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Posted by tlhunter 1 day ago

Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says(www.nytimes.com)
https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/us-citizenship-...

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-... [pdf]

https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/2057817233200418837, https://xcancel.com/DHSgov/status/2057817233200418837

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrpz4l1klgo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/05/22/new-ru..., https://archive.is/yi2cX

653 points | 1112 commentspage 10
ciconia 7 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!

SV_BubbleTime 1 day ago||
I was under the impression that this is roughly how it works (assume equivalency) in most European countries is it not?
jesseendahl 23 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 22 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 22 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 15 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_ 23 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 23 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 23 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.

thinkcontext 16 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.

anonym29 14 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 9 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 8 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 4 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.

kylehotchkiss 1 day 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 23 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 9 hours ago||
Step 324 of how to make Russia great again.
steveBK123 14 hours ago||
Again worth asking VC Bros if the light touch on their crypto bags was worth all this ethnonationalism?
_doctor_love 7 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.

xuzhenpeng 59 minutes ago||
[flagged]
shevy-java 7 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.

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