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Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

nytimes.com

891–900 of 1001 posts

Re: Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

#891

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 mor…

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.

Not just uncertainty, but the apparent speedrunning of making the US an undesirable place to live compared to other countries.

Where did you move to and what are you doing now? (I'd love to hear from anyone else who's left too)

Re: Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

#892

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 mor…

[deleted]

Re: Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

#893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish they would just have a simple fast lane for the 100% legal, non-complicated case. The explicit purpose of this is to reduce legal immigration, and reduce the number of people becoming citizens. There is no world in which the same racist, fascist administration doing this does anything remotely like what you describe.

I'm not from the US, but isn't it like almost every country in the world? Reducing immigration when it's already too much does increase job availability for locals (which should always be priority imo) . Immigration to a country is a privilege, not really a right, but again I don't really know about the US, I just know that like Emigrating to Japan permanently or like in Dubai getting citizenship is very difficult an…

Newsflash: Many European countries are, in fact, racist.

The French are virulently racist against Arabs and Muslims. Most of Western Europe is racist against the Romani, as well as against most Eastern European ethnicities (yes, even though they would be considered "white" in the US). It hasn't historically come up quite as much as in the US because most European countries are more homogeneous than the US is, but with the increase in migration—and particularly in asylum-seeking emigration from war-torn areas—it has become much more salient in recent times.

Japan is also racist, varying from moderately to horrifically depending on what the target group is.

These forms of racism don't always look the same as racism does in the US: for instance, the Western European bias against Eastern Europeans, IME, largely shows up as a widespread belief that they're lazy, and the bias against Romani is that they're seen as dirty, smelly thieves.

90% of all anti-immigrant sentiment, anywhere, is rooted in racism of varying types. Plenty of studies have made very clear that immigrants contribute more to the community and the nation, and have lower rates of crime, than people born in the country.

It is true that when a wave of immigrants first arrives in a new country, they take up more government resources for a period of time, because they literally have not had a chance to find jobs. But once that happens, they are likely to be working at lower-status, lower-paying jobs that the locals mostly didn't want in the first place. And once they have jobs, they aren't just somehow "taking up jobs that locals could have": they also create demand in the local economy, which creates more jobs. Because "number of jobs" isn't a fixed quantity.

And finally, in case you have been hiding under a rock for the last decade of American politics, this anti-immigrant sentiment is explicitly aimed at nonwhite immigrants. To the point that ICE routinely targets people based on the color of their skin, wholly disregarding their victims' status (many are legal immigrants or even citizens), and Trump actively seeks out white South Africans who want to come to the US.

Re: Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

#894

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want to defend the cure administration, but it’s very common and normal for a country to require a person to leave to change status. Every time my Canadian work visa expired I had to drive over the border, enter the US, turn around and drive back to start the new one. The border guards call it “flag-poling” because you do a U turn around the flag pole. When I went from work visa to permanent resident I had to…

Even if it is common (i don't think this is required any more anyways), just why? Why do we need to make someone run back and forth across the border for the immigration department to do some paperwork? It seems purely designed to inconvenience people for absolutely no gain to anyone.

My guess: If they end up being denied then it's easier to not let them back in by not letting them cross the border whereas if it's in the country it's harder to locate them to deport?

Seems pretty brutal to me though.

Re: Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

#895
post #666
post #443

The internal memo on this is interesting: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-... Essentially they're trying to change the rules by aggressive re-interpretation of the existing legal framework, and not actually changing any laws or regulations. I don't follow all of it, but it seems to be arguing that the "ordinary consular process", leaving the country and applying for a visa from abroad, is…

It’s a shame that I had to scroll past pages of invective and name-calling to get to your comment, which is the first one to substantively deal with the policy change. Like you, I tend to think this is a ham-handed move, but like one of the sibling comments, I also have to acknowledge that it’s common for other nations to require change-of-status applications happen outside the country. For example, Japan requires th…

It's a shame you scrolled past pages of comments and missed the point entirely.

The fact that it's "common in other countries" is entirely irrelevant to what the United States does.

It's not even clear it's common in other countries. Japan is notorious for being insular.

This is a garbage move by this administration that flies in the face of decades of precedents _in the United States_.

Re: Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

#896

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.

Why does the US have to offer jobs to the whole world? People flood US borders like it's a magnet sucking them in and cry when they can't stay. If it's so exploitive why don't people stay in their own country or go somewhere else?

> People flood US borders

They have "flooded" the US borders because in the first Trump term, Trump instituted a policy of having applicants for all sorts of reasons to have to stay in Mexico before they can be accepted.

That's the primary reason why there are now huge encampments at the border. They weren't there under Obama, Bush, or Clinton.

> why don't people stay in their own country or go somewhere else?

A lot of people are asylum seekers, and a lot of that reason they are seeking asylum is US policy which has destroyed their home nations. The best example of this being the likes Venezuela, Cuba, and Haite. The US putting international trade embargos on governments it doesn't like, plunging them into poverty, creates a bunch of refuges.

Some people are simply seeking a better life. Some have bought into american propaganda about how awesome the US is to live in. Some people are simply trafficked into the US for the explicit purpose of being exploited. (In fact, that's the majority of human trafficking in the US [1]).

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/human-trafficking-quick-facts

Re: Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

#897
post #820

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.

White supremacy never left. There are a whole bunch of people in the US that never got over the abolition of chattel slavery and arguably we're in this mess because not enough slaveowners were strung up after the Civil War. And by "not enough" I really mean "anything less than all of them". That may sound harsh, even hyperbolic, but we teach a really whitewashed version of slavery in schools, like these were just lab…

I was in high school in the 90s in the deep south and was taught about the horrors of slavery. Has that changed? Not disagreeing about reconstruction. It established a pattern of letting conservatives get away with their malfeasance and “let’s just get along” politically instead of extracting a real price for crime and destructive behavior.

Re: Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

#898
post #748
post #443

The internal memo on this is interesting: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-... Essentially they're trying to change the rules by aggressive re-interpretation of the existing legal framework, and not actually changing any laws or regulations. I don't follow all of it, but it seems to be arguing that the "ordinary consular process", leaving the country and applying for a visa from abroad, is…

So this is an example of being careful what you wish for. Neil Gorsuch's mother had to resign in disgrace as the EPA administrator under Reagan in a case that ultimately became what was called "Chevron deference" [1]. Chevron deference meant that when Congress wrote ambiguous statutes, courts would defer to the interpretation of the agencies responsible for enforcing them. Almost 40 years of laws were written with th…

Thank you for this fantastically informative comment.

Re: Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

#899

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 welf…

> 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…

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Re: Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

#900

This is just reckless without any responsibility. A number of people, especially in tech sector, legally stay in US while their GC is being processed. They have kids born in the USA. If such people were to leave USA to seek green card: - the kids must first get visas to their parent's countries - once reaching the other country, consular offices now have multi year wait lines for getting an appointment with a office…

> 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.

While you are correct, that's a minor issue in an otherwise cogent post by the parent, so addressing those other more substantial points first would have made the debate better.
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