute their skills.
They move because of the potential upsides for themselves.
PlanksVariable 3 hours ago [-]
I'm saying most people are motivated by self interest, not that you have nothing to offer in return.
BurningFrog 3 hours ago [-]
> 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!
PlanksVariable 3 hours ago [-]
More people are impacted by mass immigration than immigrants and employers.
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
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
mbgerring 4 hours ago [-]
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.
PlanksVariable 3 hours ago [-]
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.
thuridas 2 hours ago [-]
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.
k8sToGo 4 hours ago [-]
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.
garyfirestorm 6 hours ago [-]
They undid public charge from my memory. It doesn’t exist anymore.
danielrmay 6 hours ago [-]
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.
SlightlyLeftPad 6 hours ago [-]
How recently? As of about 2010, it was very much still there. I understand that is 16 years ago.
tmp10423288442 6 hours 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.
sleepyguy 5 hours ago [-]
Under what administration was your process?
danielrmay 5 hours ago [-]
Trump, early 2017. I'm aware there was some attempt by the Trump admin to change "public charge" terminology in late 2018.
d--b 3 hours ago [-]
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.
qingcharles 3 hours ago [-]
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.
tsss 5 hours ago [-]
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.
danielrmay 5 hours ago [-]
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.
platevoltage 5 hours ago [-]
Green Cards aren't citizenship.
JCTheDenthog 5 hours ago [-]
They're permanent residency, so other than voting rights effectively the same thing.
qurren 3 hours ago [-]
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.
axpy906 1 hours ago [-]
Well, based on the state your in you can still vote citizenship or not.
platevoltage 1 hours ago [-]
Which state allows this?
axpy906 53 minutes ago [-]
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
I suggest you go and try out an immigration system. You have no idea.
JCTheDenthog 4 hours ago [-]
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.
hvb2 4 hours ago [-]
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...
platevoltage 1 hours ago [-]
First of all, not true, but second of all, thats a pretty important difference in a so called democracy.
4 hours ago [-]
blindriver 4 hours ago [-]
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.
JCTheDenthog 4 hours ago [-]
>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.
alterom 3 hours ago [-]
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.
abalashov 4 hours ago [-]
... no. As someone who has had both, I can tell you there's _quite_ a difference.
Terr_ 2 hours ago [-]
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.
0xy 6 hours ago [-]
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.
danielrmay 6 hours ago [-]
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?
0xy 5 hours ago [-]
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.
danielrmay 5 hours ago [-]
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.
blindriver 4 hours ago [-]
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.
sunshowers 5 hours ago [-]
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.
6 hours ago [-]
michaelmrose 5 hours ago [-]
Did you just pick other generally racist countries with unfriendly immigration policies to prove that all other countries have such systems?
declan_roberts 6 hours ago [-]
It's a two tier system where the best outcome appears to be to simply break the law completely and illegally.
neither_color 5 hours ago [-]
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.
redeeman 2 hours ago [-]
however, though, how about those people that are illegals just... dont?
kakacik 6 hours ago [-]
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.
sssilver 6 hours ago [-]
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.
pixelatedindex 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Longhanks 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
JuniperMesos 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
Longhanks 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
iugtmkbdfil834 3 hours ago [-]
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.
silver_silver 2 hours ago [-]
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
ycombinary 5 hours ago [-]
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5 hours ago [-]
CalRobert 5 hours ago [-]
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.
mancerayder 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Swizec 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
elzbardico 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Swizec 2 hours ago [-]
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
cj 5 hours ago [-]
$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)
juliie 3 hours ago [-]
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%.
aborsy 4 hours ago [-]
Top graduates in France make 40-50k. This is the reality I have seen. Salaries are often tabulated with limited range.
sdthjbvuiiijbb 4 hours ago [-]
>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.
root_axis 4 hours ago [-]
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.
joe_mamba 4 hours ago [-]
>$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.
markvdb 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kevin_thibedeau 5 hours ago [-]
Most American's don't have that opportunity either or don't want to make the sacrifice of living in soul crushing circumstances.
expedition32 4 hours ago [-]
Nobody in my European country needs to work at 70.
But there are VERY few countries on this planet that actually saved for retirement.
xdennis 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rayiner 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
thrownthatway 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
gdubs 4 hours ago [-]
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.
biddit 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
yacin 2 hours ago [-]
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?”
biddit 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
magicalist 1 hours ago [-]
> 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".
tamimio 3 hours ago [-]
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.
alterom 3 hours ago [-]
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.
solid_fuel 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rebekkamikkoa 13 hours ago [-]
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.
TimedToasts 13 hours ago [-]
Number must go up
linuxhansl 6 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 21 hours ago [-]
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.”
buzer 20 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
airstrike 20 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 20 hours ago [-]
> evidence of how skilled immigrants are immensely beneficial to the US economy.
That's irrelevant. "Justice" means following the rules. Congress gets to decide the immigration laws. Congress has never created a real system for skilled permanent immigrants. The term "H1B" actually comes from 8 USC 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(B).
Subsection (a)(15) literally defines the term "immigrant" to exclude people in the subsequent subsections, including (H)(i)(b). Subsection (a)(15)(H)(i)(b) then reiterates that the category is for someone "who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform services." Congress didn't hide the ball.
Everyone who has applied for an "adjustment of status" is following the rules. It's literally a procedure you submit to USCIS.
People who have done everything by "following the rules" are now seeing the US backpedal on what was promised to them via an administrative memo published by USCIS at the behest of the president—not through new legislation enacted by Congress.
I don't know where you're getting your information from, but it's factually incorrect.
And as someone else said, "justice" does not mean following the law. That's the definition of "legal".
It's important to anchor these topics at a certain level of understanding of Law and Economics to discuss optimal policy, otherwise we'll just talk past each other with uninformed political views.
rayiner 19 hours ago [-]
Your information is factually incorrect. You're confusing the USCIS procedures for the actual law. The current H1B to green card pipeline was never much more than "an administrative memo" to begin with.
Read 8 USC 1101, specifically subsections (a)(15) & (a)(15)(H)(i)(B). The statute classifies H1Bs among the "nonimmigrant aliens," and states that the category is for someone "who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform services." Does that sound to you like it was mean to be a pathway to permanent residency?
There was never a "promise" in the law. Instead, there were a set of USCIS practices and procedures that amounted to nothing more than writing down what USCIS was currently doing. But USCIS never had authority to turn what Congress created as a temporary worker program into a permanent path to citizenship.
I'm sympathetic to people who put their eggs in the H1B basket. As an immigrant, how are you supposed to understand constitutional law and limits on executive power? But the fact is that the modern H1B regime was created almost entirely by executive fiat and it can be undone by executive fiat as well. (All the 1990 Act did was undo some presumptions but left the executive free to decide at any time that an H1B has immigrant intent, which is a basis for visa revocation.)
My information is perfectly correct. I think you, as a layman, seem to be understanding the Law as being identical to the US Code, somehow ignoring the fact that rules and regulations, as well as case law, are also primary sources of Law in the United States. Here's from the first hit on Google for "Sources of US Law"
> The four sources of federal and state law are (1) constitutions, (2) statutes and ordinances, (3) rules and regulations, and (4) case law.
This amounts to much more than "writing down what USCIS was currently doing". This is a specific source of law. These regulations are legally binding as Congress has authorized the agency to issue them.
There's also plenty of case law from USCIS-related adjudicative reviews, meaning specific precedents set by judges who hear cases related to immigration.
After reflecting on your comment, I hope you're not trying to force an argument that any person who's requested an adjustment of status is somehow illegally present in the country, because that would be woefully incorrect.
I also don't appreciate the patronizing remark that I somehow fail to grasp the facts because I'm an immigrant.
I'm not sure why you think people who were born outside of the borders of the United States of America do not understand how liberal democracies work.
Do you actually think immigrants have no concept of constitutional law and limits on executive power? Do you think that knowledge is somehow protected by a magic seal that prevents me from ever obtaining it? Or do you think other countries do not have constitutions or a system of checks and balances? Do you know how many years I've spent studying nations in general and the US specifically? Do you know how many comparative studies I've written? Do you even know what my specific qualifications and degrees are? And I can do this in 5 different languages.
You're way out of your depth and your bias is showing.
HenriTEL 3 hours ago [-]
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:
> 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.
airstrike 2 hours ago [-]
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!”
4 hours ago [-]
digitaltrees 19 hours ago [-]
Justice doesn’t mean following the law. It is possible to have an unjust law. Like red lining or slavery. Or civil forfeiture. Etc
leokennis 6 hours ago [-]
May the world extend Americans the hospitality that the US has extended to the world in the last year.
akkartik 5 hours ago [-]
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.
throwawa14223 5 hours ago [-]
That would be amazing.
letsberealman 2 hours ago [-]
On a related topic, the number of H1Bs brought in by big tech has been insane. Have you seen mtn view castro lately?
bsimpson 11 hours ago [-]
I'm so happy for my friends that got green cards before this insanity.
kibwen 11 hours ago [-]
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?
OutOfHere 10 hours ago [-]
For those who're in the US, the courts can stop the government. The ones more at risk are non-citizens who are abroad.
redserk 8 hours ago [-]
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.
OutOfHere 8 hours ago [-]
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.
adgjlsfhk1 6 hours ago [-]
no. the supreme Court got rid of that last year
bsimpson 6 hours ago [-]
[citation needed]
thisisit 7 hours ago [-]
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".
phs318u 10 hours ago [-]
Can they though? Hasn’t the government already ignored plenty of injunctions against them?
jfengel 10 hours ago [-]
And will they? This administration has appointed a significant fraction of judges.
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.
aborsy 1 days ago [-]
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.
throwaway219450 1 days ago [-]
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.
aborsy 18 hours ago [-]
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…).
JuniperMesos 20 hours ago [-]
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.
xpl 1 days ago [-]
> they will not be able to obtain non-immigration visas in the future
Why? Aren't L1 and H1B "dual intent" visas?
aborsy 1 days ago [-]
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.
confuseddesi 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mtremsal 3 hours ago [-]
H1B is considered “dual intent”
darth_avocado 20 hours ago [-]
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.
buzer 20 hours ago [-]
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.
darth_avocado 7 hours ago [-]
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.
kettlecorn 20 hours ago [-]
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.
cheinic6493 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
darth_avocado 7 hours ago [-]
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?
mavelikara 7 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway219450 4 hours ago [-]
EB1-A and EB2 NIW are the usual categories. Both allow you to self petition without an offer of employment.
amazingamazing 13 hours ago [-]
> 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?
dwa3592 11 hours ago [-]
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.
noodlesUK 12 hours ago [-]
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.
zipy124 11 hours ago [-]
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.
noodlesUK 11 hours ago [-]
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.
bsimpson 11 hours ago [-]
Asylum is an international concept negotiated by treaty. You apply when you arrive - that's true everywhere.
ShinyLeftPad 4 hours ago [-]
> 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?
6 hours ago [-]
TFNA 6 hours ago [-]
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.
asploder 10 hours ago [-]
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.
12 hours ago [-]
mehulashah 1 hours ago [-]
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.
amir734jj 40 minutes ago [-]
I will vote in midterms. Enough is enough.
tegiddrone 4 hours ago [-]
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/
margorczynski 2 hours ago [-]
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.
adi_kurian 1 hours ago [-]
Uncle Sam likes tax payers.
I believe the current administration, in general, appreciates those with $$.
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.
freediddy 1 days ago [-]
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.
airstrike 19 hours ago [-]
US consulates have halted green card processing in 75 countries.
throwaway219450 1 days ago [-]
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).
arrowleaf 1 days ago [-]
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?
freediddy 1 days ago [-]
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.
arrowleaf 1 days ago [-]
For F-1/OPT there is no 'pending immigrant visa case' status that lets them remain in-country after OPT expires.
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
squibonpig 3 hours ago [-]
I don't feel scared of or concerned about immigration. That's it. I don't know where that's coming from.
asterix276 6 hours ago [-]
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
pstuart 6 hours ago [-]
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.
digitaltrees 20 hours ago [-]
It’s amazing to see someone do literally all of the opposite things to create a successful business, country, economy and world.
ashley95 5 hours ago [-]
Which is so puzzling to me given Trump's impeccable record as a successful and prudent businessman.
xena 3 hours ago [-]
The dude bankrupted a casino.
jaybrendansmith 13 hours ago [-]
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.
mrlonglong 15 hours ago [-]
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.
airstrike 19 hours ago [-]
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.
didgetmaster 6 hours ago [-]
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.
aranelsurion 3 hours ago [-]
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)
ergocoder 4 hours ago [-]
> 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).
toilet 2 hours ago [-]
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.
elil17 4 hours ago [-]
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.
halflife 4 hours ago [-]
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.
toilet 2 hours ago [-]
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?
ianm218 4 hours ago [-]
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.
5 hours ago [-]
convolvatron 6 hours ago [-]
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
didgetmaster 1 hours ago [-]
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).
convolvatron 25 minutes ago [-]
in what way does that imply that there are only two possible policies, open borders and NK borders with an exception for white racists.
lugu 3 hours ago [-]
I am genuenly curious what do you think would happen if every country were to apply 1.
convolvatron 26 minutes ago [-]
I've written several replies and deleted them all. I really can't speculate. its never really occurred to me that that would be a good idea, and everything I wrote was just the kind of unsubstantiated bullshit that I hate reading here.
GeneralMayhem 5 hours ago [-]
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.
TFNA 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
elil17 4 hours ago [-]
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.
TFNA 4 hours ago [-]
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.
4 hours ago [-]
nrmitchi 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
zaptheimpaler 21 hours ago [-]
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.
hermannj314 21 hours ago [-]
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.
epistasis 21 hours ago [-]
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.
zaptheimpaler 21 hours ago [-]
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.
digitaltrees 19 hours ago [-]
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.
elzbardico 3 hours ago [-]
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.
goodluckchuck 19 hours ago [-]
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.
vidarh 6 hours ago [-]
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.
RamenJunkie_ 11 hours ago [-]
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."
zaptheimpaler 15 hours ago [-]
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.
RamenJunkie_ 11 hours ago [-]
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.
drivingmenuts 21 hours ago [-]
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.
hiddencost 21 hours ago [-]
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.
BrokenCogs 20 hours ago [-]
I think it's sarcasm
rayiner 21 hours ago [-]
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.
zaptheimpaler 20 hours ago [-]
Yes exactly. One country sucking up all the best talent is not good for the world, its a single point of failure.
airstrike 20 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
airstrike 20 hours ago [-]
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.
zaptheimpaler 18 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
airstrike 7 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 5 hours ago [-]
The U.S. built an industrial economy by itself, without any developed country offshoring work to it. Why do you think China couldn’t?
airstrike 5 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 19 hours ago [-]
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?
airstrike 19 hours ago [-]
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
rayiner 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
airstrike 8 hours ago [-]
At this point it's hard to take your opinion seriously if you think we should model economic policy after Pinochet.
> 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.
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.
digitaltrees 19 hours ago [-]
This is the correct answer. Concentration of talent creates cross pollination and collaborative learning. The innovation is then exported.
digitaltrees 19 hours ago [-]
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.
hollerith 7 hours ago [-]
>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.
I could probably find other French engineers fleeing the revolution, if need be.
hollerith 6 hours ago [-]
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.
TimorousBestie 4 hours ago [-]
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.
hollerith 3 hours ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
gyomu 20 hours ago [-]
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.
hibikir 20 hours ago [-]
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?
19 hours ago [-]
19 hours ago [-]
ViktorRay 4 hours ago [-]
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.
rayiner 50 minutes ago [-]
> Also isnt it a loss for everyone?
No, it’s a win for the people who remain in India. Imagine if the Samsung founder had moved to the U.S. instead of founding Samsung in Korea.
> 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
Maybe some, but on average no. My family is Bangladeshi and my wife’s family is pre-Revolutionary War American and the cultural gap is vast. Basic attitudes towards justice, freedom, order, civic responsibilities, time, family relations, money, government, food, etc., are completely different.
Concrete example: Bangladeshis places tremendous emphasis on formal education and credentials. Americans have a tradition of skepticism of those things. This difference persists even among American born Desis.
> 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.
ryandrake 1 days ago [-]
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.
electronsoup 1 days ago [-]
> likely not well thought out
Or it has been, and cruelty is the point
cozzyd 1 days ago [-]
I wonder how this would have applied to Melania
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
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.
adjejmxbdjdn 1 days ago [-]
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.
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
>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.
exsomet 1 days ago [-]
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)
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
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.
kylehotchkiss 1 days ago [-]
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.
daft_pink 1 days ago [-]
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.
nrmitchi 1 days ago [-]
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.
adjejmxbdjdn 1 days ago [-]
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.
daft_pink 1 days ago [-]
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.
esalman 1 days ago [-]
What if you obtain a B2 visa to attend a conference in the US, and a year later receive and employment opportunity?
ilaksh 12 hours ago [-]
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.
overlord1109 6 hours ago [-]
> The DHS has made many communications that were openly white supremacist
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.
gbraad 1 days ago [-]
This is how it works for legal immigrants for many countries.
throw-the-towel 6 hours ago [-]
Can you name some of these countries please?
declan_roberts 5 hours ago [-]
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).
TFNA 4 hours ago [-]
> 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).
throw-the-towel 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bokchoi 1 days ago [-]
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.”
SilverElfin 1 days ago [-]
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).
bokchoi 1 days ago [-]
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.
crazyfingers 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Aniket-N 3 hours ago [-]
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.
6 hours ago [-]
ViktorRay 5 hours ago [-]
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?
querulous 4 hours ago [-]
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
nceqs3 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ViktorRay 1 hours ago [-]
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.
chopete3 20 hours ago [-]
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.
cheinic6493 20 hours ago [-]
> Whatever they are trying to get to this is a big concern for all H1B employees.
Thankfully H1B is a small visa category.
lowbloodsugar 2 hours ago [-]
Companies don’t want their H1s getting a green card and the freedom that comes with it.
colechristensen 1 hours ago [-]
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.
thinkcontext 13 hours ago [-]
Curious how the tech lobby will react. You would hope Musk and Huang might take their own personal experience into account.
declan_roberts 6 hours ago [-]
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.
rebekkamikkoa 13 hours ago [-]
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.
pixel_popping 9 hours ago [-]
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.
arccy 3 hours ago [-]
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
driverdan 6 hours ago [-]
You think either of them care about other human beings? They have continuously demonstrated they only care about themselves.
Arodex 11 hours ago [-]
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.
anelson 14 hours ago [-]
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.
boredatoms 1 days ago [-]
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?
airstrike 19 hours ago [-]
Quick exit/entry trip unless you're from one of 75 countries in which the US consulate is literally not hearing cases.
garbawarb 13 hours ago [-]
Doesn't it take a few months to process a green card application?
airstrike 8 hours ago [-]
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.
techteach00 6 hours ago [-]
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.
skybrian 6 hours ago [-]
Apparently you haven't travelled much in the US. Outside the major cities it can be pretty desolate.
declan_roberts 6 hours ago [-]
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.
grassfedgeek 6 hours ago [-]
Guess what? America's homebuilding is powered by immigrant workers.
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.
mstank 19 hours ago [-]
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.
5701652400 6 hours ago [-]
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
toephu2 3 hours 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.
stego-tech 11 hours ago [-]
It's just sparkling xenophobia. Forcing a return to one's home country to apply for a Green Card can frequently remove the very qualifiers one has to getting said Green Card.
Just take a look at the categories of Green Cards available on USCIS' website[0], and think about how many of them will be unavailable if you're back in your home country.
* Green Card via Family? 18 months, minimum, for approval.
* Green Card via Employment? Well, self-deporting likely means the loss of said job opportunity, thus your ability to convert to LPR status
* via Special Worker? Here's hoping you're not an Iraq of Afghani national that might be persecuted back in said home country for cooperating with the US Government.
* via Refugee or Asylee Status, or as Victims of Abuse? Are we fucking kidding, here? Forcing refugees/asylum seekers/abuse victims back to their home countries is deliberately cruel, and I'm going to be looking for statistics on changes in approvals pre- and post- this policy change to make sure "special circumstances" are actually recognized as such
It's just a despicably cruel policy change that's so overtly xenophobic, it actually reveals the alignment of those reporting on it when it's not called out as such. It's the antithesis to legal immigration in that it all but destroys the process entirely, promoting more illicit behavior (dangerous and clandestine border crossings, exploitation of migrant workers, human trafficking, etc) in the process.
My buddy married someone he met in grad school abroad, then got a job in the US when he graduated. She had to move in with her parents in Japan while waiting for the green card. It took at least a year.
throwaway5752 11 hours ago [-]
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.
amazingamazing 6 hours ago [-]
What a strange comment. Foreigners are not inherently people of color…
throwaway5752 2 hours ago [-]
More than 80% of people applying for US Green Cards are not white.
5 hours ago [-]
lokar 11 hours ago [-]
We will take all of the white South Africans
elzbardico 3 hours ago [-]
Argentina is orders of magnitude more white than the US and yet, argentinians face the same issues as morocans in the US migration system.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 11 hours ago [-]
Why not both?
joquarky 8 hours ago [-]
Just FYI, some of us down vote for complaining about down votes.
EasyMark 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bradreaves2 1 days ago [-]
Is this intended to ensure that students and H1-Bs will not have a path to residency unless they disrupt their lives here?
outside1234 1 days ago [-]
It is intended to disrupt immigration full stop and especially brown immigration.
y-curious 16 hours ago [-]
I notice India being omitted from the list of affected countries though. That’s the major contributor to “brown immigration”
hobonation 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
hgoel 1 days ago [-]
Isn't this about applying for a green card directly from a non-immigrant visa, e.g. student? 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).
hgoel 1 days ago [-]
Ah you're right, I mixed up immigrant and dual intent.
mapt 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Chinjut 2 hours ago [-]
Silicon Valley bigwigs supported this administration vocally. I am starting to doubt that their interests and morality align with mine.
notnullorvoid 22 minutes ago [-]
Their interests and morality have been evident for a long time.
davidmurphy 3 hours ago [-]
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.
konaraddi 11 hours ago [-]
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.
ulfw 11 hours ago [-]
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
freediddy 1 days ago [-]
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.
daft_pink 1 days ago [-]
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.
adjejmxbdjdn 1 days ago [-]
> but unless you lied you will be fine.
That’s a huge unsubstantiated claim.
jrmg 11 hours ago [-]
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.
amir734jj 5 hours ago [-]
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.
SomaticPirate 4 hours ago [-]
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).
wesleyd 1 days ago [-]
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.
ivewonyoung 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
owl57 2 hours ago [-]
But then why change the renewal process for the people who were already fingerprinted for the original visa?
nutjob2 1 days ago [-]
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').
bikelang 12 hours ago [-]
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.
hellojesus 11 hours ago [-]
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.
xp84 4 hours ago [-]
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.
0xbadcafebee 4 hours ago [-]
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.
blindriver 4 hours ago [-]
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.
anonym29 12 hours ago [-]
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?
stackskipton 6 hours ago [-]
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.
anonym29 5 hours ago [-]
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?
stackskipton 1 hours ago [-]
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.
0xy 1 days ago [-]
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.
BrokenCogs 1 days ago [-]
No, this also affects anyone under employment based immigration petitions unrelated to marrying a US citizen.
0xy 1 days ago [-]
Only if they do not maintain lawful status, which is what the law says anyway. In fact, it specifically mentions this: "USCIS acknowledges exceptions including nonimmigrant categories with dual intent and immigrant categories where only adjustment of status provides a pathway to permanent resident status"
Footnote 20: However, maintaining lawful status in a dual intent nonimmigrant category is not sufficient, on its own, to warrant a favorable exercise of discretion
BrokenCogs 1 days ago [-]
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.
0xy 1 days ago [-]
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?
Do you know why many sources state that it is not dual intent or that it is "quasi dual intent"?
0xy 6 hours ago [-]
"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."
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.
0xy 1 days ago [-]
The article you linked is patently incorrect. It claims "Now, every legal immigrant must leave the country—that is, self-deport—even if they are qualified for a green card and even if leaving would disqualify them.". This is false according to USCIS' memo.
It very specifically lays out common exceptions to this, including for legal immigrants on dual intent visas and those whose only pathway to permanent residency is via adjustment of status.
It also wildly misinterprets the news to claim that the K-1 visa has been effectively ended, even though the memo specifically excludes it.
> However, maintaining lawful status in a dual intent nonimmigrant category is not sufficient, on its own, to warrant
a favorable exercise of discretion.
Which basically means that, applying AOS while being in dual-intent category is not favorable and you will have to prove extraordinary circumstance for a simple i-485 AOS on H1B. Lacking the extraordinary circumstance, your application may be denied.
What this basically means for millions of people on H1B (especially from countries like India is), they have to go for consular processing. And given the lack of appointments in India and delays they are facing - you could be stuck for months to years and no company is going to wait for you while you go through the process. So leaving would definitely disqualify them.
0xy 1 days ago [-]
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.
throwaway_62022 22 hours ago [-]
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.
Holy shit why is this comment buried?! This is exactly the purpose.
beej71 1 days ago [-]
Given our population problems, I can't think of a single rational reason why we'd want to stop this from happening.
arrowleaf 1 days ago [-]
Our population problems, in that we need immigration to avoid population decline? Our total fertility rate is 1.6.
beej71 1 days ago [-]
Exactly that. And really, it's still not going to be enough.
1 days ago [-]
nrmitchi 1 days ago [-]
It is absolutely NOT specific to the very limited situation you are describing, which is already a big red flag when processing applications.
0xy 1 days ago [-]
"USCIS acknowledges exceptions including nonimmigrant categories with dual intent and immigrant categories where only adjustment of status provides a pathway to permanent resident status"
> While aliens who were inspected and admitted or paroled may request adjustment of
status, as a general matter the discretionary approval of such a request is extraordinary given
Congress’s intent that aliens should depart once the purpose for which they sought parole or
nonimmigrant admission from DHS has been accomplished.
rorylawless 22 hours ago [-]
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.
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
This appears to close off the method by which all the "dreamers" I'm familiar with got GC/citizenship, which is by marriage.
1 days ago [-]
ciconia 4 hours ago [-]
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!
_blk 18 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
talon8635 11 hours ago [-]
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
NDlurker 10 hours ago [-]
I'm talking about the whole world. The immigration systems are like controlling which pastures different herds are allowed to graze.
talon8635 5 hours ago [-]
What barns you can live in, perhaps, but not what pastures you can graze in.
busterarm 20 hours ago [-]
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.
airstrike 20 hours ago [-]
It's an insanely stupid move, but from what I'm seeing on Twitter, it's somehow not that unpopular among the less bright.
serf 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.
airstrike 8 hours ago [-]
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.
vixen99 5 hours ago [-]
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.
airstrike 10 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
20 hours ago [-]
cheinic6493 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
digitaltrees 19 hours ago [-]
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.
anigbrowl 19 hours ago [-]
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.
zaptheimpaler 15 hours ago [-]
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.
digitaltrees 19 hours ago [-]
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.
SV_BubbleTime 21 hours ago [-]
I was under the impression that this is roughly how it works (assume equivalency) in most European countries is it not?
jesseendahl 20 hours ago [-]
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.
refurb 20 hours ago [-]
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
kettlecorn 19 hours ago [-]
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.
refurb 12 hours ago [-]
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”
_fizz_buzz_ 20 hours ago [-]
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).
nyargh 20 hours ago [-]
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.
busterarm 20 hours ago [-]
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.
steveBK123 11 hours ago [-]
Again worth asking VC Bros if the light touch on their crypto bags was worth all this ethnonationalism?
_doctor_love 4 hours ago [-]
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.
sleepyguy 24 hours ago [-]
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?
jleyank 23 hours ago [-]
Aren’t h1b’s time limited? 1-2 renewals?
sameers 21 hours ago [-]
Yes - the rule is that the application for Adjustment of Status can't happen while you're already in the US.
enraged_camel 1 days ago [-]
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.
commandlinefan 1 days ago [-]
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.
arrowleaf 1 days ago [-]
Only after losing in court, time and time again. This will take expensive lawyers and a lot of heartache to get any clear answers.
freediddy 1 days ago [-]
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.
airstrike 19 hours ago [-]
The US consulate is currently not hearing cases in 75 countries.
lelandbatey 1 days ago [-]
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.
TMWNN 22 hours ago [-]
>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.
lelandbatey 7 hours ago [-]
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?
TMWNN 6 hours ago [-]
>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.
lelandbatey 1 hours ago [-]
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.
enraged_camel 1 days ago [-]
>> 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.
nutjob2 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
cyanydeez 17 hours ago [-]
next headline: trump closes consulates in nonwhite countries
bloomark 44 minutes ago [-]
This is already happening in some way, maybe you already know this. But for anyone else.
When you renew your H-1B visa, your work permit is renewed electronically, but your travel facility (the visa folio in your stamp) needs consular processing. When expanded screening was announced [1] they canceled 99% of appointments at Indian consulates because the consulate wasn’t ready to screen that many applications. It’s bordering impossible to get a new visa stamp; people cannot travel if they want to stay employed.
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?
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
It is to disincentive those on a temporary visa to apply for permanent residency, without eliminating the visa path entirely. What your mental model is optimizing for (easy, efficient) is different than what they are optimizing for (hard, inefficient).
> The policy change could impact hundreds of thousands of people a year and potentially reduce legal immigration further amid a sweeping government crackdown, according to immigration-law experts. President Donald Trump’s administration has introduced a series of restrictions affecting everyone from asylum seekers to students and highly skilled workers.
> The new rules generally apply to any foreigner who came to the US on a temporary non-immigrant visa, including students, employees on H-1B or L visas and visitors. The US awards about 1 million green cards a year, though roughly half of those are for foreign relatives being sponsored by an American citizen. Those applications are generally already processed outside of the US.
(POSIWID [The Purpose of a System Is What It Does])
SilverElfin 1 days ago [-]
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thinkcontext 13 hours ago [-]
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.
panny 1 days ago [-]
That's how it works for legal immigrants, yes.
8note 1 days ago [-]
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dyauspitr 7 hours ago [-]
Step 324 of how to make Russia great again.
shevy-java 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ck2 12 hours ago [-]
Don't worry, the are letting in white South Africans
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
dccoolgai 11 hours ago [-]
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.
throwawaypath 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
JCattheATM 10 hours ago [-]
Well, no, it's just that people with basic empathy can see the racism and judge it accordingly.
throwawaypath 6 hours ago [-]
Basic empathy would be OK with letting the White refugees entry to the US. But because of the anti-White/Europhobic racism from the left, they lack empathy.
zulux 9 hours ago [-]
Yes. We all hate how South Africa treats differing races. It's evil. Right? Right....?
JCattheATM 9 hours ago [-]
I think the point being made may have passed you by.
pointertowhere 1 days ago [-]
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fleroviumna 4 hours ago [-]
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nine_zeros 12 hours ago [-]
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s03nk3 1 days ago [-]
TBH I think that is fair.
cloche 1 days ago [-]
Have you been through an immigration process?
chrinic6391 18 hours ago [-]
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archagon 1 days ago [-]
Who are you?
chrinic6391 18 hours ago [-]
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cboyardee 3 hours ago [-]
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GuestFAUniverse 13 hours ago [-]
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booleandilemma 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
vachina 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
leosanchez 11 hours ago [-]
So people from other countries also have to suffer ?
Your curt ‘no’ is ignoring backed by your own source, hundreds of thousands of people a year.
vachina 11 hours ago [-]
Okay, not as much. Point still stands.
SilverElfin 19 hours ago [-]
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.
kylehotchkiss 1 days ago [-]
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?
cybercatgurrl 20 hours ago [-]
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
dyauspitr 13 hours ago [-]
How to destroy the greatest country on earth.
jimmydoe 12 hours ago [-]
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.
talon8635 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Jare 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
saltcured 8 hours ago [-]
Step 1: tell ourselves we are the greatest on earth?
sleepybrett 11 hours ago [-]
... by what metric is/was the us 'the greatest country on earth'?
beej71 8 hours ago [-]
We just dropped three points to 81% on the Freedom House freedom index, so it's certainly not that.
efitz 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
grassfedgeek 12 hours ago [-]
It will destroy the United States as a leading economy and superpower.
Think about it: China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population. But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people. Until now.
swingboy 10 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of people in the USA that put identity like race and culture above how well the economy is doing.
grassfedgeek 7 hours ago [-]
The US is best understood as a land of opportunity: a country with a strong economy and a population that is diverse in race, culture, and background. Wouldn't those people be better off moving back to the country of their immigrant ancestors?
throwawaypath 10 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of people in many countries that do that: Palestine, Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Poland, etc.
tialaramex 11 hours ago [-]
The US is already a declining power, I'd say since some time late last century so by the end of the Clinton presidency at least.
ericd 12 hours ago [-]
Yep, skimming the cream of the world is the engine of US dominance. We generally got some of the most highly motivated people, because it takes a lot of work and determination to uproot your life.
There used to be a bipartisan agreement that a US advanced degree should come with a green card stapled to it. Even Trump: “You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country."
ericmay 11 hours ago [-]
> China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population.
And China is notoriously xenophobic when it comes to immigration policy - they have a clear “best race” as far as the CCP is concerned and are doubling down on it. If you want to hold China up as a model I don’t think it’s the winning argument that you think it is relative to a pro-immigration argument. White nationalists would agree with you and say to only allow whites in and be more homogenous like China is.
Separately you’re also arguing in favor of only high-skilled immigration which seems kind of suspect don’t you think? No more refugees from Haiti or Syria, for example. Otherwise the US can’t be drawing on the pick of the world’s best.
> But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people.
You also aren’t accounting for the concept of brain drain which has historically been difficult for origin countries to deal with. It’s a little amusing to see folks positively arguing in favor of what would otherwise be considered a colonialist tactic of resource extraction.
I’m critiquing these two points however and not necessarily suggesting a policy, but I think it would be wise to think a little more deeply about these two points.
I’d also add, we are totally fine and the rhetoric around the US no longer being a leading economy and superpower is false. The strength of the country isn’t solely because of immigration. In fact, that may not even be a major factor. Geography for example plays a much greater role, our system of government and laws, our markets and culture of enterprise are far more important. I’d argue tablet kids and the introduction of technology into classrooms is, for example, a much greater problem for American talent than lower rates of skilled immigration.
Immigration is just another policy choice we make, like our system of laws or others. It doesn’t need this moral component to it. Increase the rate of people immigrating in some years, decrease it in others. No big deal. If you want to suggest it’s worthy of a moral crusade then you are barking up the wrong tree because the United States has and is certainly more friendly toward immigrants both now and historically than probably any other country on the planet. You should aim your outrage at countries such as China which severely restrict this moral good.
throwawaypath 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jfengel 12 hours ago [-]
In itself, no, of course not. But it's part of a much larger pattern which together blow apart that whole "great American melting pot" thing that seemed fundamental to the country's prosperity.
matwood 11 hours ago [-]
It's not a dumb thing to say. The US is built on immigration. Making immigration harder will lead to the next big industries not having a focal point in the US. It's also not as simple as letting college grads get green cards. It's often second or third generation immigrants creating more economic prosperity. Attacking higher education and now immigration is basically destroying the US a decade to a generation from now.
potatototoo99 12 hours ago [-]
Death by a thousand cuts.
sys_64738 13 hours ago [-]
Petrodollar is gone now. Only ships paying in Yuan can exit the Strait.
grahamgooch 1 days ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 1 days ago [-]
Why is it "nearly immediately" at a consulate but "backlogged" in the US? Why can't that be fixed?
throwaway_62022 1 days ago [-]
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.
grahamgooch 1 days ago [-]
I went thru CP myself. It saved me 3 years
airstrike 19 hours ago [-]
"Didn't happen to me so therefore it won't happen to anyone."
grahamgooch 1 days ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 1 days ago [-]
So why not… expand the processing centers?
lostmsu 22 hours ago [-]
Maybe consulates are idling
freediddy 1 days ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 1 days ago [-]
That's a what, not a why.
Why can't USCIS shard it based on country within the US in a similar fashion?
arrowleaf 1 days ago [-]
The whole immigration system could easily be reformed and modernized if efficiency and speeding up the legal route to citizenship were the goal.
grahamgooch 1 days ago [-]
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.
grahamgooch 1 days ago [-]
Because it’s literally not better than the DmV
sunshowers 5 hours ago [-]
The Oakland CA DMV, which is the one I live closest to, is quite nice. I've never had a bad time there.
ceejayoz 1 days ago [-]
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.)
truncate 1 days ago [-]
DMV (at-least in Bay Area) is exponentially better and straighforward than any of processes around immigration / visa renewals.
grahamgooch 1 days ago [-]
Exactly. An extra points for using HN lingo.:)
arrowleaf 1 days ago [-]
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.
grahamgooch 1 days ago [-]
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.
kylehotchkiss 1 days ago [-]
Consulates are not nearly immediately. You have to wait months-years for appointments at some.
jezzamon 4 hours ago [-]
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)
shell0x 1 hours ago [-]
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
skupig 1 hours ago [-]
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.
dboreham 1 hours ago [-]
Nice way to destroy the US economy over the next few decades, if you consider who made the country rich since WW2.
nceqs3 1 hours ago [-]
H1-B wasn't invented until 1990...
righthand 57 minutes ago [-]
H1-B isnt what made the US economy rich, it’s what made Silicon Valley richer.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/us/politics/trump-legal-i...
Laws are made up constructs anyway, they're not real, so whether something is legal or not just depends on if the privileged people in government declare it to be legal or not, but not if the citizens who now have to suffer the consequences of mass migration approved of it, because they were never asked to begin with. So if the government just waves its magic wand and declares that migration wave to now be legal, because the corporations want cheap labor and landlords want more tenants, it doesn't change anything for the better for the citizen that the negative externalities they're now experiencing has been the cause of something done legally to them and not illegal.
So then of course citizens will also want limits to legal migration as well, when they see politicians have no limits for legal migration, that accounts for publically available resources, and the number exceed what people perceive to be a burden for them and the services they depend on.
In short, I see it this way: If you[the government] can't take care of the 100 million citizens already in your country, why should we[the voters] trust you'd suddenly be able to take care and provide for 10 million more? Food for thought.
Edit: Aaaaand... it was already downvote bombed in less than 10 minutes with no counter argument.
There can be negative effects with large inflows locally, but that's a policy failure that can be addressed.
For example, where does that 99,999,999th person sleep on the night they arrive in this country? What is there immediate plan? How and why did they come here? Your hypothetical has them almost emerging from the ether as an inherent problem rather than a person making an active decision to move to somewhere they think they will have a better life. If we stop providing them a better life, they'll stop coming. But the primary path to doing that is making life worse for everyone already here and none of us should want that.
My government pays for their housing using our tax money.
>How and why did they come here?
See above.
>as an inherent problem rather than a person making an active decision to move to somewhere they think they will have a better life.
It's not an inherent problem, it's a manufactured one by policy makers, and it's also not a problem taxpayers should be force to pay for against their will.
Like if the US lights up the middle east again for the nth time in a row, creating another wave of migrants, it's not the responsibility of taxpayers from Austria or Slovenia for example, to now house those people who chose to come there.
Like I feel for them and their situation, but I didn't create that problem and I don't want my tax money going to fix it. The US should take care of them, but I can't force the US to do it, but that also doesn't mean our taxpayers should be forced to be patsies in this, and be exploited for charity via emotional appeals, for issues others created.
Sure, wars and mass migrations have existed for thousands of years and the world didn't end because of it, but you know what hasn't exited for thousands of years? Welfare states.
You can either have a welfare state that provides everyone in the country what they need from taxes, or you can have open border that lets anyone in, but you can't have both of them combined at the same time. Your nations welfare state can't be the world's charity and still be expected to be solvent.
Name the government. What country can I show up to tomorrow and get free housing for an extended period of time?
>It's not an inherent problem, it's a manufactured one by policy makers, and it's also not a problem taxpayers should be force to pay for against their will.
People having free will is not a "manufactured problem". What a weird way to describe it.
>Like if the US lights up the middle east again for the nth time in a row, creating another wave of refugees, it's not the responsibility of taxpayers from Austria or Slovenia for example, to now house those people who chose to come there.
Who said Austria and Slovenia had to provide free housing? These goalposts moved pretty quickly from whether we should allow open immigration to whether we have a responsibility to provide social services for immigrants that we don't even provide our own citizens.
>Like I feel for them and their situation, but I didn't create that problem and I don't want my tax money going to fix it. The US should take care of them, but I can't force the US to do it, but that also doesn't mean our taxpayers should be patsies in this, exploited via emotional appeals for issues others created.
This can apply to literally any government service. I didn't start the fire, so why should my tax dollars go to paying firefighters to stop your house from burning down? That just as effective an argument as you're making and the end result is literal anarchy with no government to actually provide services.
You also seem to be conceptually merging immigrants and refugees which are two distinct groups of people that only sometimes overlap.
Now expand that across socio-economic spectrum (not enough plumbers, teachers, AI experts, researchers etc). That is what legal immigration is meant for.
In which case do 1 million of doctors and only doctors and nothing else show up at your borders because if that were the case everyone would take them in no questions asked.
That's the classic bait and switch. Merkel also told Germans they're getting "doctors and engineers" in 2015 and the only thing that increases is sexual assaults rates, crime and welfare spending.
>That is what legal immigration is meant for.
In theory yes, but just like Germany, in practice the system has always been abused to dupe voters to accept anything other than doctors. Doctors are so in demand that every country has its doors opened to them anyway. We just want the doors shut to people who aren't doctors.
Your submissions to HN evince a pattern that suggests engagement with you would likely fall on deaf ears.
This isn't "curious discourse", whatyou're doing is JAQing off (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions)
immigrants don't need to be 'taken care off' because legal immigrants in the US are net social contributors (in fact particularly large ones because the US government didn't subsidize their upbringing and education).
Five minutes on Google would have told you this, that is why "folks I'm just asking questions" gets downvoted, everyone can see through these pseudo gullible provocations
You want a hermitical state, it has to go both ways. You lock yourself in, but also stop fucking around with military and non-military interventions on every contanent on earth.
I live in Europe, small landlocked country. My government isn't destabilizing anyone but still has some of the highest migration rates per capita in OECD.
"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. "
I read this with the assumption that "nonimmigrant visa" applies to every category of visa listed here under "Nonimmigrant Visa Categories":
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-inf...
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 cannot be this calm about the administration that is all about the chaos and harm. Thank you for writing what I can't.
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...
Wonder if we’ll get a third world war that we stay out of until halfway through and then pile on at the end.
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.
https://www.state.gov/visas/
As a practical matter, all these immigrant visas pretty much entail a greencard soon thereafter. In other words, to get them is about as easy as getting a greencard in the first place, give or take, more or less.
The discussion here is really about legal workers, students and others on temporary visas who convert to permanent status.
However, ignoring family-sponsored routes, it is extremely difficult to get an immigrant visa in the first place, usually requiring years + $10k+ of fees to work your way up to it. You also need a sponsor to pay the fees (legally, you can't pay it yourself). Therefore, the vast majority of people start on a non-immigrant (temporary, restricted employment) visa and eventually ask their employer to sponsor a green card.
When people say "if you wanted to immigrate, you should just get an immigrant visa", they usually assume any other route is a hack or loophole. But it's actually the most common way to immigrate by far. You can, of course, interview for a job from abroad and ask the employer to directly sponsor an immigrant visa, but they'd have to wait years (best case) until you could actually step foot in their office. Plus they'd be forking over thousands in legal fees for an employee they haven't even seen in person. Nobody would do this, so the commonly accepted way is to bring an employee over as a temporary worker first and then apply for a green card while they're in the country.
By the way, the same checks apply for immigrant visa applications both inside and outside the US. You might think that employers are scamming the government by turning purported temporary immigrants into permanent ones, but the exact same qualifications checks, eligibility requirements, waitlists and quotas apply if you do the process inside vs. outside the US. It's entirely possible, and common, for green card applications to get denied (and the applicant's location doesn't factor in to this).
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.
They might as well mail it to your home. That’s what happens today.
Unfortunately, they do stir the populace in a cadence long enough that prior examples are are only fragments of memory.
More unfortunately, however, is that the time it takes to heal from such governments is similar to said cadence.
The whole system of US of needing to leave the country to even renew visas is absolutely bizarre and does not have analogues in most other countries (at least EU/UK)
It’s the former: intentionally malevolent. Trump cabinet members, including Stephen Miller have said this is exactly why.
Everything anti-immigration under both Trump terms comes directly from the fascist Stephen Miller. From blocking Muslim countries to trying to end birth right citizenship.
Of course he has full support from Trump who usually lies about knowing fascists he's had lunch with or tells to "stand back and stand by."
And endlessly lies to demonize immigrants. "They're not sending their best." "They're eating the cats and dogs."
SPLC has an article on Miller if you want to waste your time.
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/stephen-...
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Hawaii
A number of people, especially in tech sector, legally stay in US while their GC is being processed. They have kids born in the USA. If such people were to leave USA to seek green card:
- the kids must first get visas to their parent's countries
- once reaching the other country, consular offices now have multi year wait lines for getting an appointment with a office to even hear your case.
- parents may stay in that country but what if kids run out of their visa? A number of countries offer citizenship via parents e.g. Indian parents can obtain Indian citizenship for their kids but it also means letting go of the kids' US citizenship. And what if the parent's country does not have such mechanism?
It's completely illogical that a person must first stay in a country for 5 years to become eligible for a green card and then leave for x years to get a green card to come back !! this is just a tactic to get non-immigrant visa holders out of the country.
This is 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
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.
This is wrong. There is no minimum time in the country for a green card. You are thinking of citizenship. That is different.
HN is now filled with agenda pushers peddling obvious fake information about the US.
In this situation, wouldn't the kids already have citizenship of their parents countries?
Also the USA used to have weird rules about young mothers not transferring citizenship automatically (which the whole Obama birther myth relied on).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis#Jus_sanguinis_st...
On one hand, I'm so relieved that I have been able to dodge everything that the administration has been throwing at immigrant (legal and illegal alike), trying to see what sticks, like mass deportations, border wall expansion, visa restrictions, asylum crackdown, H-1B cuts, and chain Migration Ban.
On the other hand, we cannot apply for citizenship for 3 more years, even though me and my wife have been in the US for combined 25+ years, and paid over $100,000 in taxes last year alone, and it's jarring to imagine what the administration will come up with next to make the process less straightforward than it seems.
Most disturbing is the fact that a lot of people I know who climbed the same ladder will go out and cheer what the administration is doing.
Genuinely curious, what does taxes have to do with it? Everyone pays taxes, legal or illegal in some form.
I don’t think paying your dues should make you more likely to get through the pipeline. After all, you paid those taxes because you made good money, which is what people come here for.
All things that we should be supporting if we are indeed wishing our nation to prosper.
A plurality of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, so we’re essentially turning away someone who is building up our country.
It's funny how we forget about meritocracy as soon as the median American is threatened.
They're not being turned away. There's a requirement to be in the country for 5 years with a green card before citizenship. It seems to me that they are just upset that they have to follow the rules which aren't hurting them at all.
They are actually in fact being told to return to their country before completing a process that previously - legally! - could be done in the US. That = being turned away
> There's a requirement to be in the country for 5 years with a green card before citizenship.
That is absolutely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Until next week, or whenever the current system is again upended haphazardly.
> It seems to me that they are just upset that they have to follow the rules which aren't hurting them at all.
It seems to me that they were all following the rules. The rules are now being capriciously changed with sly marketing words to confuse everyone.
They are effectively being ruled by a system that they have no say in. That's incompatible with America's democratic values. Of course it's reasonable that we don't allow non-citizens the vote; the problem as I see it is that if someone has worked here for 25 years for all intents and purposes they are a citizen, the government just doesn't formally recognize the reality of their situation.
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.
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.
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.
I'm being facetious of course. I hate what maga is doing to our wonderful melting pot.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-administr...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess these immigrants must be stupid.
I see no reason why they should change their opinions since then, so I assume these people are still commenting among us.
It helps that a decent portion of the population hates and/or is fearful anyone different from themselves. That is what's allowed for these even more draconian and brutal measures.
My personal preference would be to allow nearly unlimited legal immigration but strip welfare programs for all. In this way we allow anyone and everyone to become an economic participant, voting participant after the naturalization process, and mitigate those immigrating purely for handouts.
But I haven't thought through this policy well. Maybe there is something this seemingly solution is missing.
Stripping away all wefare because of immigration is a bad bad bad idea.
What about long term immigrants who end up disabled through no fault of their own? Or who get cancer? Or who end up having a child (who is an American citizen) and that child is special needs and the immigrant can't manage a full time job and care for their child? If they get pregnant and end up on bed rest or with a traumatic birth that takes them out of the workforce for a period of time?
There are ways to end up needing to rely on welfare that aren't due to laziness or a desire for handouts.
If the answer is 'kick them out', I'd be worried about what we're teaching our American kids watching. There are two lessons they could pick up, and neither is good for their moral development or sense of self. The first is that anyone who lacks the ability to work has no value, and that will engender greater alienation and isolation as they place all of their self-worth on their ability to earn money. They'll look upon the elderly, children, and caretakers with disdain (Interestingly, this probably won't help the birth rates either...). The second is that they are protected but those people should be disposed of when they're not useful. This will make them arrogant and introduce the idea of dehumanizing other groups, which will further the cracks of division in our society.
It take tremendous effort to immigrate, legally or illegally. Anyone telling you that they are lazy is obviously lying.
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.
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.
That doesn't make any sense. If you want "cheap labor [that] can't complain about mistreatment," you want a weak border, not a strong one, because a weak border creates a larger pool of illegal immigrants to draw from.
A strong border, at a minimum, reduces the supply of illegal immigrants, and may even push the employer into hiring people with legal immigration status who can complain and sue over mistreatment.
> It helps that a decent portion of the population hates and/or is fearful anyone different from themselves. That is what's allowed for these even more draconian and brutal measures.
I'd put it another way: a large part of the population has been put under a lot of stress and pressure, while simultaneously being intensely conditioned to not blame the people actually responsible. That stress has to go somewhere. Don't blame the little guys, even if you find them contemptible because they're not from your culture. Blaming the little guy (for "hat[ing]...anyone different from themselves") is another aspect of the conditioning that protects those actually responsible.
A larger pool with more rights and less fear of being deported. That means it's easier for them to pick and choose the jobs they do or even to start their own businesses.
They could, for example, form a union without the fear of deportation.
Look, if this were all about stopping illegal immigration, there are very fast paths to doing that. A prime one would be punishing not the immigrant, but the employer of the immigrant. Fine every farm in the US that employs an illegal immigrant and you'd quickly see the number of those jobs being worked drop.
But that's not what ICE is about which is why they and legislators haven't done that really basic enforcement.
Heck, at the start of this admin, Trump had to pull back ICE from raiding farms because the business interests of the farmers collided with the xenophobia of Steven Miller.
“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...
Since USCIS is blocking Adjustment of Status, and the Department of State is blocking green card emission for citizens of 75 countries, this means that if you are from the following countries you are effectively banned from getting a Green Card:
Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, The Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/i...
I never considered illegal immigration, nor will I ever - I value predictable outcomes.
But looking at these new rules, I can't help but think that it really punishes people who want to play by the rules and sets the price for ones that don't to approximately $15k.
Actually, it kind of make sense why only the most desperate try to get into the US , people who have something to lose are naturally repelled by the bureaucracy.
The system sorely lacks reform to align the legal fiction with reality, which is precisely why this news release may sound entirely sensible for the uninitiated.
Instead we're doing exactly the opposite, cutting down on legal immigration as well. Making it hard for me to believe that it was ever about illegal immigration at all.
I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.
This is just an ego problem I suspect. It bruises the ego of MAGA voters to realize that immigrants actually are smarter, they actually do get paid more (and not because they're "taking the jobs" but because they are actually more desirable.)
> I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.
Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically? Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America?
Not all American citizens have the same level of intelligence, nor do all people attempting to or actually succeeding in immigrating to the US. To the extent that "everything nice" including technological development is grounded in the average level of intelligence of the people currently inhabiting a country (which I think is a substantial part of but not the entirety of the explanation), this doesn't necessarily imply that immigration which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric.
And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration (including some like "immigrating illegally, having a natural-born-citizen child on US soil, and having that child sponsor your legal immigration decades later) that have nothing at all to do with how intelligent a given immigrant is.
And of course, immigration itself changes how "mediocre academically" Americans are, by changing who Americans are - an immigrant might eventually become a citizen; or if they don't their children born on US soil will be.
Edit: And before you mention O-1 and friends for highly accomplished individuals (maybe that's not affected for now? Honestly have no idea), this kind of policy has wide ranging second order effects even if it doesn't affect top talent directly. Like I said I was U.S. educated myself, once I would encourage bright minds from elsewhere to pursue a higher education in the U.S., now I heavily advise them from even setting foot in the U.S.
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.
But... the US also has not the best education, so.
Why should immigration be kafkaesque? It is in the US interest to have a pipeline of smart, hard-working, innovative people come to this country. The US is/was in many ways a great country for them to come, but we are not the only international destination for such talent. Why would we want to put up such artificial barriers to entry, if we agree on the premises I laid out?
The purpose of this is to discourage legal immigration.
TBH most immigrants I've met better embody the American spirit than most Americans.
Also, beyond the US getting the benefit of motivated workers coming here and the intelligent ones, we’re brain draining other countries.
It’s a legitimate tool to weaken other countries worldwide and we’re just throwing it away because people believe the lies coming from people like JD Vance[1] about immigrants eating their cats and dogs
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/15/us/politics/jd-vance-spri...
https://yaledailynews.com/articles/international-grad-school...
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
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.
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.
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.
Even if it were true, there are wider effects of immigration that you must consider. The purpose of life isn't to increase GDP. It reflects poorly on you that you must cast your opponents as being stupid and spiteful. Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?
Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant. Or are you referring to the Spanish that settled the west? The French in the far south? The Italians and Jews that populated New York? The British and Africans?
I’m painting in broad strokes, but to say “the American People” as if it’s somehow distinct from immigrants is just ladder pulling.
Immigrant (noun) A person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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)."
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11831114/
No, it couldn't. Trump tells them to vote a certain way, they do it. Look at Massie's primary as an example.
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.
Given that they’re underwater for approval rating on immigration it seems both you and they have misread the room. Most people’s objections have to do with immigrants who are violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat. This is what their campaign was highlighting as a problem. They have not been cracking down specifically on those immigrants. For this, they have no mandate.
There never were "violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat." That was a baseless, racist caricature and it's unfortunate that anyone took it seriously.
And we all still remember "the wall," and Trump complaining about immigration from "shithole countries" like Haiti (versus Norway and Sweden, gee I wonder what the qualifying factor is there) and how Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists across the border. The immigration policy of this administration has always been that immigrants (specifically any non-white immigrants) are an existential danger to American culture and safety. You don't try to wall off your entire southern border because you think the problem is a minority of bad actors. The DHS doesn't deploy white nationalist anti-immigrant propaganda[0,1] because it's just concerned about a criminal element.
And they didn't misread the room. Trumpism is first and foremost a white nationalist nativist movement. People wanted the wall. They wanted immigration stopped. "The immigrants were taking our jobs." "Muslims can't assimilate into civilized society." "Europe is basically a war zone because of all of the Muslims and low-IQ sub-Saharan Africans." These are all things Trump supporters have been saying for years and that the American right has been saying since at least 9/11. "Borders, Language Culture" as Michael Savage used to say. It's all been out in the open.
White Christian conservatives still support Trump's immigration policies by a wide margin. He speaks to the people he intends to speak to. I don't know why so many Black people and Latinos signed up for the "Leopards eating your face" party thinking the leopards wouldn't eat their face, but that's on them. But pretending Trump doesn't have a mandate to purge the country of immigrants is just naive - that is the only mandate he actually has.
[0]https://newrepublic.com/article/199094/dhs-neo-nazi-memes-no...
[1]https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/dhs-white-nati...
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This is a bit myopic, partly because it diminishes Chinese capabilities - they're definitely ahead in a few areas, notably battery tech, advanced manufacturing, and in some product categories like robotics, (arguably EVs) and they have demonstrated leadership in industrial capacity for many others, like Solar Panels, other things. They're less than 1 year behind on AI (admittedly, they 'distill' and do a lot of copying but there's legit Engineering going on).
When you put that altogether, and the pace of progress, it's formidable.
China does it with 'domestic talent' whereas US R&D and 'Tech Exceptionalism' would literally not exist without outsiders, who make up up to 1/2 of the primary innovations, companies etc.. Tesla, Nvidia, OpenAI, Google - so many critical people from Europe, Asia etc. None of the 'Godfathers of AI' are American (which I find odd actually). Europe in particular makes a ton of primary contributions which are leveraged by others.
It's not a reason to say 'anyone from tech can be a citizen' but immigration has to be recognized as a critical ingredient, maybe the most critical.
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.
Care to share what other policies of yours you happen to offshore to 19th century ethnic activists?
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.
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.
This new policy is no different and is a trap to kick out and never accept back more non-white immigrants.
You can't be serious.
Those that jumped through all the hoops above bar, paid their dues in a messed up system where they bit their upper lip and got through it, and have been extremely frustrated at others trying to game the system.
When I heard the crowd roar every time Trump said “we’re going to kick them out” I knew exactly what the crowd was cheering. Trump never used those moments to say “but America is a nation of immigrants and we celebrate their contributions”. He wanted to rile up a crowd while maintaining a fig-leaf of “oh it’s only illegals who are evil”
You don’t have to have a PhD to understand the appeal and consequences of nativist populism — just the slightest understanding of history.
A lot of those people had no issue with ICE bullying and detaining legal immigrants.
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.
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.
> If I walk into your house uninvited, that’s trespassing.
Sure.
What happens if your kid invites round a friend of theirs you don't like?
What happens if you are a kid and your sibling does?
What happens if you rent out a room to a lodger, and the lodger invites someone over?
What happens if you're a tenant in a rental, and the landlord sends in an emergency plumber?
Remember, every single migrant working illegally in your country is someone that another person in your country wanted to employ; if you're in the US, most of those employers will be selling you your food and your houses, which most of you seem to like, while some were South Koreans making data centres which you personally may hate but your pension funds love.
What the lower classes are concerned about is the value of their labor relative to others’, while the upper classes are concerned with getting a good deal by avoiding increases to the labor-cost floor. Bribes/subsidies and offered scams, have worked so far.
If the federal government, as an institution, were genuinely concerned about illegal immigration, it would have a different set of tactics. Start by punishing the sources of capital (fewer people), then property owners (more people), and only afterward the laborers themselves (many people).
What I see is a combination of class warfare and political theater, not a sincere effort to enforce the law. The law is incidental, made obvious by the exceptions the administration has had to carve out for certain industries.
Out groups are always the initial targets for these movements, but as time goes on any form of dissent will cause narcissistic wounding and will be treated accordingly.
What do you think they mean by "100 million"?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
I want to keep the US a destination for hard work and smarts and striking out on your own. Don’t shelter your lazy kid, show them the beauty of complexity and mastery. Have them master some difficult skills, whether that’s a second language or botany or math or public speaking or building things. We are all responsible to each other for excellence. Respond to the opportunities for excellence, of what we can build together, dont’t yield to sloth and resentment being satisfied with turning your back on your own potential. The future is awesome and we welcome all who want to contribute! We welcome competition - better to be second best to the best than turning your back and cutting yourself off from the course of history.
If the logic is that people who are born somewhere else shouldn't have any agency over immigration laws, well, why does someone who lives in some town in my country with a negligible immigrant population get a say in who I and my colleagues can invite to work with us, and who I and my neighbors can invite to live with us?
Being "anti illegal immigrant" doesn't have to imply you let in whoever wants as long as they follow some process. You are taking away the agency of the people to select its immigrants.
Tying this back to OP's comment, it's hard to see these policy changes as any sort of legitimate protectionism and it's just as hard to divorce them from the justifications given by people who start with "I'm not anti-immigrant".
If legal immigration was at 40% of its current level and I wanted legal immigration to double from there, would that still be anti-immigrant?
Or does having any limit whatsoever mean that you're opposed to a thing?
I don't know how else to read that.
so there a huge need to have a difficult policy discussion about what to do without cratering the economy.
but when you start removing civil liberties and running around in gangs grabbing random brown people off the streets and sending them to indefinate detention in the middle of nowhere, dumping people in Somalia, claiming you have the right kill anyone you want, you shouldn't be surprised when people start waving around the f word.
You've been propagandized to believe that is happening. Remember when we were grabbing random brown people, including Black Olympian school superintendents right off the streets and sending them to concentration camps?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/27/us/ian-roberts-des-moines-sup...
Months later the truth comes out: illegal alien with guns in his possession, which is a federal crime. Deportation order issued under Biden's administration.
The post-truth era has made the f word effectively meaningless.
No real lawyer will ever tell you that an "administrative warrant" is a real thing that lets jackbooted thugs enter your home and detain you. It's absurd and disgusting, and you should feel dirty for defending it.
https://apnews.com/article/ice-arrests-warrants-minneapolis-...
https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/admin...
1) Someone can be against illegal immigration and for legal immigration.
2) That same person's idea about who should immigrate to the country may exclude most or all of the people who are currently immigrating illegally.
It's not like you can only be against illegal immigration because they forgot to fill out some form. Legal immigration has a component of deciding who gets in.
I suppose by “all factors” I mean all factors aside from exploitation and xenophobia, but I hope we could at least move the Overton window back that far.
My understanding is that many of us, perhaps including the author of the comment to which you are responding, would like to see at lease some small, inching movement towards such a system.
For example, you want small inching movement. From what starting point? Inching movement from the near-zero flows of the mid-20th century? Inching movement from the mass flows of the 21st century? Both ideas would have major consequences, and if you are going to advocate for mass social change, you should think it out and advocate with care and thoughtfulness.
Agreed, care and thoughtfulness should be the rule, not the exception. Presently we are getting neither. I’m a software developer, I don’t work in policy; but I believe our immigration position should be aligned with policy goals and I’m not sure we have any of those, either.
In any case, re-categorizing so many legal immigrants in order to imprison them strikes me as pointless and fundamentally wrong.
If I advocated abolition in the 19th century, it would be missing the point to turn around and say "oh yeah? And how many slaves would you like to free per year, and what effects do you expect that to have? Include examples of past slave rebellions"
The obvious assumption is that they mean from where we are right now. We're not going to suddenly be at the mid-20th century again. This comes off as argumentative more than curious (as do your other comments in this thread, for what it's worth).
No, it isn't. It is a change; whether it's acceleration or velocity is an implementation detail. Whether it should be changed suddenly or gradually is the spec.
You are right that the Native Americans were completely misplaced by immigrants, but immigration made the US what it is today and I see no reason it won't continue to make the US a uniquely strong country.
I think it’s self evident that the U.S. benefited greatly from its mass immigration inflows in the 19th and 20th centuries.
"Oh, you support immigration? Write an entire nation's immigration policy. Can't/won't do it? You must be a paid shill."
People are allowed to have opinions without regurgitating policy documents on demand.
I love immigration. We should have lots of immigration! But it should occur within consistently, fairly enforced laws passed by our legislative system. I get that our immigration system is arguably broken and that it's very difficult to pass meaningful legislation, but that doesn't mean we should just allow whoever is president to dictate immigration policy.
Isn’t this straw man? Who said anything about eliminating laws or being inconsistent about legal immigration? The top comment was only pointing out that slowing the flow of legal immigration does not fix illegal immigration and probably makes it worse. Some people don’t love immigration or feel we should have lots, despite the benefits, and sometimes those people say contradictory things.
If there was a legal pickpocketing, and someone claimed to only be opposed to illegal pickpocketing, then it would be reasonable to point out that unless they're lying about their intent a solution to preventing illegal pickpocketing would be to make it all legal.
The analogy falls apart because nobody argues that they are "only" opposed to illegal pickpicketing.
If people are opposed to any form of immigration, then they should just admit that, rather than pretend they're only opposed to illegal immigration.
b. Not opposed to someone taking my money in exchange for goods or services I want.
a. Opposed to someone moving into my country against my will and the law just because they want to, “for a better life”.
b. Not opposed to someone moving into my country because I married them and want them here.
There’s a whole spectrum between a and b, but I think most people are against a.
Legal pickpocketing is taxes you’re opposed to, or wages being garnished.
In theory people who say they’re only against illegal immigration are saying they completely agree with all policies regarding legal immigration, now and maybe into the future. Likely not what these people actually believe because while possible it would be a silly position. They’re probably just saying it to try to find some common ground with very pro immigration people. Likely a fools errand.
To your last paragraph, no, they are not. There is no automatic implication that people will not change their minds depending on the situation. The argument is not that they can never change their minds, but that it is deceitful to pretend to only oppose illegal immigration in current circumstances and then go on to demonstrate they are also opposed to the currently legal immigration.
But an inconvenient process change has you clutching your pearls and crying "bad faith"? Yikes.
https://archive.is/QKk0l#selection-923.73-930.0
https://dgcjnpzq7j07id.archive.is/QKk0l/41e225be79dbd90e86c6...
~ Jean-Paul Sartre, 1944
"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"
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?
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)
USCIS doesn't have the authority to just unlawfully deny a case. It can be challenged in court. They can make your life really difficult. For example, they can put you in removal proceedings if you're an overstayer with a petition that they unlawfully deny and then you're out of status. So now you have to go to immigration court, where the odds are stacked against you, and either get your case approved there or get removal proceedings cancelled. And the administration is holding certain people in removal without bond even if they've been here for decades. And some people, like those on ESTA, have waived their right to see an immigration judge at all.
They prefer what's called "consular processing" (applying outside of the country vs "adjustment of status" in country) is that it takes way longer and the administration has way more power to arbitrarily deny your case, as is the case with certain current banned countries. The Supreme Court ruled the president's power to limit visas to certain countries can't be challenged. The case was from the first Trump term. It's called Trump v. Hawaii [1].
But one thing they are also doing, which is evil, is taking advantage of people come to a USCIS interview without an immigration attorney. They separate the couple and threaten the US citizen that they're committing fraud and to withdraw the case or they get the immigrant to admit things that are false or they just outright deny the case on faulty grounds because people aren't knowledgeable enough to fight back without a professional. It is evil.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Hawaii
Source?
"Forcing green card applicants to leave will render many green card applicants’ ineligible because, when they leave the United States, they will trigger the 3- or 10-year bars on receiving an immigrant visa based on accrual of unlawful presence."
https://www.uscis.gov/laws-and-policy/other-resources/unlawf...
Note particularly the following:
> Asylees and asylum applicants: Generally, time while a bona fide asylum application is pending is not counted as unlawful presence.
So unless there's currently a huge backlog of people staying here illegally who are somehow eligible for green cards in spite of this fact, the government changing it's policies to require new applicants do so from overseas is not itself causing these applicants to violate immigration law.
https://refugeerights.org/news-resources/new-data-shows-visa...
With the raw data from 2023-2024 here: https://refugeerights.app.box.com/s/bizdcdev37oknqdwg8p93afi...
USCIS doesn't publish data on consular processing times, but even AoS processing were backlogged 3+ years. https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-processes-and-pr...
The majority of consular offices are, in fact, backlogged.
What you are saying used to happen but not anymore.
What is minimum qualifications? Enough to get an interview?
With so many tech layoffs now it would be nearly impossible for most roles to claim there’s nobody else available, and under the current administration the historical games are no longer just flying below the radar. That hasn’t stopped some companies from still trying though.
Thats obviously extreme but given the abuse in the status quo it’s hard to defend what was going on and whine about this now. Some folks are obviously angry, but that anger is better directed at those that were abusing the system not those trying to fix it.
The H1B system was stupid. That doesn't justify any of what the Trump admin has been doing.
Ironic that liberals turn into libertarian boot likers for mega corps when it comes to immigration.
If you have filed I485 and they fail to process it before your current visa expires (D/S ends like F1 OPT). Then what? You just have to leave, abandon AOS and re-apply for CR1?
It’s insane that the simplest immigrant pathway; spousal green card could take 12+ months and may now require temporarily moving and being separated. Guess I actually will be paying $4K for a lawyer (plus the 3-4K just to file the USCIS forms).
I wish they would just have a simple fast lane for the 100% legal, non-complicated case.
Immigration policy in the current administration (which seems to be driven by Stephen Miller) is not based around legalaities, it's based around cutting immigration as much as possible because that's what satisfies Trump's voter base. These people do not care if you 'did it the right way'. They have an atavistic hatred of foreigners.
White immigrants are fine with this administration.
"All but 3 of 6,069 refugees taken in by Trump are White South Africans"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/05/22/trump-south-a...
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.
Even the current right wing party CDU doesn't seem to want to make migration harder, but when the extremist party AfD gets voted into office, an already highly damaged balance will break.
Sad how people become so detected from reality that they make their society irrelevant and destroying a lot of wealth in the process.
To me it feels like the US pretends they don’t need immigrants when:
1. The overwhelming majority of current US residents were immigrants themselves at some point in the last 150 years (only natives were there, everyone else immigrated from somewhere)
2. The US wouldn’t function without illegal immigrants
3. Every country is short of workers in one domain or another. Encouraging immigration in these domains (see how Canada does it for instance) would be the smart move. But instead… yeah let’s make it even harder across the board
2. The US not functioning without illegal immigrants is a bad thing. More often than not, employers like illegal immigrants because they can abuse them in some way or another. If you actually interact with illegal immigrants or the people that employ them, this is clear. “We need modern indentured servitude” is not the country I want to live in. I would rather these industries just be subsidized by the government to whatever extent it takes for US citizens to take the jobs with all of the protections we expect workers to have.
3. Not every country is short of workers. Employers may be short of workers that they can lord over, but refer back to point 2. Pointing to Canada’s policy as an example of a “smart move” is a strange play.
The current administration is certainly not working on the above premises, but I’m floored when I hear supposedly progressive people going on about who is going to work the psychologically scarring meatpacking plants if we don’t take on an undefined number of people who are only here to get shit on for a good paycheck. I have compassion for illegal immigrants, which is exactly why I don’t want them in the US.
My point was that with the sorely lacking rules already in place, illegal immigration is a problem and at the same time there is still a supply problem.
So acting even more high and mighty like it’s the greatest place on earth to be and require people who want in to grovel even more certainly isn’t good policy.
I’m also confused why you think Canada isn’t doing it better? You can immigrate but your profile needs to match what the country needs: its win win, because once you’re there you have a fair chance at a good life (integration, job, etc) vs taking anyone in and then having issues with people who can’t find jobs, be happy in the country, and integrate into society.
But the process around the US visa and immigration program is a lot more hostile than it needs to be. I had the displeasure to deal with this grinder and it’s really showing that the attitude is “you’re less than nothing, it’s up to you to prove you’re worthy of us even reading the forms you filled in and paid for, fuck you very much”
EU countries are working on imigration rules that would allow for bringing imigrant labour without ever extending citizen privileges to them. A sort of permanent uderclass. This is what voters want at this time.
I suppose little matters from the before days, but I've only been a permanent resident for 2 years so maybe this timeline helps: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Green_Card_Application#Timel...
The explicit purpose of this is to reduce legal immigration, and reduce the number of people becoming citizens.
There is no world in which the same racist, fascist administration doing this does anything remotely like what you describe.
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.
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...
Today I learned. Before this thread, I was under the same impression as bluesea.
A green card is literally not a visa
In other contexts, it literally is.
A green card like a visa can be revoked. Citizenship gets a bit more interesting with the current administration.
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.
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.
How?
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.
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)
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.
But you are right that it is ending, just wrong about what: it’s the high economic activity that attracted people which is disappearing thanks to the same people that hate migrants.
I'm not sure there's a "just" here: compared to peer countries, the US is either middle-of-the-pack[1] or significantly more accepting of immigrants[2] depending on which number you pick.
(This isn't to somehow imply that the US isn't hostile to its immigrants, because it is. But the question is whether it's more hostile.)
[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-the-share-of-foreig...
[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/stocks-of-foreign-bo...
By the way, your [2] is useless to prove your point: you can't compare absolute numbers (for instance Iceland vs the US).
(Again, I must emphasize that this does not make the US good. Only that the bar is perhaps lower than people who are assimilated into any particular country may realize.)
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.
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.
Exclusively immigrants? Is that what you’re arguing?
Only green card holders in the US do those jobs?
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 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.
Those having their labour under-cut aren’t going to directly benefit.
Without immigration an imminent depopulation crisis is on its way to America.
We are actually blessed to be in demand as an immigration destination as well as a culture and infrastructure uniquely set up for it.
Squandering that advantage to satisfy xenophobic ideology is yet another demonstration of the Republican Party’s lack of fiscal responsibility. See also: completely random war in Iran, ICE budget increases spent on kicking out taxpayers/customers, tax cuts for billionaires, the current record high budget deficit, $1.8 billion fund for Trump brownshirts, etc.
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?
Recommended reading:
After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People
Or really any other book on the subject, I'm not married to that one, it's not a perfect book it's just one that's easy to find because of the distinctive cover.
I don't care to get into talking about Israel. It's a country with the population of Ohio, so if it's an anomaly, it's an anomaly. The only discussion I can get into that country is going to get distasteful.
You may not realize this, but it appears to be the goal in this case.
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.
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.
They are needed and often do more than those that are citizens.
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.
> Bobby Jindal
> Nikki Haley
All natural-born American citizens born in the US.
Why did you quietly remove these names from your sarcastic comment when confronted about it?
We could easily extend this to second generation immigrants if we want to make xenophobes look even dumber.
Imagine the American tech industry without Steve Jobs, for example.
Didn't check the others...
Also, some people on your list are absolute red flags I would rather not have in my country, which is proving my point that good border controls and strict visas are essential.
Without committing to some wildly contradictory logic, the xenophobic political party in charge of this country cannot be simultaneously in favor of mass deportations, denaturalization, and generally closing the borders while being against denaturalizing and deporting Melania Trump and Elon Musk for obvious visa violations. There is also contradiction in the way the right wing has gotten cozy with big tech companies run by immigrants who entered the country on the H1B visa they demonize so fervently.
Just imagine the outcry if Obama was from South Africa and was standing behind the president's desk talking about how he's running a new illegal government agency.
Pick any other developed country and the process is generally fairly simple. With some you can just apply for a temporary work visa (possibly without a job) or just apply to immigrate. If you stay in many places long enough on a temporary visa you pretty much get residency and ultimately citizenship.
Beyond what's possible, the time frames for doing anything with US immigration is ridiculously long. Like if you, as a US citizen marry someone overseas it can take upwards of 4 years to get a green card for your spouse and they won't be able to visit the US at all in that time. Why? Because filing a marriage petition means you've shown "immigrant intent" so you'll never get a visit visa (B1/B2) again. Also, the president may well just ban your country from getting any visa. 75 countries are currently on that list.
It's also incredibly easy to make a mistake at some point in the process and that may end up getting an approvable case denied or, worse, you end up with an improvidently granted benefit that cannot be repaired, even if it was an honest mistake.
https://www.reuters.com/world/sweden-tighten-citizenship-rul...
The rules now are tougher than US rules for citizenship. Sweden (like e.g., Norway) has a 8 year wait vs US's 5 year wait.
Sweden has minimum income requirements, none in the US.
[1] https://www.migrationsverket.se/en/you-want-to-apply/live-wi...
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/immigration/comments/1tks87l/trump_...> 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
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.
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!"
It's pretty normal not to be able to look for work on a tourist visa in most countries - are you suggesting this is unusual? As far as spouses, they used to have an incredibly asinine system where they told you your spouse _could_ work, without sponsorship, if they got a special form, but getting this form was de facto impossible. It was a very Irish approach, in retrospect. The campaign to fix this was, eventually, successful. (https://reformstamp3.wixsite.com/home)
Which is nonsense, it applies to all non immigrant visas such as work visas. But it’s a line you’ll see various people try to claim as if this isn’t devastating to every spouse of a us citizen who now can’t get a greencard without leaving their us based job and family.
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.
Is it though? This administration doesn't exactly have a track record of decisions based on carefully thought out policy implications.
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.
White people are, and have been, target and killed in those place.
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.
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.
There is nothing wrong with that. I'm selfish, you're selfish, the government is selfish, everyone in the host country is selfish. It's human nature. We all want good lives. That's the reason a transactional economy exists. It's good for the country's GDP and overall economy to welcome outside talent, and that outside talent enjoys being rewarded for their contributions, and over time, their new place of residence becomes a part of their cultural identity. That's how things usually work.
Not everyone is a saint.
> 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.
Reality check: 99% of people would take a better life over a worse life. And there's nothing wrong with that. The entire world is built with this as a base assumption.
Also, reality check: Life in the US kinda sucks unless you have a well-paying skilled job or a lot of money. In either case you'll be contributing to the economy.
And it seems you agree: people don’t move to a new place to contribute their skills.
They move because of the potential upsides for themselves.
People come to improve their lives.
Their employers hire them to improve their lives.
Both end up better off!
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.
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.
Best moment of the process.
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.
Later, I was recognized for that potential benefit. Last December, I became a citizen.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Notably, and very relevant, the UK recently made it substantially harder for UK citizens to bring over spouses to the point that even teachers don't meet the income thresholds necessary to qualify.
Australia is more expensive AND takes longer than the United States for the equivalent spousal visa.
Notably, the exact same UK visa you used has been made substantially harder to get since you applied.
I am very familiar with the US, UK and Australian immigration systems. The US is the easiest, cheapest and fastest of those 3.
You would also have enough time to actually enjoy life, not just work till death/health issues come in some empty prestige rat race.
Where else would people get opportunities that could match the United States? I can't think of any country that would even come close.
Isn’t that comparative?
If you are in the EU then the US seems like a holy grail because pay is higher. If you have dual citizenship you can probably avail of the EU safety nets if you had to go back.
If you’re in South East Asia, any EU choice is a huge improvement. Lately there has been strong immigration to Germany for example instead of coming to the US.
After naturalization and giving up my original citizenship, I am a little envious of people with dual citizenship of US + any EU country. It really doesn’t get better than that.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
$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)
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%.
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.
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.
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.
But there are VERY few countries on this planet that actually saved for retirement.
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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
"Look how prosperous we got off your backs, suckers!" is the intended message.
It's taunting.
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.
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.
I don't get it.
Gemini gets this correct: “The H-1B visa is a nonimmigrant classification that allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign nationals in ‘specialty occupations’ that require highly specialized knowledge and at least a bachelor's degree.”
You are correct about this.
> H1B is also non-immigrant visa, but it is dual intent visa meaning it doesn't have that requirement
You're incorrect about this. The concept of "dual intent" doesn't exist in the Immigration and Naturalization Act. It was created by executive fiat. H1Bs, like other non-immigrant visas, still requires non-immigrant intent. It's different only that it has two carve-outs:
Subsection (b) excludes H1Bs from the "presumption" of immigrant intent that applies to other categories of aliens. Subsection (h) provides that applying for permanent residency "shall not constitute evidence of an intention to abandon a foreign residence" for H1Bs.
So H1Bs must still have non-immigrant intent. It's just that they are carved out of certain presumptions that would automatically establish immigrant intent, which would lead to denial of their visa. It gives the executive flexibility to essentially look the other way when an H1B applies for a green card. But it doesn't confer any legal rights* onto the H1B. The administration can at any time decide that you actually have immigrant intent and yank your visa.
I can only assume that's accidental. You're the 17th most active person on HN, so I'm certain you've seen an overwhelming amount of evidence of how skilled immigrants are immensely beneficial to the US economy.
The H-1B is not the only path to a green card. There are many ways, every case is different, and pretty much all of the paths suck, even if you do everything right.
This decision only makes all of those paths worse.
That's irrelevant. "Justice" means following the rules. Congress gets to decide the immigration laws. Congress has never created a real system for skilled permanent immigrants. The term "H1B" actually comes from 8 USC 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(B).
Subsection (a)(15) literally defines the term "immigrant" to exclude people in the subsequent subsections, including (H)(i)(b). Subsection (a)(15)(H)(i)(b) then reiterates that the category is for someone "who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform services." Congress didn't hide the ball.
It's just an example of how the immigration laws have been a bait-and-switch for decades: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
People who have done everything by "following the rules" are now seeing the US backpedal on what was promised to them via an administrative memo published by USCIS at the behest of the president—not through new legislation enacted by Congress.
I don't know where you're getting your information from, but it's factually incorrect.
And as someone else said, "justice" does not mean following the law. That's the definition of "legal".
It's important to anchor these topics at a certain level of understanding of Law and Economics to discuss optimal policy, otherwise we'll just talk past each other with uninformed political views.
Read 8 USC 1101, specifically subsections (a)(15) & (a)(15)(H)(i)(B). The statute classifies H1Bs among the "nonimmigrant aliens," and states that the category is for someone "who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform services." Does that sound to you like it was mean to be a pathway to permanent residency?
There was never a "promise" in the law. Instead, there were a set of USCIS practices and procedures that amounted to nothing more than writing down what USCIS was currently doing. But USCIS never had authority to turn what Congress created as a temporary worker program into a permanent path to citizenship.
I'm sympathetic to people who put their eggs in the H1B basket. As an immigrant, how are you supposed to understand constitutional law and limits on executive power? But the fact is that the modern H1B regime was created almost entirely by executive fiat and it can be undone by executive fiat as well. (All the 1990 Act did was undo some presumptions but left the executive free to decide at any time that an H1B has immigrant intent, which is a basis for visa revocation.)
You should listen to this NYT podcast on America's immigration system and how its operation in practice is very different from what voters thought they were getting: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
> The four sources of federal and state law are (1) constitutions, (2) statutes and ordinances, (3) rules and regulations, and (4) case law.
https://guides.law.sc.edu/c.php?g=315539&p=10379907
With that in mind, do read CFR 8 § 245.1 Eligibility: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-8/chapter-I/subchapter-B/...
More broadly please read https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-7-part-a
This amounts to much more than "writing down what USCIS was currently doing". This is a specific source of law. These regulations are legally binding as Congress has authorized the agency to issue them.
There's also plenty of case law from USCIS-related adjudicative reviews, meaning specific precedents set by judges who hear cases related to immigration.
After reflecting on your comment, I hope you're not trying to force an argument that any person who's requested an adjustment of status is somehow illegally present in the country, because that would be woefully incorrect.
I also don't appreciate the patronizing remark that I somehow fail to grasp the facts because I'm an immigrant.
I'm not sure why you think people who were born outside of the borders of the United States of America do not understand how liberal democracies work.
Do you actually think immigrants have no concept of constitutional law and limits on executive power? Do you think that knowledge is somehow protected by a magic seal that prevents me from ever obtaining it? Or do you think other countries do not have constitutions or a system of checks and balances? Do you know how many years I've spent studying nations in general and the US specifically? Do you know how many comparative studies I've written? Do you even know what my specific qualifications and degrees are? And I can do this in 5 different languages.
You're way out of your depth and your bias is showing.
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 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!”
If you aren’t lucky enough, you’re just screwed.
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.
If the person adjusts status in usa, there are more possibilities for appeal etc.
> A refused green card application might be the end of being ever in usa.
Do you have evidence for your other claim? The main thing you need to prove for a non immigrant visa or VWP is that you won't overstay or have intent to immigrate at the time of application and upon entry. Otherwise it's up to the consular officer like usual. You would need to declare the refusal/denial of course.
What will get you denied is "inadmissibility" if you don't submit a waiver. If you're inadmissible that usually means some serious violation and you've got other problems.
As far as I know, people have been successful in re-applying for EB green cards after being rejected when they've assembled a better packet.
People are deemed to have immigration intent for small things like they don’t have enough ties to their country of residence. An application for immigration is definite proof you had intent to immigrate. You can wait like ten years, but time doesn’t work in your favor (immigration gets harder every year, people get older and handcuffed elsewhere…).
The US government should not give permission to anyone at all to set foot on US soil, unless the mass of existing citizens of the US are comfortable with that person eventually voting as a citizen on what the composition of the government should actually be. And as a US citizen, I am not comfortable with letting the vast majority of people in the world - many of whom are scrambling for any legal opportunity at all that will let them legally reside in the US - vote for the government that passes laws that affect me.
Why? Aren't L1 and H1B "dual intent" visas?
Now I'm not sure if you are allowed to re-enter after your interview before your case is decided/you get the visa but I would imagine so (if have valid visa), you would just need to exit again to get the visa later.
I believe the issue with what you're describing is that if you're on a temporary visa, like a student visa, applying for a green card shows intent of immigration so you cannot return to the US on a student visa.
If you have an H-1B already you may be able to do what you're describing. If you're a recent grad in the US this basically locks you out of trying to get a green card until you've already secured an H-1B.
False
You don’t need a job to apply for green card.
Valid visa, yes. But that’s easy.
> don’t know how this will play out for employment based categories
I am only talking about employment based categories if you refer to my original comment. I’d be curious to know what visa categories allow you to file for an employment based greencard without a job?
In practice, though, almost all employers file EB GC petitions for only their current employees, not future ones.
Whats the equivalent policy for other countries? Can you stay like you could prior to this?
Graduate visa's are the same for example, where you cannot apply abroad, so you must be careful not to leave the country between graduating and getting that visa.
Pretty much all forms of permission to stay in the UK other than asylum can only be granted from within the country if you hold an existing long term status. So if you're visiting as a tourist you can't then decide to apply for a spouse visa or even a working holiday or student visa without leaving the country first. If you're already on a student visa or a work visa or similar you can change categories without having to leave.
The graduate visa is essentially an extension to the student visa with slightly different permissions - it makes sense that you can only apply to extend if you're in country and you view it from that lens.
The historic reason behind all this is that there used to be a substantial difference between being granted "leave to enter" and "leave to remain" (out of country vs in country applications). Leave to enter used to be granted by embassies etc and the foreign office, but leave to remain was granted by the home office. Now the home office handles everything in the UK centrally so the distinction is not significant.
How expensive is it?
I get to vote and he does not.
Edit: s/green card/H1B/
In the first case the paid taxes argument is pointless.
I believe the current administration, in general, appreciates those with $$.
https://www.trumpcard.gov/
Nothing new there, but under the new rules the former is no longer an option and you'd need to leave immediately. On the plus side consular processing tends to be cheaper and often faster (AOS and all the approvals vs the consular processing fee and a plane ticket).
All this FUD in this entire post is disheartening.
This government has a really bad reputation for taking one or two cases and making an example of them and then telling the other 98% they deserve it. I hope at some point this stops and someone rationalizes whatever is going on in my country
In recent years, they've combined yet another favorite, racism, to get that tasty peanut butter chocolatey goodness to get the base angry enough to go to the polls to vote based on that.
I hold on to hope that somehow, someday, we can overcome this nonsense. I have nothing to support this so I get in this sense it makes me a man of faith.
Come to the EU instead, we want more STEM people.
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.
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.
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)
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).
Most of the disagreement is where a given country should be on the spectrum of zero immigration and fully open immigration.
You can know we have the right to set strict regulations, and also object to driving smart hardworking people away from your country for no reason.
It seems obvious to me that there is no moral reason that some people should only be allowed to live in certain places.
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.
The Trump administration is not in camp 2.
The Trump administration, as this rule clearly illustrates, is in camp 3: Those who believe that the people who are not currently citizens of your country should never be able to become so, and should be punished for even trying.
The problem is not that the system is "strict" in the sense of holding an incredibly high bar. The problem is that the system is arbitrary - there is no process you can follow that will give you a high degree of confidence that you'll be allowed to enter, or even that a decision _will be made at all_ in a fair manner, no matter who you are (unless you're a personal friend of the administration) - as opposed to you being randomly arrested by ICE halfway through waiting for a decision. And even if there were such a process, you would have no confidence that it wouldn't change retroactively in another week.
It is laughably naive to believe that they are doing this in good faith out of any sense of strictly filtering immigrants. There's exactly one explanation that isn't transparently pretextual, and you and I both know what it is.
This is basically the longtime practice of countries like UAE, and historically it is categorized under camp 2; no need to create a third camp here. It’s not as if no foreigners ever in such countries become citizens – while most immigrants are meant to be guestworkers who eventually return to their own countries, there are still laws to confer citizenship on exemplary foreigners.
The UAE and the US (as of the last year and a half) don't (just) have strict immigration laws. Instead, they have corrupt and abusive immigration systems which operate outside of national and international laws.
Again, the local laws allow for conferring citizenship on exemplary foreigners, which does happen, and so such countries fit easily into camp 2 by which a country has the right to choose who and who not it wishes to make citizens.
I personally think this is the big secondary benefit that the administration is going for.
The current administration is sending a pretty clear message to immigrants.
How could this ever help to build stronger industries or trade relationships?
If somebody hands you a shit sandwich you don't need to pretend it tastes good.
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.
If you read "the current US administration and their voter base" it sure feels like hate.
I used to visit the US a lot. I haven't been for a long time and as long as the current regime remains in place I'll spend my time and money in places where I can be sure not to be mistreated.
That's not because I fear I would be hated in the places I would actually visit, but because I have no interest in being at the mercy of US immigration. It doesn't matter that the risk isn't great - it is high enough and the potential consequences severe enough that it's put the US in the same category as high crime third world countries for me in terms of risk.
Already 20 years ago it was more stressful to go through immigration in the US, even as a white man from a rich country, than in dictatorships like China. As it stands now, I wouldn't hesitate to visit China, but I would hesitate to even transit the US.
It’s just facts but they’ve been boiling the frog and doing so many idiotic and horrific things at once that people have completely checked out.
This move, like everything the MAGA administration does, will only weaken the US.
Even better for other countries, anyone the US produces who isn't a raging idiot, also are more likely to want to immigrate from the US.
Well, we're continuing to find out. We haven't exactly scraped rocked bottom yet.
Skilled labor immigration is great for everyone involved, and bad only for the countries that suffer the brain drain.
But it's not zero-sum. The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity.
That's a pretty big qualifier!
> The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity
Isn't it the opposite? Creating wealth and technology in India helps a billion quite poor people. Creating wealth in the U.S. helps 300 million already rich people.
It's created by an entire ecosystem that allows a project like that to be conceived and executed in such a way that has benefited the entire world, including the poor in India.
It's a big qualifier, but like I said, it's not zero-sum.
No economist will argue that limiting skilled labor immigration (or any immigration, really!) is an optimal policy for improving the lives of the poor elsewhere. It just doesn't work that way.
The other line of argument is again the fault-tolerance I mentioned above, maybe see Taleb or distributed systems. Maximizing efficiency has trade-offs in resiliency. Yes it might be less efficient for there to be 3 ecosystems in 3 countries instead of 1, but its more resilient to shocks. We saw the risks of highly efficient but single point of failure supply chains materialize just a few years ago during the pandemic.
It's also pretty obvious that the tech companies being in the US benefits the US more than other countries. The big salaries are in the bay area, the tax revenue goes to the US, all the ex-Googlers founding new companies found them in the US etc.. So of course Google being founded in country X would benefit country X more than it being founded in the US.
Exactly. Obviously it’s better for China that BYD and Huawei were founded in China rather than the US. It’s better for Korea that Samsung and LG were founded there instead of the U.S.
It wouldn't have been able to do it without US companies, and it's not particularly a model that can be replicated that easily, though in general, economic policy that focus on exporting goods indeed tend to be the most successful.
Still doesn't mean the US should be preventing Chinese from immigrating here, so it's just utterly besides the point.
The United States was a British colony where demand for raw supplies led to an organic development of railroads, coupled with technological transfer from businessmen in the UK hoping to capitalize on this nascent market.
Textile manufacturing was still a thing and we were in the very early innings of the global Industrial Revolution. The two world wars that destroyed Europe were also immensely helpful to the insulated US.
Why are you asking me questions for which there are easily available answers? Honestly, you might as well have asked an LLM.
Stop looking for evidence that only confirms your biases and start trying to disprove your hypothesis. Only when there's nothing left to disprove can you claim your hypothesis _may_ be right, though you can't ever know for sure.
By the way, immigrant labor was a massive force behind US industrialization so you're just totally lost at this point. Industrialization has always depended on interaction with rich economies. From capital flows to technology transfer, export markets, immigration, empire, or trade networks. No major industrial power developed in total isolation.
Developing countries have structural reasons for why they are underdeveloped. This is a very complicated topic, and one for which there is no shortage of academic interest. I suggest starting from William Easterly's "The Elusive Quest for Growth".
I quote here from the book review MIT Press:
> What is necessary for growth is that government incentives induce investment in collective goods like education, health, and the rule of law
What's Easterly's qualifications? Has he ever successfully improved the economy of a developing country? I'd rather learn what LKY or Park Chung Hee or heck even Deng Xiaoping or Pinochet had to say.
If you want to know Easterly's qualifications, just read his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly
Being ignorant is a choice.
Pinochet is one of several autocratic rulers who put in place frameworks that resulted in economic miracles in their countries.
Especially in Asia and Latin America, I don’t think there’s a single country that tried democracy before economic development that didn’t end up a failure. I’d rather be a Chinese living under effective authoritarian capitalism than an Indian living under dysfunctional social democracy.
> If you want to know Easterly's qualifications, just read his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly
So he’s never done anything? He’s never built an economy or part of an economy?
> Being ignorant is a choice.
Indeed. And confusing credentials for knowledge is a choice too.
Name one of these innovations preferably made during the first 100 years of the revolution, which we can take to have started in 1712 with the first deployment of a practical steam engine built by Thomas Newcomen and John Calley at a coal mine. Certainly it had started by then.
100 years after 1712, all of the decisionmakers in Europe were rapidly waking up to the fact that the industrial revolution was a big deal because steam-driven textile mills, ironworks, and canals were changing Britain’s economy.
By 1812, many hundreds had already contributed some kind of innovation toward that outcome: an improvement in a machine or a process, a scientific or economic or sociological insight useful in industry or a new law or business practice.
Name one of those many hundreds that did not have two parents and four grandparents and eight great-grandparents of British ancestry.
I could probably find other French engineers fleeing the revolution, if need be.
But even if we suppose there are a few more (as you suggest), the involvement of a few white immigrants is not a good argument for non-white immigration.
If the goal is to argue for non-white immigration, the smart tactic would have been to leave the industrial revolution in the UK completely out of the argument so as to avoid creating an opening for someone like me to point out that the critical first 100 years of that revolution was led and innovated by more than 99% Brits with the rest being white immigrants.
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.
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?
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.
No, it’s a win for the people who remain in India. Imagine if the Samsung founder had moved to the U.S. instead of founding Samsung in Korea.
> 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
Maybe some, but on average no. My family is Bangladeshi and my wife’s family is pre-Revolutionary War American and the cultural gap is vast. Basic attitudes towards justice, freedom, order, civic responsibilities, time, family relations, money, government, food, etc., are completely different.
Concrete example: Bangladeshis places tremendous emphasis on formal education and credentials. Americans have a tradition of skepticism of those things. This difference persists even among American born Desis.
There is evidence to back this up. Cultural differences persist for generations in immigrants: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran...
An Indian’s greatest accomplishment in life is leaving India.
I wonder how this would work with a K-1 "Fiancé" Visa. Typically a K-1 holder can enter the country as long as they get married within 90 days, and then the family stays together while the I-485 is processed. Now what? Come to the USA, marry the US Citizen, and then you're banished back to your home country?
There's also the K-3 which lets the foreign spouse enter as a non-immigrant to keep the family together while the I-485 is processed. Are they getting rid of that entirely?
This is all totally bonkers, likely not well thought out, and pretty cruel to families, which is completely on-point for this Administration.
Or it has been, and cruelty is the point
Thats why they’re appointed a whole bunch of unqualified people at high positions. This is what happens in the mafia. Those people know that the only reason they’re there is because of the dear leader and not because of their competence, so purely out of self preservation, they will put loyalty to dear leader above every other principle.
Similarly gangs will get even low level people to commit completely unnecessary crimes. Because once you’ve committed a crime, they own you. You’re at their mercy, since you can’t run to the police anymore, without risking jail time yourself.
So you make a whole bunch of your residents criminals, so they’re unable to exercise their rights effectively without threat of being punished for a completely different reason that the government now holds against them.
They’ve started with immigrants because making them criminals is as easy as writing administrative memos, but the same incentives will lead them to start making criminals out of American citizens too. You can already see some of it with the way they’ve criminalized protest against Israel. The next step will be to redefine whatever acts they can as terrorism since Congress granted the executive tremendous power when it comes to terrorism. But they won’t stop there.
If that was true why even go through a whole process. To me it sounds like there is still an approval required meaning the person is not determined to be admissible yet.
The general logic has been that it’s really easy for people to say they want to marry a U.S. citizen, get approved to emigrate, and then change their mind after (the common term for this is visa fraud). So the government grants a series of visas for increasing lengths as you move through that process and prove that it is a bona-fide relationship.
A K1 visa is the last step before getting married, and stipulates that you get married within a short time after entering the country, after which you have to remain married for several years, prove you’re doing things normal married couples do (like live together), and then you can get your permanent residency.
So, in short, it’s not as clear cut as a one-time yes/no decision. You very much live within a prescribed framework for several years until the government is satisfied that your relationship is real.
(Source: personal experience)
One interesting note here is the case of DACA recipients. If they leave the country to adjust status it should triggers a re-entry ban unless they're granted parole (DACA are quasi-illegal but granted a form of amnesty as long as they remain in US). AFAIK parole isn't granted for US consular visits, so it's effectively banishment as punishment for trying to adjust their status to reflect their marriage.
FWIW K1s were never a great visa category. Doing an engagement party with a white dress and posting it on instagram could lead to a "go apply for CR1 instead" rejection.
K1 will obviously be an exception as substantial steps are generally taken at a home consulate.
An entire visa class is not “obviously an exception”, or it would be clear.
I think you can apply for an AOS to a different dual intent visa which could then allow you to apply for a green card if you meet the requirements for that visa.
Maybe something like if you get married while visiting, but even then I believe you need to apply for an adjustment of status to a marriage visa and then apply for a green card.
The IR-1/CR-1 that you describe is how a spouse would apply from outside the country.
There need to be thorough weekly video walkthroughs of all of the detention centers. Otherwise you can expect actual starvation at some point.
Just dropping this here: https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1970251208322621530
In SE Asia there's a whole cottage travel industry taking business and tourist visa holders on a quick trip out of the border in order to return to renew their visa (of course you can also pay for this service under the table).
This is not the case for transitioning from a temporary residence permit to a permanent residence permit, which is the best analogue to the USA’s Green Card. In most European countries, one does that within the country (and often within the same province one lives, at a regional office).
> 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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
>> admitted into the United States as nonimmigrants to depart rather than pursue adjustment of status. Such aliens are generally expected to pursue an immigrant visa and admission from outside the United States if they wish to reside permanently in this country.
H1-B was already a dual intent visa. Are they trying to create a new visa category?
Whatever they are trying to get to this is a big concern for all H1B employees.
Thankfully H1B is a small visa category.
Forget the French, the new meme for cowards who retreat at the first opportunity should be the American Congress.
In some ways that industry is losing a tool. Sponsoring a green card used to be the prize they dangle in front of the h1b to keep their nose to the grindstone.
So many great students will be off the market. This will affect to the whole tech space. No way they will be happy with this decision.
Most countries, you get a visa of some kind but you have no way to permanent residency at all unless you marry but you can keep staying there somewhat permanently.
Americans voted for this.
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.
or is it effective all the way back at I-140 time where people would then need to spend years away from the US?
https://www.businessinsider.com/immigration-crackdown-housin...
Hong Kong introduced new self-sponsored visas, Mainland introduced new high-tech visas couple months ago
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.
Just take a look at the categories of Green Cards available on USCIS' website[0], and think about how many of them will be unavailable if you're back in your home country.
* Green Card via Family? 18 months, minimum, for approval.
* Green Card via Employment? Well, self-deporting likely means the loss of said job opportunity, thus your ability to convert to LPR status
* via Special Worker? Here's hoping you're not an Iraq of Afghani national that might be persecuted back in said home country for cooperating with the US Government.
* via Refugee or Asylee Status, or as Victims of Abuse? Are we fucking kidding, here? Forcing refugees/asylum seekers/abuse victims back to their home countries is deliberately cruel, and I'm going to be looking for statistics on changes in approvals pre- and post- this policy change to make sure "special circumstances" are actually recognized as such
It's just a despicably cruel policy change that's so overtly xenophobic, it actually reveals the alignment of those reporting on it when it's not called out as such. It's the antithesis to legal immigration in that it all but destroys the process entirely, promoting more illicit behavior (dangerous and clandestine border crossings, exploitation of migrant workers, human trafficking, etc) in the process.
Fuck this regime.
[0]: https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-eligibility-cate...
It is gutter racism.
edit: I wish I could be surprised by the downvotes, but it's gutter racism and I'm proud to point this out! I would be never be quiet about a matter of ethics and conscience just because of startup accelerator social media popularity points. This directly influences many of our friends and colleagues in this field. It is vile, evil racism and directly topical for software startups.
edit 2: the list of immigrants and children of immigrants who have founded software companies that are the absolute backbone of US information infrastructure is embarrassing to write down. Anyone can search for the information, but it's harder to list companies not founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.
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).
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.
Let's not mince words. My heart goes out to everyone impacted by all this.
I did consular processing when I got my Green Card. It's the FINAL step fo the GC process. You don't need to be outside the US for all the other stages, in fact I think if you leave during some parts, it would be considered abandoning your application. It just means that while you're in the US, you need to schedule an appointment at the US embassy/consulate in your home country, and fly back. Then you go through the appointment and there on the spot you're approved or rejected. It's a big nerve wracking but unless you lied you will be fine. Then you fly back to the US.
For me CP was much much faster, on the order of months.
That’s a huge unsubstantiated claim.
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.
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).
I read that it used to not be like this, that it used to be possible to renew the _visa_ itself from inside the US, but that got changed before my time. I can only imagine that the reason for that was that non-citizens inside the US are entitled to due process, but non-citizens outside the US are not. And denying a visa to somebody outside the US is therefore a lot easier than denying it to somebody inside the US, and essentially cannot be appealed.
When I applied for AOS form H1B to Green Card, I didn't have to leave the US. With this change, I would have had to. The only reason I can think for this change is that denials of AOS would now become unappealable. I hate this.
No, after 9/11 they passed a rule to always collect biometrics before issuing visas and validating them at border entry. The DoS facilities in the US did not have fingerprinting facilities but the consulates and embassies did, so they forced the change. Recently there was a pilot to allow it in the US itself.
In general the law applies equally to everyone associated with the US in any respect so you get due process (in theory) regardless. Specific laws may apply to different classes of people though (see 'enemy combatants').
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...
Footnote 20: However, maintaining lawful status in a dual intent nonimmigrant category is not sufficient, on its own, to warrant a favorable exercise of discretion
https://fam.state.gov/fam/09FAM/09FAM040213.html#M402_13_5_B
Seems extremely clear to me.
Department of Homeland Security is no longer processing Green Cards via AOS. That included UCSIS.
However the STATE DEPARTMENT is still processing it via Consular Processing.
The article makes it sounds like the US is no longer offering Green Cards which is false.
It very specifically lays out common exceptions to this, including for legal immigrants on dual intent visas and those whose only pathway to permanent residency is via adjustment of status.
It also wildly misinterprets the news to claim that the K-1 visa has been effectively ended, even though the memo specifically excludes it.
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...
> However, maintaining lawful status in a dual intent nonimmigrant category is not sufficient, on its own, to warrant a favorable exercise of discretion.
Which basically means that, applying AOS while being in dual-intent category is not favorable and you will have to prove extraordinary circumstance for a simple i-485 AOS on H1B. Lacking the extraordinary circumstance, your application may be denied.
What this basically means for millions of people on H1B (especially from countries like India is), they have to go for consular processing. And given the lack of appointments in India and delays they are facing - you could be stuck for months to years and no company is going to wait for you while you go through the process. So leaving would definitely disqualify them.
H1Bs should jump the queue why? You're arguing that the family of US Citizens should be considered behind temporary immigrant workers with no family ties to the United States, and you should be exempt from the requirements they face.
I am just pointing out this affects all employment visa types.for countries with long delays in counselor processing this effectively kills any chance of getting Green card because no employer will wait that long.
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-green-card-rule-wont-aff...
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...
> 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.
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!
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-...
The are other nits to pick with the analogy, but I’ll leave it at that
politics aside, do you realistically believe that you can view twitter and actually mentally carve out the opinion of a group of people in real life?
that's exactly the issue with twitter.
for one : you're polling twitter users (a TINY subsect of humanity), two : you're extracting opinion from those that seek to broadcast it (an outlier) , and three: twitter never self-exposes the world to a user, it selectively curates and amplifies, and fourth : it's one of the most gamed communications arenas in existence.
you're viewing the world through an itty-bitty twitter-colored monocle and making sweeping accusations across large cohorts, it's not an accurate portrayal of actual human opinion.
Nah. I’m an Indian-American (born in America, never visited India) working at a FANG company here in SF South Bay and I support this policy.
We need fewer immigrants in America for the next 10 years until we can sort out our domestic issues (education, healthcare, taxation, cost of living).
Once the immigrants are gone and birthright tourism / birthright citizenship to non-US citizen parents is also gone (hopefully next week), politicians can no longer blame immigrants for americas problems.
We could create special economic zones like china, allow 200 million immigrants into the country with a goal of a billion people to match the population of china and India. Make it a condition of citizenship that they help build ten homes or similar infrastructure. Immigrants could be the solution to all the problems you cite and they certainly aren’t the reason those problems exist.
If something seems irrational it’s usually a sign that you don’t understand the underlying logic. This behavior is totally logical if they aren’t worried about losing power.
Stay on whatever visa you’re on -> apply for consular processing -> travel for interview -> enter on green card
So they likely have to wait out the green card process abroad unless they secure a dual-intent visa like an H-1B.
There's also 75 countries that the US has shut down consular processing for so those people may be locked out getting a green card entirely.
You could go the fiancé visa route and stay in status while waiting for the green card.
I think what this policy is trying to avoid is the blanket “you can stay while processing even if you’re not in the country legally”
Wait times to process applications depend on your country of origin and visa type. If you are an H1B from India that was already decades approaching never. Same for Brazil and elsewhere.
And that was before Trump. All that was practically halted.
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.
Is that right?
As others have said, someone entering the US on a tourist or other nonimmigrant visa, then marrying a US citizen, is inherently committing fraud because the marriage demonstrates intent to stay. In the past, the US was nice about it and let people apply to adjust their status without leaving. This loophole is now closed.
Are you saying that in such cases, the US rules here are and should be that the married couple should live apart for years due to the bylaws of the USCIS?
As I said, this is inherently a violation of the commitment the visitor made when entering the US on a non-immigrant visa, as much as (say) exceeding the limit on the hours per week an international student can work.
>Are you saying that in such cases, the US rules here are and should be that the married couple should live apart for years due to the bylaws of the USCIS?
First, this is what the law has always said; there is a reason why non-immigrant, immigrant, and dual-intent visa types exist. The USCIS memo reiterates this, while clarifying that the agency will no longer grant the contrary-to-the-law leeway it has heretofore done regarding non-immigrant, non dual-intent visas.
Second, the alternatives of 1) K-1 (fiancee) visa or 2) CR-1 (spousal) visa exist, and have always been the intended means for the person you mentioned in your situation.
The leeway meant that pretty much anyone, including illegal aliens, could obtain a green card (and be exempt from removal during the application process) by marrying a US citizen.
A US citizen is free to marry anyone, regardless of citizenship. There is no automatic guarantee, however, that the couple can both live in the US.
> 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.
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.
When you renew your H-1B visa, your work permit is renewed electronically, but your travel facility (the visa folio in your stamp) needs consular processing. When expanded screening was announced [1] they canceled 99% of appointments at Indian consulates because the consulate wasn’t ready to screen that many applications. It’s bordering impossible to get a new visa stamp; people cannot travel if they want to stay employed.
[1] - https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/a...
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])
This could be a big deal for Big Tech. I wonder how personal experience of Musk and Huang will play into how they react.
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.
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
https://infogram.com/figure-3-employment-based-green-card-pe...
The cruelty is the point. They want the economic benefit of immigrants but also want them to live in uncertainty and without any easy path to settling down. Complete and utterly stupid.
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?
US&A has been the escape hatch for oppressive regime in China/Russia/... for many years, young people from there seek freedom in US, instead of fight for freedom in their own.
Individual freedom is great but collectively they made people who can't migrate have less and less freedom. Some expected US&A compensate that with trade, military and twitter, which all turned out to be disasters.
I'm sorry for anyone stuck in those processes, but for long term US&A giving up on Green card / dual citizenship is not necessarily a bad thing for the world.
Damned if we don’t allow people in and, apparently, damned also if we do allow some in
Your strange argument would actually support this policy: stop letting these people into the USA so that they stay in their own repressive countries and are forced to reform them.
Hundreds of millions of people from abroad shared that belief up until 2 decades ago or so. I don't think they believe it anymore. It's been like watching your awesome high school friend throw away their lives over time.
Think about it: China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population. But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people. Until now.
There used to be a bipartisan agreement that a US advanced degree should come with a green card stapled to it. Even Trump: “You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country."
And China is notoriously xenophobic when it comes to immigration policy - they have a clear “best race” as far as the CCP is concerned and are doubling down on it. If you want to hold China up as a model I don’t think it’s the winning argument that you think it is relative to a pro-immigration argument. White nationalists would agree with you and say to only allow whites in and be more homogenous like China is.
Separately you’re also arguing in favor of only high-skilled immigration which seems kind of suspect don’t you think? No more refugees from Haiti or Syria, for example. Otherwise the US can’t be drawing on the pick of the world’s best.
> But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people.
You also aren’t accounting for the concept of brain drain which has historically been difficult for origin countries to deal with. It’s a little amusing to see folks positively arguing in favor of what would otherwise be considered a colonialist tactic of resource extraction.
I’m critiquing these two points however and not necessarily suggesting a policy, but I think it would be wise to think a little more deeply about these two points.
I’d also add, we are totally fine and the rhetoric around the US no longer being a leading economy and superpower is false. The strength of the country isn’t solely because of immigration. In fact, that may not even be a major factor. Geography for example plays a much greater role, our system of government and laws, our markets and culture of enterprise are far more important. I’d argue tablet kids and the introduction of technology into classrooms is, for example, a much greater problem for American talent than lower rates of skilled immigration.
Immigration is just another policy choice we make, like our system of laws or others. It doesn’t need this moral component to it. Increase the rate of people immigrating in some years, decrease it in others. No big deal. If you want to suggest it’s worthy of a moral crusade then you are barking up the wrong tree because the United States has and is certainly more friendly toward immigrants both now and historically than probably any other country on the planet. You should aim your outrage at countries such as China which severely restrict this moral good.
F1 and h1 are non-immigrant visa.
American law only allows a person to reside in the country with one Visa type.
The green card is an immigrant visa - and the new visa is issued through an adjustment of status for those inside the USA (backlogged) or by consulates (nearly immediately).
So this is a good thing. It’s easy to get alarmed.
Why can't USCIS shard it based on country within the US in a similar fashion?
2025, the cap was about 26,323 per country because the total visa pool was larger.
Important details:
1. The cap applies to: * Employment-based green cards * Family preference green cards 2. The cap does NOT apply to: * Immediate relatives of U.S. citizens * spouses * parents * unmarried children under 21 Those categories are uncapped. 3. The cap is based on: * Country of birth (“chargeability”) * Not citizenship. 4. In practice, countries like: * India * China * Mexico * Philippines hit the cap constantly, causing very large backlogs.
Simple example:
If 500,000 Indians qualify for employment-based green cards, but only ~25k–30k can be allocated annually under the cap system, the remainder wait in line. That is why Indian EB-2 and EB-3 wait times can stretch into decades.
Demand better from your government.
(And this still raises the question of why the consulates supposedly don't have this issue.)