Posted by tlhunter 23 hours ago
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
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.
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
If you aren’t lucky enough, you’re just screwed.
If you have filed I485 and they fail to process it before your current visa expires (D/S ends like F1 OPT). Then what? You just have to leave, abandon AOS and re-apply for CR1?
It’s insane that the simplest immigrant pathway; spousal green card could take 12+ months and may now require temporarily moving and being separated. Guess I actually will be paying $4K for a lawyer (plus the 3-4K just to file the USCIS forms).
I wish they would just have a simple fast lane for the 100% legal, non-complicated case.
Immigration policy in the current administration (which seems to be driven by Stephen Miller) is not based around legalaities, it's based around cutting immigration as much as possible because that's what satisfies Trump's voter base. These people do not care if you 'did it the right way'. They have an atavistic hatred of foreigners.
White immigrants are fine with this administration.
"All but 3 of 6,069 refugees taken in by Trump are White South Africans"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/05/22/trump-south-a...
Even the current right wing party CDU doesn't seem to want to make migration harder, but when the extremist party AfD gets voted into office, an already highly damaged balance will break.
Sad how people become so detected from reality that they make their society irrelevant and destroying a lot of wealth in the process.
To me it feels like the US pretends they don’t need immigrants when:
1. The overwhelming majority of current US residents were immigrants themselves at some point in the last 150 years (only natives were there, everyone else immigrated from somewhere)
2. The US wouldn’t function without illegal immigrants
3. Every country is short of workers in one domain or another. Encouraging immigration in these domains (see how Canada does it for instance) would be the smart move. But instead… yeah let’s make it even harder across the board
2. The US not functioning without illegal immigrants is a bad thing. More often than not, employers like illegal immigrants because they can abuse them in some way or another. If you actually interact with illegal immigrants or the people that employ them, this is clear. “We need modern indentured servitude” is not the country I want to live in. I would rather these industries just be subsidized by the government to whatever extent it takes for US citizens to take the jobs with all of the protections we expect workers to have.
3. Not every country is short of workers. Employers may be short of workers that they can lord over, but refer back to point 2. Pointing to Canada’s policy as an example of a “smart move” is a strange play.
The current administration is certainly not working on the above premises, but I’m floored when I hear supposedly progressive people going on about who is going to work the psychologically scarring meatpacking plants if we don’t take on an undefined number of people who are only here to get shit on for a good paycheck. I have compassion for illegal immigrants, which is exactly why I don’t want them in the US.
My point was that with the sorely lacking rules already in place, illegal immigration is a problem and at the same time there is still a supply problem.
So acting even more high and mighty like it’s the greatest place on earth to be and require people who want in to grovel even more certainly isn’t good policy.
I’m also confused why you think Canada isn’t doing it better? You can immigrate but your profile needs to match what the country needs: its win win, because once you’re there you have a fair chance at a good life (integration, job, etc) vs taking anyone in and then having issues with people who can’t find jobs, be happy in the country, and integrate into society.
But the process around the US visa and immigration program is a lot more hostile than it needs to be. I had the displeasure to deal with this grinder and it’s really showing that the attitude is “you’re less than nothing, it’s up to you to prove you’re worthy of us even reading the forms you filled in and paid for, fuck you very much”
EU countries are working on imigration rules that would allow for bringing imigrant labour without ever extending citizen privileges to them. A sort of permanent uderclass. This is what voters want at this time.
Today's news make this crystal clear: the current admin does not want citizens marrying outside the country, regardless of how quickly the marriage rate among US population is falling.
I suppose little matters from the before days, but I've only been a permanent resident for 2 years so maybe this timeline helps: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Green_Card_Application#Timel...
The explicit purpose of this is to reduce legal immigration, and reduce the number of people becoming citizens.
There is no world in which the same racist, fascist administration doing this does anything remotely like what you describe.
I don't get it.
Hong Kong introduced new self-sponsored visas, Mainland introduced new high-tech visas couple months ago
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 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.
If you read "the current US administration and their voter base" it sure feels like hate.
I used to visit the US a lot. I haven't been for a long time and as long as the current regime remains in place I'll spend my time and money in places where I can be sure not to be mistreated.
That's not because I fear I would be hated in the places I would actually visit, but because I have no interest in being at the mercy of US immigration. It doesn't matter that the risk isn't great - it is high enough and the potential consequences severe enough that it's put the US in the same category as high crime third world countries for me in terms of risk.
Already 20 years ago it was more stressful to go through immigration in the US, even as a white man from a rich country, than in dictatorships like China. As it stands now, I wouldn't hesitate to visit China, but I would hesitate to even transit the US.
It’s just facts but they’ve been boiling the frog and doing so many idiotic and horrific things at once that people have completely checked out.
This move, like everything the MAGA administration does, will only weaken the US.
Even better for other countries, anyone the US produces who isn't a raging idiot, also are more likely to want to immigrate from the US.
Well, we're continuing to find out. We haven't exactly scraped rocked bottom yet.
Skilled labor immigration is great for everyone involved, and bad only for the countries that suffer the brain drain.
But it's not zero-sum. The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity.
That's a pretty big qualifier!
> The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity
Isn't it the opposite? Creating wealth and technology in India helps a billion quite poor people. Creating wealth in the U.S. helps 300 million already rich people.
It's created by an entire ecosystem that allows a project like that to be conceived and executed in such a way that has benefited the entire world, including the poor in India.
It's a big qualifier, but like I said, it's not zero-sum.
No economist will argue that limiting skilled labor immigration (or any immigration, really!) is an optimal policy for improving the lives of the poor elsewhere. It just doesn't work that way.
The other line of argument is again the fault-tolerance I mentioned above, maybe see Taleb or distributed systems. Maximizing efficiency has trade-offs in resiliency. Yes it might be less efficient for there to be 3 ecosystems in 3 countries instead of 1, but its more resilient to shocks. We saw the risks of highly efficient but single point of failure supply chains materialize just a few years ago during the pandemic.
It's also pretty obvious that the tech companies being in the US benefits the US more than other countries. The big salaries are in the bay area, the tax revenue goes to the US, all the ex-Googlers founding new companies found them in the US etc.. So of course Google being founded in country X would benefit country X more than it being founded in the US.
Exactly. Obviously it’s better for China that BYD and Huawei were founded in China rather than the US. It’s better for Korea that Samsung and LG were founded there instead of the U.S.
It wouldn't have been able to do it without US companies, and it's not particularly a model that can be replicated that easily, though in general, economic policy that focus on exporting goods indeed tend to be the most successful.
Still doesn't mean the US should be preventing Chinese from immigrating here, so it's just utterly besides the point.
The United States was a British colony where demand for raw supplies led to an organic development of railroads, coupled with technological transfer from businessmen in the UK hoping to capitalize on this nascent market.
Textile manufacturing was still a thing and we were in the very early innings of the global Industrial Revolution. The two world wars that destroyed Europe were also immensely helpful to the insulated US.
Why are you asking me questions for which there are easily available answers? Honestly, you might as well have asked an LLM.
Stop looking for evidence that only confirms your biases and start trying to disprove your hypothesis. Only when there's nothing left to disprove can you claim your hypothesis _may_ be right, though you can't ever know for sure.
By the way, immigrant labor was a massive force behind US industrialization so you're just totally lost at this point. Industrialization has always depended on interaction with rich economies. From capital flows to technology transfer, export markets, immigration, empire, or trade networks. No major industrial power developed in total isolation.
Developing countries have structural reasons for why they are underdeveloped. This is a very complicated topic, and one for which there is no shortage of academic interest. I suggest starting from William Easterly's "The Elusive Quest for Growth".
I quote here from the book review MIT Press:
> What is necessary for growth is that government incentives induce investment in collective goods like education, health, and the rule of law
What's Easterly's qualifications? Has he ever successfully improved the economy of a developing country? I'd rather learn what LKY or Park Chung Hee or heck even Deng Xiaoping or Pinochet had to say.
If you want to know Easterly's qualifications, just read his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly
Being ignorant is a choice.
Pinochet is one of several autocratic rulers who put in place frameworks that resulted in economic miracles in their countries.
Especially in Asia and Latin America, I don’t think there’s a single country that tried democracy before economic development that didn’t end up a failure. I’d rather be a Chinese living under effective authoritarian capitalism than an Indian living under dysfunctional social democracy.
> If you want to know Easterly's qualifications, just read his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly
So he’s never done anything? He’s never built an economy or part of an economy?
> Being ignorant is a choice.
Indeed. And confusing credentials for knowledge is a choice too.
Name one of these innovations preferably made during the first 100 years of the revolution, which we can take to have started in 1712 with the first deployment of a practical steam engine built by Thomas Newcomen and John Calley at a coal mine. Certainly it had started by then.
100 years after 1712, all of the decisionmakers in Europe were rapidly waking up to the fact that the industrial revolution was a big deal because steam-driven textile mills, ironworks, and canals were changing Britain’s economy.
By 1812, many hundreds had already contributed some kind of innovation toward that outcome: an improvement in a machine or a process, a scientific or economic or sociological insight useful in industry or a new law or business practice.
Name one of those many hundreds that did not have two parents and four grandparents and eight great-grandparents of British ancestry.
I could probably find other French engineers fleeing the revolution, if need be.
But even if we suppose there are a few more (as you suggest), the involvement of a few white immigrants is not a good argument for non-white immigration.
If the goal is to argue for non-white immigration, the smart tactic would have been to leave the industrial revolution in the UK completely out of the argument so as to avoid creating an opening for someone like me to point out that the critical first 100 years of that revolution was led and innovated by more than 99% Brits with the rest being white immigrants.
A big argument for letting people emigrate is that they owe no real debt to the county where they are born, or the city, or anything like that. They aren't selfs owned by a nobleman. If moving increases their personal lot, why should we stop them?
An Indian’s greatest accomplishment in life is leaving India.