So for those that don't know, it's quite common for a visa renewal to be required to leave the country. Depending on the visa, you might have to do this every year.
So just imagine, having a normal job in the US and you're asked to leave to renew your visa and this stuff happens.
That's no more appointment, not even a new date and you're now very likely unable to work and possibly can't even enter the country to get your belongings if you were to leave.
Just 'putting a pause' on people with existing appointments with no answer for when they might resume is.... Inhumane
In Canada you never have to leave to renew or change status; it's just sometimes faster to do so. It's always the applicant's choice. I went through the whole work permit to PR to citizenship pipeline without ever having to leave the country.
I'm not sure if its the same in Canada but when I went through the process for Australia it depended on where you started the process. I started the process while outside the country so to activate my visa I had to leave and come back but if I had filed while in the country I could have stayed.
I do remember Canada telling my partner she wouldn't be guaranteed reentry while they were processing her PR visa until it was finalised if we left the country though so we just ended up doing the Australian half first and I never went back.
I don't think the practice of the change is significant. Reddit has numerous stories of people who are still receiving it, so whatever that release says, things haven't changed. People seem to be receiving AoS based Green Cards the same way I did under the Biden Administration. It does seem to be a bit more uncertain which is always troubling.
I had a study permit at first. I renewed my permit, got a work permit, renewed my foreign passport and extended my work permit, got PR and got citizenship, getting visas to match my work and study permits, over a period of 10 years, without ever having to leave Canada. So my experience is that in Canada you never have to leave but in the US you do.
My classmates who had gone to the US for PhD programs, even those who were fortunate enough to get multiple entry visas, had visas that allowed re-entry for only the first two years of the PhD program. After that, if they wanted to leave the US, say for a conference or to visit family, they would have had to apply for a visa from abroad and hope to be granted one. In Canada, I could apply for the visa and get it while in Canada. Even comparing like with like, the American system seems bizarre to me, looking at it from a Canadian lens.
Really? My spouse and I lived in Canada on work permits and were not required to leave in order to achieve PR status; nor to achieve citizenship status.
Prior to Covid, my wife had
to exit the country to get photos taken as part of the permanent resident process. We took a trip to Montana for
that purpose.
This seems to have changed in the past 3-4 years, but as the GP said, the original process did involve leaving.
I think the whole point of making someone leave is the possibility that they may not be allowed back in. If staying was a foregone conclusion then there’d be no point in leaving.
I can’t think of any other rationale. What, only border officers are able to process a visa renewal? Please. We can have offices inside the country handle this stuff, just like offices handle Trusted Traveler applications and Social Security card issuances.
The point is surely to get another chance to grill the immigrant and potentially bar them entry. Other countries don’t always do this: Canada for example has inland changes of status and I believe renewals.
For many visas, people are expected to maintain a home that they intend to return to in their country of origin. Forcing people to leave every once in a while makes this more likely (at least in theory.)
Visa renewals are processed at a US consulate. You can extend your status (ie you ability to legally be in the US) while staying in the US, but if you want to renew your visa (your ability to leave and re-enter) you need to visit a consulate and those only exist outside of the US.
In the mid 2000s, I had to leave the US for renewal while leaving all my hard assets behind. I had a plan in place in case I couldn't go back to the country, which did happen to some people. These people had their interviews, but they got held back outside the US, sometimes for months, waiting for the renewal process to finish. I had an immediate renewal, but was almost held back for some red tape reasons.
The scale is new. Obviously a nightmare or even a tragedy for individual people that it happens at all. But this happening to (tens of?) thousands of people all at once is a whole different thing.
I've had a couple of reports that this applied to. It's incredibly disruptive. "I've got to fly back to India to renew my visa." "Okay, when will you be back?" "I have no idea, it depends when I can get an appointment. It could be next week, it might be in a month." "[State department] We're pausing all visa appointments." "Well fuck."
Meanwhile I've got a tech lead who is 12 hours away from the rest of the team. He was at least willing to work US-East hours while in India (basically staying up all night and sleeping during the day), but there was a huge amount of management overhead and inconvenience for the employee involved.
At least the procedure used to be that one would try to get an appointment at the US consulate in one's home country and then arrange the trip around it. Also, at least in my experience (but importantly, not with this administration) was that one was never required to leave the US.
The main constraint is re-entry into the US and being able to travel outside the US. If one stayed here, there was no problem switching schools, programs, jobs, adjusting status to permanent residency or naturalization. On the other hand, for re-entry, one needs a valid visa stamped on a passport which necessitated a trip to one's home country. This stamping visit could be unpredictable.
Ideally, one would like to travel freely to see family and friends but I see a lot of comments implying that one is forced to leave. It might be true now but a lot of comments here are conflating several issues together.
The first time it happened (2023) it was a non-issue; he did exactly as you said, appointment happened as planned, and then he was back on his scheduled plane trip a week later.
Everything post-2025 has been a shit-show. There's no predictability or clear guidance, either from our lawyers or from the state department.
Predictability matters a lot in business. If you know what the procedure is and how long it will take, you can plan around it. If the rules change in the middle of the game you're left scrambling to keep up.
Predictability flew out the window with the last election. I simply do not understand how any business leaders supported this, but I suppose the ability to bribe their way out of chaos was appealing.
I've worked at companies where we transfer people to Canada during periods like this in the same time zone. Sometimes they enjoy it so much they don't want to transfer back to the US.
It's totally not illegal to discriminate against people who don't have work status and the mere suggestion is absurd.
It's totally unreasonable to suggest that companies should have to hire random people from nation xyz only to have to sponsor their impossible work visas.
And I say this as someone who was on work status for a very long time.
Clarity, consistency, simplicity, predictability - this is what people want.
Because 'discriminating against people of other ethnicities' is kind of as old as time, the issue triggers our empathy radar a bit, which is reasonable, but in reality what would be 'the most fair to everyone' is just clear rules, and very light but important anti-discrimination aka can't discriminate on age, race, gender religion aka the basics.
There is no obligation[1] to consider any candidate who needs visa sponsorship. Green cards are different. In hiring they must be considered like any citizen candidate.
No - that's not right - they can't discriminate against people who have work-status, but they absolutely can discriminate against people who don't have status aka arbitrary foreign nationals.
And it would be absurd if they could not.
Also, in some cases, employers should be able to discriminate, it's totally different to hire someone on an n-month visa vs full time.
Granted, it's different if they are Green Card.
It's also perfectly normal to want to hire locals, if it can be done on a national basis, then I think for some roles, state ought to be fine as well. If state governments had a state preference for in-state nationals, that would be fine, for example.
The issue here is by far and away mostly one of transparency and efficiency - the rules should be clear and the bureaucracy should just function normally.
The fact that anything takes months, or that you need lawyers etc is a sign of dysfunction.
It should be about as complicated as getting a prescription. 'One trip to an office and done'.
This is just false. There are lot of reasons people hire immigrants, very few are truly incredible, singular talents. I lived with a bunch of Indian immigrants when in SF and it was universally guys not as skilled as me hired because there was a pipeline for Brahmin to the US.
Most immigration is based on hiring people into jobs for which the skills exist locally but which demand higher wages than immigrants. This is called a labor shortage by employers who prefer not to think of it as a salary shortage.
This is based on my experience in working with good immigrant coders who got the job over about equally capable locals, but more cheaply. The immigrants (mostly Indian and Chinese) tended to have weaker English communication skills but stronger work ethics.
This idea that paying more would magically create a pool of trained workers is a a form of fallacy as well.
There's obviously some degree of reality to it, but the equilibrium doesn't always work that way, and, shifting it would require sometimes a decade, and integration with other parts of the supply chain, like literally opening / expanding new schools, training programs, certification, convincing young people before they even select a college major - etc.
It's a very different equation for specialized work than for unskilled labour.
And should add - communication skills matter a lot, and I don't mean just 'vocabulary'.
I've hired tons of teams from India and it's often really hard, the cultural gaps are huge.
There's a reason that almost zero startups on limited budgets 'go to China or India' to hire.
Big budget and small budget films immediately choose lower wage centres to produce films, but it's not the same for certain skilled work.
And yes, 'funny accents' can cause people's otherwise great work to be overlooked, or for them to be devalued, obviously that one is as old as time.
The entire Silicon Valley would not exist were it not for immigrants behind he scenes, obviously, and speaking from direct experience there as well.
Many job reqs are scams intended to satisfy the "doesn't exist locally requirement" (superficially) so that exploitable foreigners are importable.
Nobody has 20 years of React experience, of course, but that doesn't stop people from listing this as a requirement - or a pre-selected group of people on the other end from asserting this experience.
Hundreds of thousands of tech workers have been laid off in the last two years. There are many skilled Americans on the job market. Foreign workers are here for the benefit of the United States, not as charity to the rest of the world, or as a source of cheaper labor for global employers seeking to undercut American wages.
> Foreign workers are here for the benefit of the United States
But that's the point, isn't it? Some foreign workers who "worked the US for the benefit of the US" are now unable to come back to the US. Isn't that bad for the US too?
It's clear you are not a hiring manager. There aren't thousands of highly qualified engineers looking for work. I can't tell if this a troll post or not.
Fortunately such ridiculous hypotheticals have no correspondence to reality. Most every job can be easily trained or cross trained. Mathematicians make good physicists. Nor is there some foreign pipeline of a million physicists. Such ridiculous argument exist only to perpetuate the lie of a skills shortage and deny the wage shortage.
I’m very pro immigration, but “Americans are lazy and stupid , thus unfit for hiring” isn’t a winning argument.
Tons of Americans are out of work. I’ve personally seen my wages drop by at least 20$ an hour as well as the work being less stable.
Gasp, you might need to train someone a bit or have employees that will say no if you ask them to work on Christmas.
If I ran the H1B program it would be an unrestricted work permit with an automatic pathway to a GC after 5 years. Don’t get *convicted* of a felony and here you go.
It's clear you are not considering the long-term effects of labor policy. If we want a stronger domestic workforce, the answer is to incentivize Americans to develop the skills we need and to train them when they do not already have those skills. Mass importing foreign labor is not a substitute for building and investing in the domestic workforce.
everything this administration does daily is from one of three boxes
[CHAOS] [CORRUPTION] [CRUELTY]
this is a little from the first box and the last box
imagine what's tomorrow or next week
meanwhile let's all enjoy the billion spent on making statues gold plated in DC and the ballroom and the arch and his drapes and his reflecting pool and 100 foot banners of his face on federal building and his face on gold coins, passports, park passes and the $250 bill
They can’t vote in most elections (except a few local elections in some places) and aren’t guaranteed entry at the border. They also can’t work a litany of jobs requiring citizenship.
They get a plenty bad enough shake. Let’s grant them the absolute basics of humane treatment and a fair shake at getting citizenship, sheesh.
Other countries get by just fine not having such a huge delta between haves and have nots on citizenship, and their social cohesion is better for it.
I have a better idea. Let them make their countries worth living in. If they don't like it in America they can leave. Because unlike Americans, we don't have another home country to retreat to.
Most countries have MUCH higher standards for immigration and their citizens much better off for it.
> Most countries have MUCH higher standards for immigration and their citizens much better off for it.
I think your math is off. The US is in the top 10 for GDP per capita, 99% literacy rate when the global average is 87%, the poverty rate is below average, the list goes on. Most countries in the world aren’t even considered developed nations. Immigration has been America’s core growth engine for two and a half centuries. There may be problems but you are deluding yourself if you think the whole economy hasn’t benefited from immigration. Even when that immigration was through chattel slavery.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. The reason the US is so prosperous is due to immigration, mostly during the 20th century. The US cannot run off of just the existing citizens. Well, it can, for a while, but not indefinitely.
Oh, spare me. What an unserious statement. The entire point of an I-9 is to discriminate on citizenship, which is the document that HR pesters you on for your first few days at any new job anyway.
What responsibility does a non-citizen shirk? They must follow lows, pay taxes, etc. Even for things like social security.
I sometimes wonder where these concepts come from, because it sounds like somebody tricked you into thinking that non-citizens are somehow taking things from everybody else, rather than contributing just the same as everyone.
Surely you would admit that this Administration’s approach to immigration has been both chaotic and cruel. The workers who were given status in the United States expected a predictable process, not one that changes weekly based on the unserious personal whims of a bored, ill-informed and vindictive man. In any case, the prioritization of citizens’ wellbeing writ large is demonstrably _not_ a feature of this Administration’s agenda.
If you expect predictability from the government you're barking up the wrong tree. Every few years the tax code gets significantly changed with much less warning the the business cycle would prefer.
And its going so great for our citizens wellbeing. Oodles of programs for the needy smashed to bits. Corruption and self dealing out the wazoo. Protestors shot to death by ICE agents. A legendarily stupid war fucking up international shipping. Illegal tariffs changing daily.
How, in any way does this help the wellbeing of a citizen? Why bring up that very strange point, which is completely unconnected to the massive harm here.
If anything, these policies harm the citizens of the US in a myriad of ways. There's zero benefit to be had from any of this. Except for the joy tha tthe cruel feel in causing others misery, but that's not citizens, that's just a few sick people.
The mere suggestion that this admin is doing this or anything else for the wellbeing of its citizens is a complete departure from reality.
It's very clear what the motivations are, and just because they don't seem harmful in isolation doesn't mean it's going to have no consequences for everyone else.
A friend of mine is on a spousal visa and has lived in the US for decades. His wife and child are US citizens.
He's been doing the paperwork to finally become a citizen, and as one of the final steps he was required to leave the country and go to US embassy in the country where he was born (and hadn't been to in 30 years).
It was supposed to be a two week trip. While he was there Trump froze all greencard applicants indefinitely and refused to let him back into the country. He lost his job, his family lost their apartment, and he hasn't seen his little girl in almost a year.
His life is in limbo. The US rejected his application with no rationale or next step. His wife and child aren't citizens of his home country either, so it's not like they can move to be with him. Their lives are shattered.
Yeah, this is a pretty big risk. I'm similarly married to an American and we have an American child. Other country seems to have screwed the family, though. Mine (India) offers a fairly indefinite visa called an Overseas Citizen of India. And my wife's other nationality (Taiwan) also permits foreign spouses to live there after some straightforward paperwork. So, in theory, we could live in either of these other places together. I suppose I will only know when push comes to shove.
For now they're just waiting, separately, each living with relatives. There is zero guidance. The US consulate did not provide a reason for rejecting it other than the freeze, so there's nothing to even appeal.
Moving his wife and kid to his birth country isn't really an option. He doesn't plan to stay there. He has no job, no house, and no social network there. He barely speaks the language. His wife (US born) has a job and family here, and his kid only speaks English. Asking them to pull their kid out of school and move to another country until the US consulate decides to start processing paperwork again doesn't really seem like a reasonable solution, though with every passing week and month, it may end up being the only way they can be together again.
I don't want to minimize your friend's situation. But, a spousal visa is very different from being a permanent resident (maybe I am misunderstanding). If he got it through marrying a US citizen, there's a 3-year wait for naturalization and otherwise it's a 5-year wait.
Naturalization never required leaving the country, at least in my experience but things might have changed.
You're right, I fixed the wording. I don't know all the details, but I do think it's a recent change. They've been married for almost ten years. His wife and child are US born.
Trump ended in-country processing and now requires almost all greencard applicants to go to a consulate abroad. My friend and his wife were surprised and nervous when they were told he'd have to leave due to this new requirement (rightfully so, in retrospect).
You said he hasn't seen his daughter in over a year which means he was disallowed from coming into the country since August 2025, before that in-country processing was ended. It ended in May 2026.
Almost a year. The May 2026 rule ended it for a lot of people, but they ended in-country processing for his situation/country earlier. The new rules are complicated and constantly shifting nowadays.
I think part of the problem is that most Americans have no clue how the immigration system works. They see a large number of immigrants and hear horror stories about "chaos at the border" and "open border" and assume it's easy to immigrate. Even if you know someone who immigrated, you probably only know that route. Even though I'm a nationalized citizen myself, I can only tell you about the exact route that applied to my specific circumstances and beyond that mostly just know that it's extremely complicated and burdensome.
My wife is an immigrant and there were so many times when I’d talk about something related to her not being a citizen and the other person would say, but you’re married, doesn’t she get citizenship from that? They just thought it was automatic. People have no clue.
Or they do have a clue, actually want the cruelty, and assume that somehow, some nebulous "good ones" will be exempt from the cruelty. I was at a gathering and someone's garbage uncle was on one of those MAGA-rants about immigration and how we need to kick foreigners out of the country and how they don't deserve to be here and so on. I chimed in that my wife is an immigrant and you're telling me that my family should be broken up and my kid's mother should be taken away from her. The guy got all red faced and bashful and muttered something about how he's not really talking about my family in particular but all the bad ones out there who really need to go, blah blah blah. The usual MAGA-coward trash.
A lot of America has this world view that there's a hierarchy, and the people they know and like are above the people they don't know and don't like. One group gets the benefit of the doubt and the other group gets rules and cruelty.
Yes, agreed. I came on a fiance visa, then work authorization, then green card, then naturalization. Spouse (the OG US citizen) thought we just needed to get married in the US..
The number of times I've heard "just wait your turn in line like my grandparents" from people is infuriating. There is no line! We have a series of lotteries, and even these are straight up forbidden for people from a bunch of countries. Failing the lottery one year does not get you any close to immigrating.
The details of this story have glaring mistakes and don't make sense. I know this because I'm a naturalized citizen to the US and I came in on H1B.
> He's been doing the paperwork to finally become a citizen, and as one of the final steps he was required to leave the country
You don't have to leave the country to become a citizen. I recently became a US citizen a few years back and leaving the country is not required.
If you somehow meant Green Card, the timeline still doesn't make sense. Until May 2026, 3 months ago, you could do Adjustment of Status within the country without having to leave. So there's no reason why you friend would need to leave the country to get his Green Card unless he chose Consular Processing.
Getting denied CP is rare, but it means that they lied about something.
And if he did live in the US for decades without having his GC, well, applying for GC under Trump in this climate was a huge mistake, especially leaving the country having been in here for decades illegally. He should have waited 2 years until the Republicans were voted out and maybe he would have some modicum of amnesty where at least ICE would get him.
> His wife and child aren't citizens of his home country either, so it's not like they can move to be with him.
This also doesn't make sense. First off, the country's immigration is even more restrictive than the US?? They can't even visit on a travel visa??
They can definitely move to his home country, since he's a citizen. There's a spousal visas for almost all countries, and the child is most definitely allowed to come in since they can usually get citizenship via the father.
But there's no way he hasn't seen his daughter in over a year since the forced Consular Processing didn't start until this past May, and his spouse and daughter can most definitely travel to see him.
None of this story makes sense, so either you have the details very drastically incorrect or this is completely fake.
Didn't we used to fast track citizenship for immigrants who married a US citizen? I mean, the default should be that after the wedding you're now on track to be a citizen within a year or two if the marriage is still in effect by then.
This doesnt make any sense. If you are married to a us citizen you qualify for a green card. Then you need 3 years for citizenship. You never need to leave the country. Ive been through this process, this is absolutely wrong.
Inhumane is every choice made by this country under this regime. The "bothsides" and "no politics" crowds are equally as complicit in this as Trump voters.
At least for F1 and H-1B visas, one wasn't required to get a new visa physically stamped (for which one would have to leave) to switch schools (undergrad -> grad) or jobs. Is this forced now? Of course, if one wanted the freedom to be able to travel or visit one's home country, a new stamping was required if the old visa expired.
It's not ideal but a lot of us basically didn't leave for several years (even pre-Trump 1) to avoid the hassle of a new stamping.
Based on my experience 20 years ago you could only renew the H-1B visa in the passport in-country under extraordinary circumstances. In the majority of cases they reject your request and would tell you to travel to a consulate.
Prior to the mid 00s you could renew at any consulate but they changed it so you could only renew in your home country.
You are talking about change (or extension) of status, not visa.
US is unique in that the visa sticker and your right to remain in the country (status) are two different things. The only purpose of the visa sticker is to allow you to travel to a U.S. port of entry, where you apply for admission, and therefore legal status. You can have legal status in the U.S. while the visa sticker has expired, and your status can be changed or extended domestically. However unless you have a valid sticker you cannot leave and return.
Australia too - however, to get a renewal all you need is an online connection and a credit card, the renewal (at least for me!) goes through automatically. (Notwithstanding that Australia just increased the PR-renewal cost from ~400-500 to ~1400-1500 AUD)
The pause on visa appointments does not apply to H1-B and L1 as they are nonimmigrant visas. It applies to family based immigration visa, diversity visa, and EB-1/2/3 when you do processing abroad.
(You might have known that, but I thought it's worth clarifying).
Hang on a tick: does that mean we may have been the baddies all along?
I say this as someone who just sent their daughter to NYC explaining how we used to try to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to poor immigrants who just assumed this was a land of kind people, WTF? Could we not take a decade off from being prissy about our democracy *and* total cocks about how we actually act?
Not trying to make a political point at all and perhaps a controversial take. But, it’s specifically and maybe implicitly by design. Meaning they made this way precisely so you have to reapply so they can change their mind or block you out later. Nothing about getting a visa is permanent and you’re fully at risk when you move here with that type of status. If you evaluate the situation that’s always been the case.
That's the only source that I've heard for this quote:
> U.S. intelligence sources report that the one Israeli who is considered an extreme threat to U.S. national security is former prime minister and current prime minister hopeful Binyamin Netanyahu. Not only has Netanyahu visited convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in his North Carolina prison cell and advocated strenuously for his release, but he was once overheard by an ex-CIA agent as saying to a group of his supporters, "Once we squeeze all we can out of the United States, it can dry up and blow away." Considering the damage the neocons and their Israeli facilitators are causing for U.S. national security, Netanyahu may soon have his wish.
Israel is trying to stoke anti-immigrant policies, specifically they want to exacerbate Islamophobia. They're also well aware that the US is about to become staunchly anti-Israel once the baby boomers are gone.
There are many possibilities. The conspiracy theorists like to talk about how the people pushing the "pro Israel" actions in the U.S. are more loyal to Israel than they are to the US and so their end goal is to make Israel a regional superpower in the Middle East and to them in the end, it doesn't matter what happens to the US. I mean if you are loyal to Israel and not the US I could see this. Each country acts in their own interests and these people have been able to exploit the weakness of money in politics for their benefit. I personally don't fully buy that, but that's one theory.
Another theory is that the leadership in Israel is not really thinking long term. They are suffering from the same issues that other poor leaders like Trump are suffering from. They're just looking at themselves and what benefits them in the short term, so the moves that they're making are beneficial in the short term but very detrimental in the long term.
It's possible that they think that the US decline is inevitable due to uncontrolled spending, the decline in development in its people and other issues etc. and so they are grabbing as much as they can before it collapses and then afterwards they align with the next superpower there have been some moves in that direction to open up to China although small. Its a risky move because China may not treat them anywhere near as well so Israel has to work harder to earn its seat at the table but if the US decline is out of their full control then the next best move is to grab as much as you can before it comes crashing down and then move on.
> the current admin are working hard to destroy the U.S as if they're foreign agents
The U.S. had a draconian restrictive immigration policy from 1921-1965. That worked fine. How can you say with a straight face that someone must be a “foreign agent” to think doing the same thing again will have the same result? Surely the burden is on you to prove the opposite, right?
>And the U.S. has been doing even better since 1965.
Better for whom? People are struggling to afford groceries largely because the dollar is worth 1/165th of its 1913 value and the minimum wage hasn't been raised in 17 years.
I found a job that pays in BTC and I'm super hopeful about that one because my effective salary won't go down by 3-8% every year but instead will appreciate relative to what things are priced in.
That doesn't follow. I'm pretty sure they're talking about the effect of nominal wage stickiness: you're not constantly renegotiating your rate, so when there's fluctuations in relative value, it matters what unit the original number is denominated in. Compare with the case of a US expat being paid a steady salary in USD and converting to the local currency to make purchases, if you want an example with a similar mechanic but very different intuitive feel and practicalities.
(I'm not sure they're right about the overall effect though.)
It did matter. It was restrictive in actual effect, in that it blocked immigration from the places it was mainly coming from, and dropped the foreign born population under 5% by 1970.
The U.S. was at the apex of its power during those years. Those years are also why we remember earlier immigration waves as “working.” The foreign born population dropped from 15% to under 5% during that period. The Italian and Irish enclaves disappeared and so did the separate ethnic identity of those groups (to a large degree).
That’s a common misconception. The U.S. actually became the world’s largest industrial power before World War I. Germany had 60% of the US’s GDP per capita in 1910. It dipped during the war itself, but by 1960 it was closer to 70%. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/us-gdp-per-cap....
Mmmmhmmm. Ah yes 1921, the year both the Klu Klux Klan (and European Fascism) metastasized in society. All immigration controls come from a rather interesting, dark place; shifting of the Overton Window, and all that.
“I’m okay with racial prison camps if it makes us powerful” is the exact sort of moral bankruptcy to be expected from the people who defend this administration.
This was never about talent. It's about companies hiring foreigners on h1b visas at below market wages where their life in the USA is contingent on their job performance forcing them to work harder and longer than their peers to remain in the country. It's a situation that only benefits companies, while harming US citizens who have to compete with the lower wages of foreigners.
H-1B / L-1 are non-immigrant visas, immigrant visas are green cards yes. Pausing green card processing in consulates after (on sketchy legal grounds) forcing folks to not do adjustment of status for getting an immigrant visa inside the country is, indeed, how the admin is trying to get around doing their job the way the INA intends them to.
If you mean the memo earlier this year, it was about tourist visas and similar doing aos in country when they are not dual intent visas, which makes it iffy.
They explicitly said that for h1b and l1 aos wouldn’t be affected as they are dual intent visas.
They are doing that now too, however the problem is that h1b is used for roles outside of tech, believe it or not, and if you measure everything by Bay Area tech salaries a bunch of necessary but lower paying jobs will go unfilled
The idea is that the "same wage" you are talking about is too low to hire enough employees in the time needed that the company needed so they had to look abroad for people willing to work for that amount.
Being paid the same as the other guy doesn't necessarily mean the wages themselves stayed the same. Adding H1B candidates to the talent pool exerts downward pressure on salary due to the law of supply and demand. I can't say for sure whether the allure of a green card or threat of deportation play a material factor in lowering the average salary that H1B immigrants are willing to accept. But in an environment where talent is treated as fungible (even if it isn't always so), any such downward pressure affects everyone.
I used to think things like this as an American. But let's simplify. What if they're just fucking idiots and they realized they could rally a bunch of other fucking idiots to the polls?
So if you were essentially having a spasm about how no one understands how perfect the world was when you had all the advantages, I mean, we don't need a fancy theory at that point. It's literally old people spewing up acid about why their kids don't come to Thanksgiving, only we managed to create such a presence in the world media, it's a damned disaster.
These visa policies have already encouraged large tech companies etc to expand their Indian offices. It erodes the US tax base and means talent stay in their home country, which means more innovation happens outside the US. More start-ups are been founded in these countries because more talent is now there.
Trump first term was make Mexico and Vietnam Great Again as companies moved their manufacturing there.
This term its make India Great Again as companies retain and train their tech talent there.
I wonder if this has to do with the current economy and job market. Anecdotally I have found it very tough to find a new job (software engineering), though my previous employer continues to post job listings for green card applications as part of the required labor market test.
I'd say it's on the Trump administration being full of racists and white nationalists and wanting to deport immigrants.
Why do you wonder if it's economic instead of the Trump administration's announced policies of stopping immigration, including unconstitutionally removing birthright citizenship?
Conflating not wanting to compete with foreigners for jobs in your own country with racism is bad faith bullshit. Foreigners of the exact same race are equally unwanted competition.
Even taking you at your word, immigrants also create far more jobs. The economy is not some zero sum thing, with some fixed amount of jobs and fixed amount of work and fixed amount of wealth to be split.
Every economic analysis I have ever seen shows that there's economic surplus from immigrants entering a local economy; more jobs and more wealth is created, per person, than if those people had not come. In particular I'm thinking of some studies of local economy in Miami when there have been bursts of immigration.
Birthright citizenship is so weird, because when I think of my son’s birthright, I imagine things he’s entitled to because he’s my son. He’ll inherit from my estate, he’ll enjoy my love and encouragement and support, etc. The location of the hospital where he was born doesn’t really have anything to do with it, but now I have an entirely new fear about foreign countries claiming my child if my wife happens to give birth early while on a vacation. Like, I want to go to Israel, but don’t they have compulsory military service? I wouldn’t want the baby to accidentally become an Israeli citizen and forced to serve for some foreign army. Same with China. I’d love to see the country, but they’ve had some weird and draconian laws like the one child policy. For all I know they take some children to be raised by the state. Whatever their laws are… I don’t think they should apply to my children.
you have a kid like billions of other people in the world, nothing special tbh besides it is "your" kid
you just want a subscription pass to a country, and i think people like that are useless freeloader people who want none of the stakes and all of the benefits
cool you can code and get hired by some company, or maybe you start a company. so what?
This is rather weird framing since usually an additional citizenship (especially one in a country like the US) is considered a valuable thing to have for your child. Usually people claiming birthright citizenship are weird are doing it because they also see it as valuable. It’s also woven into the traditions of New World countries.
Regarding your concerns, I don’t see why it is unreasonable to simply renounce citizenship later or just simply double check your travel itinerary during the late stages of a pregnancy. This seems like at best an unfounded concern.
I agree that you can "just renounce" although notice that this won't necessarily work (it will for the US assuming you follow the procedure properly)
However being a dual citizen isn't necessarily all upside. Citizenship comes with requirements, particularly in some countries military service is mandatory and so if you're a citizen - even though you are a permanent resident of somewhere else, you must either go do your service or maybe pay a fine depending on the country.
You also get treated differently if things go wrong. Foreigners are entitled in most cases to diplomatic assistance from the representatives of their country. Your country can't necessarily do much for you, but typically you will get that phone call home to let loved ones know what happened, they can find a lawyer who speaks your language (but you'll need to find a way to pay them), if there's some paperwork snafu they might be able to help (often for a fee). It's at least nice, if you're jailed or in hospital after surprise food poisoning or whatever, to hear somebody who speaks your language.
None of this applies to dual citizens. You're "home" from their point of view, so no need to contact your diplomatic representative, maybe you have never been there since the day you were born and can't speak a word of the language but too bad.
> You also get treated differently if things go wrong.
Not treated differently. Treated the same.
You are required by law to enter your country of citizenship using that country's passport (this is true for every country). Not doing so can result in fines or jail time. This is precisely to stop idiots from playing the "foreigner" card to try to, for example get out of paying a speeding ticket or parking fines.
I think many (if not most) countries in the developed world should reduce immigration, and usa in particular should abolish birthright citizenship.
The first because a lower supply of labor is going to create breathing space for an entire working population who will see tremendous job upheaval due to AI automation. A lower aggregate demand on houses, services will also be welcome to take the fuel out of inflation, and maybe we'll regain some of that experience of true affluence, where scarce things (e.g. access to cabin in the woods, a rowhome in a walkable city, ...) are in abundance. There is also the import of an idle, criminal element that has very clearly reduced quality of life and safety in many places.
Birthright citizen should be abolished because birth tourism and illegally crossing the border to have anchor babies are a vector for foreigners to participate politically and claim imho undeserved welfare benefits.
I think largely these are the stated reasons of the administration too.
The administration has never justified immigration policy on economic terms, only keeping out criminals.
If it were really part of a coherent anti-inflation, pro-housing strategy, then, well, a lot of other policies would be different... (Including signing the ROAD act, not starting trade wars, or driving up the price of oil)
FWIW the Road ACT became law anyway without his signature, but yeah if he wanted to demonstrate he cared about such things he would have signed it promptly and proudly.
Birthright citizenship is a constitutional right in the US same as freedom of speech, religion, the press, and the right to sue the government.
The change would require 2/3 of all states to approve a constitutional amendment. It won't ever pass. Most of us are only citizens because someone up the chain was born under this rule.
My family came here in the early 1700s and fought in the revolution. It would be a disgrace for me to do anything other than support immigrants.
I think birth tourism is an overblown fear, but I suppose their answer is that poor welfare sponges and rich-ish passport collectors are both threats, for different reasons.
straight up lying and doomer boomer mentality, sad and gross.
very consistent correlations between migrants being net positive economic providers, more law abiding then native citizens, and just straight up regurgitating racist myths
mass deportations won’t solve anything economic when it’s the same admin hamstringing prices and rates with tariffs, war, and defacto support of the oligopoly
i really wish basement dwellers like you though of something original now and then
Or, crazy idea, we make life livable for the locals and then we incentivize them to have kids of their own? And before you say it, I'm an immigrant from the 3rd world myself. I'm not anti-immigratiom, but the birth rate talking point is a very poor one.
Not to mention how unsustainable it is anyways, what happens a few years down the line when the immigrants stop having kids? There isn't an infinite ocean of people you can import on a whim, and definitely not forever.
Attempts to find plausibly deniable rationales for this administration's anti-immigrant policies other than "gutter racism" are ridiculous.
Occam's razor. When somebody shows you who they are, believe them. Nativism is possibly the only stable and coherent political ideology this admin holds. Everything else is negotiable, but not this one.
I wonder what it would take for some people to give up assuming this administration is acting in good faith. I totally understand believing it during Trump 1.0 and I know that people might be hesitant to accept it early in Trump 2.0, but haven't we seen enough at this point for everyone to understand how this administration operates?
This is a response to the supreme court ruling on birthright citizenship. They're using the levers they do have, since that was removed. Anyone who agrees with the ruling should really read justice Thomas' dissent.
This one doesn’t mention tourist visas, so I am guessing they will be issued? I don’t get what benefit they see by inconveniencing and potentially harming folks that are already in the country legally to just live their lives. I get that this administration’s goal is to completely shut down all immigration and potentially even remove folks here legally too but there will be a cost to bear for the country because of that. It will be slow to come and so they will be able to blame it on the next administration
This is specifically for immigrant visas. USCIS distinguishes two broad categories of visas: immigrants and non-immigrants. Tourists are part of the latter group.
That's not accurate. H-1B is a non-immigrant visa. It's not intended for tourists.
From CBP's own website[1], emphasis is mine:
An immigrant visa (IV) is issued to a foreign national wishing to live permanently in the United States.
A nonimmigrant visa (NIV) is issued to a foreign national with permanent residence outside the United States but wishes to be in the United States on a temporary basis for tourism, medical treatment, *business, temporary work, or study*, as examples. Note: There are more than 20 different categories of nonimmigrant visa classifications.
We all know this whole H1-B situation was to cripple wages and to get an indentured workforce. Glad its being "paused". Would love to it being modified to not being tied to a company, or gottennrid of for good.
Sorry about the people who were using it, but also not sorry.
Maybe we Americans can get some of those jobs the companies were scamming the govt with.
Slanted take here, but this is exactly what they are doing with the federal government.
They like to complain that "big government inefficient and bad" while actively making it inefficient and bad. They are fulfilling their own prophecies.
Similar to immigration I'm sure. If all immigration is illegal then it's all bad!
Being anti-illegal immigration and pro-legal immigration doesn't mean you want to flood the country with legal immigrants. That's the case in the UK, by the way, where the vast majority of immigrants are legal and it's the reason for the growing anti-immigrant attitude of the natives.
People who are anti-illegal immigration and pro-legal immigration also have requirements like:
- there should be a fixed number of legal immigrants
- they should be well vetted (this may be lacking in the US and UK)
- legal immigration should be points based
- quotas for legal immigrants should be increased contingent
on the number of illegal immigrants which are expelled
- there should be checks to verify that visas are not abused (the way H1Bs are abused in the US with under qualified immigrants)
- asylum should be abolished because it's abused. It can be replaced by paying poorer countries to permanently host asylees.
It most certainly is hypocritical. You can not be simultaneously pro-legal immigration and support banning legal immigration. If you support banning legal immigration, you are by definition anti-legal immigration.
> Being anti-illegal immigration and pro-legal immigration doesn't mean you want to flood the country with legal immigrants.
If only there were something between 0 and unrestricted immigration, some sort of program where people apply for permission and the government issues approvals for individuals to enter its borders after meeting legal criteria.
> You can not be simultaneously pro-legal immigration and support banning legal immigration.
Nobody is banning legal immigration. It's being restricted. The headline itself says "pauses". Do you think no legal immigrant will be let into the US until 2028?
> some sort of program where people apply for permission
Yes, and if that program is being abused (just ask people here on HN about H1Bs to see how they feel), then you pause it until you figure out how to solve it.
You're giving the current government the benefit of the doubt, which I never do.
In 2024, I didn't think we'd be murdering protesters in the streets or kidnapping heads of state or inciting global tariff wars paid for by US citizens or watching the president take billions of dollars of bribes using cryptocurrency.
Why do you think thos government is responding to something in a good faith attempt at improving a system?
What will be next in Trump's destruction of the American Economy?
So far he has driven away allies, put huge tariff on our most loyal allies. Driven away manufacturing by tariff policies. Driven away immigrants and academics. Pushed a last century oil based economy. Shown us how our exquisite weapon tech will fail (this might actually be good in the long run). Along with crippling our cybersecurity and state departments.
50% of all American unicorns were started by immigrants. This is sheer stupidity to prevent the best of what the world has to offer when they are knocking at your door.
It’s unquestionably bad for the United States, but it will be good for the rest of the world. Time for US dominance to end, and Trump is doing a good job of that.
The impact on academics and research has already been felt over the last decade. US used to be the default destination for academics and skilled workers from China ever since the cultural revolution. They engrained themselves in the country, studied/worked at top univerities, taught multiple generations of students, did key research, worked at top tech companies, and overall were major contributors to American technological superiority.
Then starting ~2016 Trump and his DoJ made it borderline impossible for Chinese nationals to get visas, specifically targeting research universities. Since then new Chinese skilled immigration has slowed down to a trickle, and there has been a massive "brain gain" of existing talent in China's favor.
The result - China now has a booming tech industry, Chinese universities have overlapped Amercian ones in research output, China is a very close 2nd in the AI race. And as skilled immigrants continue to be driven out of the US China in particular will enjoy the benefits.
I think what voters want is for highly skilled founders to come and start companies and for normally skilled employment to go to Americans before foreigners.
Not just immigration, seems like travel in general is becoming difficult too.
It's a real shame that just when we have the tech and infrastructure to allow people to travel anywhere in the world within a day, for a single person to be able to explore the entirety of this awesome planet for the first time in human history,
that the worst among us have to enforce artificial borders and deny everyone this basic freedom.
Travel should be codified as a human right.
If someone can support themselves and doesn't harm anybody, what ethical justification does anybody have for denying a person from living where they want?
> to enforce artificial borders and deny everyone this basic freedom.
a very postnational view, humanist in a way, lipsius or erasmus would recognize it.
that sort of individuated cosmopolitanism only works for educated men and women with means, who have or have the capacity to self-actualize.
not for the masses. the nation is still a cradle to protect and nurture the commonwealth, and given that they took hundreds to sometimes thousands of years to form, i don't think borders are artificial in the least.
This is really frustrating. I'm (native-born US citizen) naviagting the visa process with my future wife. She has no intentions of working (enjoys being NEET) and there's zero risk of her becoming a public charge (our hh gross income is closer to 7 digits than it is to 5 digits), very frustrating that we're getting screwed by this under the justification of labor market competition and public charge risk.
Right wing oligarchs want infinite immigration because they get a larger labor pool and lower wages. Right wing normies want less immigration because they don't want to compete with the entire world for a job and don't want to become a minority in their own country.
Spend some time on X and you can see the two parts of the right wing attack each other over this issue.
> don't want to become a minority in their own country.
Yet in the next thread over, people are crucifying DHH for saying the same thing, except they are spinning it as "denying their right to exist"... somehow.
It's an obvious thing that anyone can understand, any group of people on the planet would behave the same way. It is natural to oppose becoming a minority, minorities are treated poorly and marginalized, by dint of human nature. The data showing it's happening are undeniable, the only way to defeat the argument is to shut it down by labeling the people who make it as hateful.
What? Where is the contradiction? DHH is deplorably wrong for the same reason that these right-wingers are deplorably wrong. (Even more so in the US because none of them are "native" to the country in the first place. Their immigrant ancestors just got here a little bit faster.)
Most right wingers are fine with that. As the recent GTA 6 leak shows, companies that embrace offshoring too eagerly learn the hard way that not all jobs can be sent to the other side of the planet.
Huh, this is rather useless argument. People in US already how companies, sport teams extract exorbitant tax breaks to move or stay put in particular state/city etc and nonetheless still end up moving because someone offered even better incentives. The jobs that are moving will not stay here for long even if all hurdles removed for immigration.
Ultimately, there is some value in each position, and in a corresponding set of positions on the left. Unlike many issues in US politics, in the long run this one is not well left-right aligned, and there is no single correct number for how much immigration is best. It's a bunch of trade-offs, which should be made democratically and end up somewhere around the number that the median person wants, such that roughly half of us are unhappy because too many immigrants come in and roughly half unhappy because too few. Arriving at that number and changing it slowly would be far better than wild swings.
The US seems hellbent on destroying its own economy, immigrants have always played a key part in it. Looking forward to Trump yelling about how the radical left has somehow undermined the US economy in a few months.
I often think about how far the Republican party has fallen from Truman with his "The Buck Stops Here" plaque on his desk to Trump's "I don't take any responsibility at all" response to poor Covid testing in 2020.
Meanwhile, just this week, he's taking credit for Biden's legislative efforts on cost reductions for pharmaceuticals that every single Republican voted against, and Trump campaigned against.
Plus he outright stole government money, not even the pretense of some kind of pass-through contracting entity or something, just brazenly stole cash. And later went on a PR tour lying about being destitute to get Congress to give him a big pension (presidents didn’t get one before that; and he was doing quite alright financially without it).
Whatever the party affiliation, he was an actual thief and scam-artist at the public’s expense, so wouldn’t be a great example of some high water mark for public service.
And they are. I read somewhere a few days ago that France is vacuuming up academics and advanced students that have been displaced by various recent policy changes that have proven to be hostile towards academia and research.
I don't know about vacuuming good students ... you probably have no idea what kind of students get hired in the USA nowadays.
The recruiting at a typical research university has an woke dimension to it - and I am reporting my personal experience, not hearsay:
Out of five scores each student was graded on, three were basically pure wokism like: describe how you overcame a difficult prejudice in life, or talk about how your presence will contribute to an inclusive environment ... only one was probing actual skills ...
PS: I have nothing against immigration - I am an immigrant myself ... a former immigrant student at that ...
I am against the selection process that ignores talented, skilled people and replaces them with mediocre people with some (probably made-up) nice woke story.
If you can't understand the utility of having welcoming and creative/tenacious people involved in your science (which your questions listed are asking about) then you are not nearly the expert in qualifications you think you are.
I am saying we are not selecting for those people.
When we hire at the university, we ignore creative, tenacious people and instead select mediocre people with a nice woke story that meets the woke requirements.
I would encourage you to reflect on what you think "woke" is, and why things that you think are woke are mutually exclusive from the skills and qualities you value.
"Woke" is a nonsense scare phrase at this point, when what you're actually taking issue with is valuing people's lived experiences and backgrounds as a part of what they contribute. Understanding where people come from and how that colors their world view is simply a good practice when doing anything, but especially when you're trying to do science/academia. Too many similar minds in a room will never produce what one with a diverse group will. Diversity is good science, and valuing it is not "woke".
Pretending the word doesn't mean anything is the most obvious sign that the person saying that is one of them.
If you don't like the term given to your basket of political beliefs give one that encapsulates it that you like better.
"MAGAts" is the obvious 'other side' parallel. Both sides have their crazies and denying that one exists means you're obviously one of them. As a Pacific Green I don't even like the fact that I can say "both" and people both know what I'm talking about and perpetuates the misguided notion that only two parties exist.
>When we hire at the university, we ignore creative, tenacious people and instead
select mediocre people with a nice woke story that meets the woke requirements.
Which university? Name some "creative, tenacious people" who were rejected by said university.
There's nothing in your HN profile to out you to anyone, so have at it. If you are unwilling to do so, I call bullshit on your anecdote. Or as they say, "pix, or it didn't happen."
Looking forward? He never stopped. It's been 10+ years of narcissistic scapegoating, even for times when he was President, even while Republicans controlled congress, and even over trade-deals, policies, and laws that he took-credit for and bragged about. (e.g. USMCA in 2020.)
> Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work!
The parallels between Emmanuel Goldstein and Trump Derangement Syndrome are impossible to ignore for anyone who's actually read 1984.
To borrow from Baum (The Wizard of Oz): today there's not only a curtain with men behind it, but a man in front of the curtain that everyone is pointing to (a la Goldstein). And if he stops being useful they'll replace him. This has happened several times already while the men behind the curtain and long standing policies he people hate remain unchanged.
Donald Trump: Billionaire in one of the top government roles of one the most powerful countries in the world; puts enormous banners of his own face over buildings; runs a personal distribution network to announce what he hates every day to his followers; regularly "jokes" about being a dictator; triggers perpetual wars with other countries; etc.
Emmanuel Goldstein: An exiled academic in hiding with a death-sentence over his head for criticizing the despotic government.
You: "People like myself who actually read 1984 know that Trump is basically Goldstein! Not any other character. The parallels are impossible to ignore."
If you really read the book, then that's tragic, because all you learned was how to embody doublethink.
And in the interim he's positioning his family and cronies to benefit from any rebuilding. Just as he literally sat in the White House and said, verbatim, "My children insider trade all the time".
As noted clearly in the article, this is a temporary pause while personnel are brought up to speed on the protocols. The real question is how just or unjust the refusals will be once it is unpaused. It's bad enough that the process is excruciatingly slow.
Users keep downvoting my comment even though it is the only literal interpretation supported by the evidence, without any evidence to the contrary. I would rethink only if it lasts over three months.
Note also that courts would easily overrule Trump if the pause became unreasonable.
Also, lol @ "the courts will fix it!" Fat fucking chance. I'm looking into my crystal ball: I see a 6-3 supreme court ruling supporting the administration's executive order to liquidate congressional power and fold it into the executive branch (as the founding fathers intended...)
You're obviously wrong, it obviously doesn't make sense to close down instead is implementing the training for the new protocols in parallel. And the current disruption is just as real of a question as the future refusals.
And obviously courts couldn't do it easily.
By the way, you also haven't provided any evidence for your opinion, why would you burden type replies with it?
Consular staff are trained on this as-is. It is hard to imagine a re-training on process that could take any more than two days.
And yet we have an entirely open-ended "We have nooooo idea how long this will take!"
Garbage. This is the same administration that paused all immigration from Africa except for "Caucasian South Africans" who were classified as refugees by default, regardless of their motivation on immigration.
This is just Stephen Miller doing exactly what he said he intended to do, and exactly what Project 2025 said the government should do (meanwhile, Trump, "What's that? Never heard of it").
It's a temporary, presumably short, pause to train the consular staff on the economic viability (or liability) of immigrant visa applicants. Why is it unreasonable?
Because if that were the case they should have just kept the existing staff that already had the requisite knowledge instead of letting DOGE fire 400 people from DHS who did this kind of thing. You have no backing for your presumption either. The Iran war was supposed to be short. The Trump admin is full of pathological liars. Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.
What, were they untrained before? Is there a reason this training would take more than (at most) 16 hours?
It's a bullshit excuse that's barely more palatable than the truth, brought to you by the same people who paused immigration for almost all of Africa except for "Caucasian South Africans".
Because you don't need to pause applications to train staff? Schedule a training meeting for an hour on Wednesday. Reschedule the appointments you would have had then. No pause in application.
They aren't really pausing for training. The training is an excuse for the pause. The pause is to cause pain and difficulty and try to get people not to immigrate. Because they don't like immigrants.
https://archive.is/cjW9v
So for those that don't know, it's quite common for a visa renewal to be required to leave the country. Depending on the visa, you might have to do this every year.
So just imagine, having a normal job in the US and you're asked to leave to renew your visa and this stuff happens.
That's no more appointment, not even a new date and you're now very likely unable to work and possibly can't even enter the country to get your belongings if you were to leave.
Just 'putting a pause' on people with existing appointments with no answer for when they might resume is.... Inhumane
In Canada I had to leave and re-enter for my permanent resident status to complete. It’s not that uncommon - but it’s a pain.
OP isn't criticizing the practise of leaving to renew. He's criticizing the this new policy of not letting you back in when you leave.
In Canada you never have to leave to renew or change status; it's just sometimes faster to do so. It's always the applicant's choice. I went through the whole work permit to PR to citizenship pipeline without ever having to leave the country.
I'm not sure if its the same in Canada but when I went through the process for Australia it depended on where you started the process. I started the process while outside the country so to activate my visa I had to leave and come back but if I had filed while in the country I could have stayed.
I do remember Canada telling my partner she wouldn't be guaranteed reentry while they were processing her PR visa until it was finalised if we left the country though so we just ended up doing the Australian half first and I never went back.
... It's always applicant's choice
> I went through the whole work permit to PR to citizenship pipeline without ever having to leave the country.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
People going from non-immigrant visa (H1B, F1 etc.) to Green card via i485 "adjustment of status" do not need to leave the country either.
Only consular processing (ds 260) are in scope of this pause
https://www.ellis.com/resources/immigrant-visa-pause-2026
Has more details than the paywalled article
Yeah, but they tried to change Adjustment of Status too.
https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/us-citizenship-...
I don't think the practice of the change is significant. Reddit has numerous stories of people who are still receiving it, so whatever that release says, things haven't changed. People seem to be receiving AoS based Green Cards the same way I did under the Biden Administration. It does seem to be a bit more uncertain which is always troubling.
I had a study permit at first. I renewed my permit, got a work permit, renewed my foreign passport and extended my work permit, got PR and got citizenship, getting visas to match my work and study permits, over a period of 10 years, without ever having to leave Canada. So my experience is that in Canada you never have to leave but in the US you do.
My classmates who had gone to the US for PhD programs, even those who were fortunate enough to get multiple entry visas, had visas that allowed re-entry for only the first two years of the PhD program. After that, if they wanted to leave the US, say for a conference or to visit family, they would have had to apply for a visa from abroad and hope to be granted one. In Canada, I could apply for the visa and get it while in Canada. Even comparing like with like, the American system seems bizarre to me, looking at it from a Canadian lens.
I did it 20+ years ago and I had to “land”. They’ve relaxed a lot of immigration rules since then so it might have changed.
Really? My spouse and I lived in Canada on work permits and were not required to leave in order to achieve PR status; nor to achieve citizenship status.
Prior to Covid, my wife had to exit the country to get photos taken as part of the permanent resident process. We took a trip to Montana for that purpose.
This seems to have changed in the past 3-4 years, but as the GP said, the original process did involve leaving.
"Flagpoling" was the beautiful euphemism for this.
I have friends who are expats and they’ve done this for years. I had one family member who left every six months to renew their visa.
It’s a chore, but very common around the world.
Were they able to come back when they did this?
I think the whole point of making someone leave is the possibility that they may not be allowed back in. If staying was a foregone conclusion then there’d be no point in leaving.
I can’t think of any other rationale. What, only border officers are able to process a visa renewal? Please. We can have offices inside the country handle this stuff, just like offices handle Trusted Traveler applications and Social Security card issuances.
The point is surely to get another chance to grill the immigrant and potentially bar them entry. Other countries don’t always do this: Canada for example has inland changes of status and I believe renewals.
> I can’t think of any other rationale.
Lack of real domestic enforcement would be an obvious one, so everything gets pushed to the border entry points.
> I can’t think of any other rationale.
For many visas, people are expected to maintain a home that they intend to return to in their country of origin. Forcing people to leave every once in a while makes this more likely (at least in theory.)
Maybe stimulating the airline economy? Is Big Plane at it again?
In the EU you do not need to leave to renew your visa. I don't know how common it is elsewhere.
Sorry, but that is not common around the world. Most countries do not have such a system. I.e. none of the EU/UK/Australia countries have that.
Were the visas for the US? B1/B2?
I know stuff like this happens for digital nomads in southeast asia or Schengen but the US generally doesn't approve of "visa runs".
Visa renewals are processed at a US consulate. You can extend your status (ie you ability to legally be in the US) while staying in the US, but if you want to renew your visa (your ability to leave and re-enter) you need to visit a consulate and those only exist outside of the US.
Is it? You’re generally able to renew without leaving. Unless you mean abusing a visitor visa?
In the mid 2000s, I had to leave the US for renewal while leaving all my hard assets behind. I had a plan in place in case I couldn't go back to the country, which did happen to some people. These people had their interviews, but they got held back outside the US, sometimes for months, waiting for the renewal process to finish. I had an immediate renewal, but was almost held back for some red tape reasons.
This sucks but it isn't new, unfortunately.
The scale is new. Obviously a nightmare or even a tragedy for individual people that it happens at all. But this happening to (tens of?) thousands of people all at once is a whole different thing.
Or imagine if an employee works for you and this happens to them.
I've had a couple of reports that this applied to. It's incredibly disruptive. "I've got to fly back to India to renew my visa." "Okay, when will you be back?" "I have no idea, it depends when I can get an appointment. It could be next week, it might be in a month." "[State department] We're pausing all visa appointments." "Well fuck."
Meanwhile I've got a tech lead who is 12 hours away from the rest of the team. He was at least willing to work US-East hours while in India (basically staying up all night and sleeping during the day), but there was a huge amount of management overhead and inconvenience for the employee involved.
At least the procedure used to be that one would try to get an appointment at the US consulate in one's home country and then arrange the trip around it. Also, at least in my experience (but importantly, not with this administration) was that one was never required to leave the US.
The main constraint is re-entry into the US and being able to travel outside the US. If one stayed here, there was no problem switching schools, programs, jobs, adjusting status to permanent residency or naturalization. On the other hand, for re-entry, one needs a valid visa stamped on a passport which necessitated a trip to one's home country. This stamping visit could be unpredictable.
Ideally, one would like to travel freely to see family and friends but I see a lot of comments implying that one is forced to leave. It might be true now but a lot of comments here are conflating several issues together.
The first time it happened (2023) it was a non-issue; he did exactly as you said, appointment happened as planned, and then he was back on his scheduled plane trip a week later.
Everything post-2025 has been a shit-show. There's no predictability or clear guidance, either from our lawyers or from the state department.
Predictability matters a lot in business. If you know what the procedure is and how long it will take, you can plan around it. If the rules change in the middle of the game you're left scrambling to keep up.
Predictability flew out the window with the last election. I simply do not understand how any business leaders supported this, but I suppose the ability to bribe their way out of chaos was appealing.
I've worked at companies where we transfer people to Canada during periods like this in the same time zone. Sometimes they enjoy it so much they don't want to transfer back to the US.
The consequence of choosing to not hire a citizen.
Of not violating the law? Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a company can't use a candidate's citizenship in hiring decisions.
Companies can though use proxies like whether a candidate would require visa sponsorship now or in the future.
> Companies can though use proxies
So it's a decision between violating the law and acting unethically?
Yes they all do this. "Anyone can apply. This company does not provide visa sponsorship."
It's totally not illegal to discriminate against people who don't have work status and the mere suggestion is absurd.
It's totally unreasonable to suggest that companies should have to hire random people from nation xyz only to have to sponsor their impossible work visas.
And I say this as someone who was on work status for a very long time.
Clarity, consistency, simplicity, predictability - this is what people want.
Because 'discriminating against people of other ethnicities' is kind of as old as time, the issue triggers our empathy radar a bit, which is reasonable, but in reality what would be 'the most fair to everyone' is just clear rules, and very light but important anti-discrimination aka can't discriminate on age, race, gender religion aka the basics.
There is a difference between "not providing visa sponsorship" and "using X as a proxy for not hiring non-citizens".
There is no obligation[1] to consider any candidate who needs visa sponsorship. Green cards are different. In hiring they must be considered like any citizen candidate.
For those seemingly not believing this, read: [1]https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/can-a-company-refuse-to-c...
Looks like people are downvoting facts, in the hope that this will change the facts.
No - that's not right - they can't discriminate against people who have work-status, but they absolutely can discriminate against people who don't have status aka arbitrary foreign nationals.
And it would be absurd if they could not.
Also, in some cases, employers should be able to discriminate, it's totally different to hire someone on an n-month visa vs full time.
Granted, it's different if they are Green Card.
It's also perfectly normal to want to hire locals, if it can be done on a national basis, then I think for some roles, state ought to be fine as well. If state governments had a state preference for in-state nationals, that would be fine, for example.
The issue here is by far and away mostly one of transparency and efficiency - the rules should be clear and the bureaucracy should just function normally.
The fact that anything takes months, or that you need lawyers etc is a sign of dysfunction.
It should be about as complicated as getting a prescription. 'One trip to an office and done'.
Most immigration is based on hiring people into jobs for which the skills don't exist locally, based on what I've read.
So, yes, they could hire a citizen, but then they probably wouldn't be able to do the job they were hired for.
This is just false. There are lot of reasons people hire immigrants, very few are truly incredible, singular talents. I lived with a bunch of Indian immigrants when in SF and it was universally guys not as skilled as me hired because there was a pipeline for Brahmin to the US.
Some of the worst programmers ive ever met have been h1b visa programmers.
Most immigration is based on hiring people into jobs for which the skills exist locally but which demand higher wages than immigrants. This is called a labor shortage by employers who prefer not to think of it as a salary shortage.
This is based on my experience in working with good immigrant coders who got the job over about equally capable locals, but more cheaply. The immigrants (mostly Indian and Chinese) tended to have weaker English communication skills but stronger work ethics.
This idea that paying more would magically create a pool of trained workers is a a form of fallacy as well.
There's obviously some degree of reality to it, but the equilibrium doesn't always work that way, and, shifting it would require sometimes a decade, and integration with other parts of the supply chain, like literally opening / expanding new schools, training programs, certification, convincing young people before they even select a college major - etc.
It's a very different equation for specialized work than for unskilled labour.
And should add - communication skills matter a lot, and I don't mean just 'vocabulary'.
I've hired tons of teams from India and it's often really hard, the cultural gaps are huge.
There's a reason that almost zero startups on limited budgets 'go to China or India' to hire.
Big budget and small budget films immediately choose lower wage centres to produce films, but it's not the same for certain skilled work.
And yes, 'funny accents' can cause people's otherwise great work to be overlooked, or for them to be devalued, obviously that one is as old as time.
The entire Silicon Valley would not exist were it not for immigrants behind he scenes, obviously, and speaking from direct experience there as well.
Many job reqs are scams intended to satisfy the "doesn't exist locally requirement" (superficially) so that exploitable foreigners are importable.
Nobody has 20 years of React experience, of course, but that doesn't stop people from listing this as a requirement - or a pre-selected group of people on the other end from asserting this experience.
Hire Americans?
Hundreds of thousands of tech workers have been laid off in the last two years. There are many skilled Americans on the job market. Foreign workers are here for the benefit of the United States, not as charity to the rest of the world, or as a source of cheaper labor for global employers seeking to undercut American wages.
> Foreign workers are here for the benefit of the United States
But that's the point, isn't it? Some foreign workers who "worked the US for the benefit of the US" are now unable to come back to the US. Isn't that bad for the US too?
Not until all Americans who can work have jobs
It's clear you are not a hiring manager. There aren't thousands of highly qualified engineers looking for work. I can't tell if this a troll post or not.
They would be looking for work with you if you were offering them better pay and conditions than where they're currently working.
Money does not fix the supply problem the parent comment pointed out (at least for fields that need multi year training).
Let’s say that tomorrow we need 1M nuclear physicists. How can money help? You still need to wait for the talent pipeline to divert.
Fortunately such ridiculous hypotheticals have no correspondence to reality. Most every job can be easily trained or cross trained. Mathematicians make good physicists. Nor is there some foreign pipeline of a million physicists. Such ridiculous argument exist only to perpetuate the lie of a skills shortage and deny the wage shortage.
Why are they needed in the USA, but not needed in their home country?
Yes, there are thousands of qualified engineers looking for work.
I’m very pro immigration, but “Americans are lazy and stupid , thus unfit for hiring” isn’t a winning argument.
Tons of Americans are out of work. I’ve personally seen my wages drop by at least 20$ an hour as well as the work being less stable.
Gasp, you might need to train someone a bit or have employees that will say no if you ask them to work on Christmas.
If I ran the H1B program it would be an unrestricted work permit with an automatic pathway to a GC after 5 years. Don’t get *convicted* of a felony and here you go.
It's clear you are not considering the long-term effects of labor policy. If we want a stronger domestic workforce, the answer is to incentivize Americans to develop the skills we need and to train them when they do not already have those skills. Mass importing foreign labor is not a substitute for building and investing in the domestic workforce.
everything this administration does daily is from one of three boxes
this is a little from the first box and the last box
imagine what's tomorrow or next week
meanwhile let's all enjoy the billion spent on making statues gold plated in DC and the ballroom and the arch and his drapes and his reflecting pool and 100 foot banners of his face on federal building and his face on gold coins, passports, park passes and the $250 bill
it's surreal
You forgot [INCOMPETENCE]
That's the foundational box for the actors, not a property of the actions
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Inhumane maybe, but our government should owe its first allegiance to our citizens wellbeing, not imported workers.
The first responsibility is to protect the rights of all people in the country. Citizenship is not required for protected rights
Why be a citizen at all if non-citizens have all the benefits and none of the responsibilities?
They can’t vote in most elections (except a few local elections in some places) and aren’t guaranteed entry at the border. They also can’t work a litany of jobs requiring citizenship.
They get a plenty bad enough shake. Let’s grant them the absolute basics of humane treatment and a fair shake at getting citizenship, sheesh.
Other countries get by just fine not having such a huge delta between haves and have nots on citizenship, and their social cohesion is better for it.
I have a better idea. Let them make their countries worth living in. If they don't like it in America they can leave. Because unlike Americans, we don't have another home country to retreat to.
Most countries have MUCH higher standards for immigration and their citizens much better off for it.
> Most countries have MUCH higher standards for immigration and their citizens much better off for it.
I think your math is off. The US is in the top 10 for GDP per capita, 99% literacy rate when the global average is 87%, the poverty rate is below average, the list goes on. Most countries in the world aren’t even considered developed nations. Immigration has been America’s core growth engine for two and a half centuries. There may be problems but you are deluding yourself if you think the whole economy hasn’t benefited from immigration. Even when that immigration was through chattel slavery.
I'm relieved that the magic soil in the United States can improve these peoples' lives.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. The reason the US is so prosperous is due to immigration, mostly during the 20th century. The US cannot run off of just the existing citizens. Well, it can, for a while, but not indefinitely.
Can't? Do citizens expire? Are you unaware of the concept of children?
A litany of jobs? Do you mean a minority of jobs - civil service, some clearance jobs, holding some offices?
The Immigration and Nationality Act makes citizenship discrimination illegal.
>Other countries get by just fine
Which ones are your model for the US?
Oh, spare me. What an unserious statement. The entire point of an I-9 is to discriminate on citizenship, which is the document that HR pesters you on for your first few days at any new job anyway.
Rights and benefits are two different things, surely you aren’t that dumb. Do you think non-citizens can get Social Security or a US Passport?
If they have almost all of the rights and almost all of the benefits but none of the responsibilities, which you ignored, then the point stands.
They benefit from the entire bill of rights (arguably rightly so).
They have better job prospects.
They can purchase homes with federal loans.
They can attend college.
They can invest and own companies.
They can even draw from Social Security.
For now, non-citizens cannot vote openly in congressional elections, but can in minor elections like school boards and municipal votes.
They cannot be drafted to defend a nation. They have to remain employed, but enforcement is questionable and creative solutions exist.
It's a pretty good deal. Oh, and of course dual citizens always have an escape hatch to leave one country and their debts behind should they choose.
If you hate it so much maybe you should leave
> Do you think non-citizens can get Social Security
I know they can (because I checked).
If they have paid into it like anybody else, crucially. They met their responsibilities.
> Do you think non-citizens can get Social Security or a US Passport?
Non-citizen Nationals can get a US passport. For example, folks born in American Samoa.
The vast majority of citizens never made a conscious choice to be one.
What responsibility does a non-citizen shirk? They must follow lows, pay taxes, etc. Even for things like social security.
I sometimes wonder where these concepts come from, because it sounds like somebody tricked you into thinking that non-citizens are somehow taking things from everybody else, rather than contributing just the same as everyone.
The government should not be doing inhumane things to people. This should not be a controversial statement.
Surely you would admit that this Administration’s approach to immigration has been both chaotic and cruel. The workers who were given status in the United States expected a predictable process, not one that changes weekly based on the unserious personal whims of a bored, ill-informed and vindictive man. In any case, the prioritization of citizens’ wellbeing writ large is demonstrably _not_ a feature of this Administration’s agenda.
If you expect predictability from the government you're barking up the wrong tree. Every few years the tax code gets significantly changed with much less warning the the business cycle would prefer.
[delayed]
And its going so great for our citizens wellbeing. Oodles of programs for the needy smashed to bits. Corruption and self dealing out the wazoo. Protestors shot to death by ICE agents. A legendarily stupid war fucking up international shipping. Illegal tariffs changing daily.
How, in any way does this help the wellbeing of a citizen? Why bring up that very strange point, which is completely unconnected to the massive harm here.
If anything, these policies harm the citizens of the US in a myriad of ways. There's zero benefit to be had from any of this. Except for the joy tha tthe cruel feel in causing others misery, but that's not citizens, that's just a few sick people.
The mere suggestion that this admin is doing this or anything else for the wellbeing of its citizens is a complete departure from reality.
It's very clear what the motivations are, and just because they don't seem harmful in isolation doesn't mean it's going to have no consequences for everyone else.
A friend of mine is on a spousal visa and has lived in the US for decades. His wife and child are US citizens.
He's been doing the paperwork to finally become a citizen, and as one of the final steps he was required to leave the country and go to US embassy in the country where he was born (and hadn't been to in 30 years).
It was supposed to be a two week trip. While he was there Trump froze all greencard applicants indefinitely and refused to let him back into the country. He lost his job, his family lost their apartment, and he hasn't seen his little girl in almost a year.
His life is in limbo. The US rejected his application with no rationale or next step. His wife and child aren't citizens of his home country either, so it's not like they can move to be with him. Their lives are shattered.
Yeah, this is a pretty big risk. I'm similarly married to an American and we have an American child. Other country seems to have screwed the family, though. Mine (India) offers a fairly indefinite visa called an Overseas Citizen of India. And my wife's other nationality (Taiwan) also permits foreign spouses to live there after some straightforward paperwork. So, in theory, we could live in either of these other places together. I suppose I will only know when push comes to shove.
> And my wife's other nationality (Taiwan) also permits foreign spouses to live there after some straightforward paperwork.
Not really.
Taiwan doesn’t like India either.
There’s a reason out of the 1.1 million immigrants/foreigners in Taiwan, only 6,000 are from India.
> His wife and child aren't citizens of his home country either, so it's not like they can move to be with him. Their lives are shattered.
What would the steps be for this? Hopefully the other country has easier entry and that would be a possible route?
For now they're just waiting, separately, each living with relatives. There is zero guidance. The US consulate did not provide a reason for rejecting it other than the freeze, so there's nothing to even appeal.
Moving his wife and kid to his birth country isn't really an option. He doesn't plan to stay there. He has no job, no house, and no social network there. He barely speaks the language. His wife (US born) has a job and family here, and his kid only speaks English. Asking them to pull their kid out of school and move to another country until the US consulate decides to start processing paperwork again doesn't really seem like a reasonable solution, though with every passing week and month, it may end up being the only way they can be together again.
I don't want to minimize your friend's situation. But, a spousal visa is very different from being a permanent resident (maybe I am misunderstanding). If he got it through marrying a US citizen, there's a 3-year wait for naturalization and otherwise it's a 5-year wait.
Naturalization never required leaving the country, at least in my experience but things might have changed.
You're right, I fixed the wording. I don't know all the details, but I do think it's a recent change. They've been married for almost ten years. His wife and child are US born.
Trump ended in-country processing and now requires almost all greencard applicants to go to a consulate abroad. My friend and his wife were surprised and nervous when they were told he'd have to leave due to this new requirement (rightfully so, in retrospect).
You said he hasn't seen his daughter in over a year which means he was disallowed from coming into the country since August 2025, before that in-country processing was ended. It ended in May 2026.
Almost a year. The May 2026 rule ended it for a lot of people, but they ended in-country processing for his situation/country earlier. The new rules are complicated and constantly shifting nowadays.
Confused as well - spousal visa gives them a green card, does it not? What is there to wait for? Are they postponing green card renewal as well?
It's just such mindless cruelty. It's hard to imagine so many people support this.
I think part of the problem is that most Americans have no clue how the immigration system works. They see a large number of immigrants and hear horror stories about "chaos at the border" and "open border" and assume it's easy to immigrate. Even if you know someone who immigrated, you probably only know that route. Even though I'm a nationalized citizen myself, I can only tell you about the exact route that applied to my specific circumstances and beyond that mostly just know that it's extremely complicated and burdensome.
My wife is an immigrant and there were so many times when I’d talk about something related to her not being a citizen and the other person would say, but you’re married, doesn’t she get citizenship from that? They just thought it was automatic. People have no clue.
Or they do have a clue, actually want the cruelty, and assume that somehow, some nebulous "good ones" will be exempt from the cruelty. I was at a gathering and someone's garbage uncle was on one of those MAGA-rants about immigration and how we need to kick foreigners out of the country and how they don't deserve to be here and so on. I chimed in that my wife is an immigrant and you're telling me that my family should be broken up and my kid's mother should be taken away from her. The guy got all red faced and bashful and muttered something about how he's not really talking about my family in particular but all the bad ones out there who really need to go, blah blah blah. The usual MAGA-coward trash.
A lot of America has this world view that there's a hierarchy, and the people they know and like are above the people they don't know and don't like. One group gets the benefit of the doubt and the other group gets rules and cruelty.
Yes, agreed. I came on a fiance visa, then work authorization, then green card, then naturalization. Spouse (the OG US citizen) thought we just needed to get married in the US..
The number of times I've heard "just wait your turn in line like my grandparents" from people is infuriating. There is no line! We have a series of lotteries, and even these are straight up forbidden for people from a bunch of countries. Failing the lottery one year does not get you any close to immigrating.
The details of this story have glaring mistakes and don't make sense. I know this because I'm a naturalized citizen to the US and I came in on H1B.
> He's been doing the paperwork to finally become a citizen, and as one of the final steps he was required to leave the country
You don't have to leave the country to become a citizen. I recently became a US citizen a few years back and leaving the country is not required.
If you somehow meant Green Card, the timeline still doesn't make sense. Until May 2026, 3 months ago, you could do Adjustment of Status within the country without having to leave. So there's no reason why you friend would need to leave the country to get his Green Card unless he chose Consular Processing.
Getting denied CP is rare, but it means that they lied about something.
And if he did live in the US for decades without having his GC, well, applying for GC under Trump in this climate was a huge mistake, especially leaving the country having been in here for decades illegally. He should have waited 2 years until the Republicans were voted out and maybe he would have some modicum of amnesty where at least ICE would get him.
> His wife and child aren't citizens of his home country either, so it's not like they can move to be with him.
This also doesn't make sense. First off, the country's immigration is even more restrictive than the US?? They can't even visit on a travel visa??
They can definitely move to his home country, since he's a citizen. There's a spousal visas for almost all countries, and the child is most definitely allowed to come in since they can usually get citizenship via the father.
But there's no way he hasn't seen his daughter in over a year since the forced Consular Processing didn't start until this past May, and his spouse and daughter can most definitely travel to see him.
None of this story makes sense, so either you have the details very drastically incorrect or this is completely fake.
True, it does smell a bit fishy..
Didn't we used to fast track citizenship for immigrants who married a US citizen? I mean, the default should be that after the wedding you're now on track to be a citizen within a year or two if the marriage is still in effect by then.
3 years instead of 5 for other LPRs
This doesnt make any sense. If you are married to a us citizen you qualify for a green card. Then you need 3 years for citizenship. You never need to leave the country. Ive been through this process, this is absolutely wrong.
Inhumane is every choice made by this country under this regime. The "bothsides" and "no politics" crowds are equally as complicit in this as Trump voters.
At least for F1 and H-1B visas, one wasn't required to get a new visa physically stamped (for which one would have to leave) to switch schools (undergrad -> grad) or jobs. Is this forced now? Of course, if one wanted the freedom to be able to travel or visit one's home country, a new stamping was required if the old visa expired.
It's not ideal but a lot of us basically didn't leave for several years (even pre-Trump 1) to avoid the hassle of a new stamping.
H1-B and L1 can actually be done in-country, but for some reading going abroad and get consular processing has a lower chance of RFE.
Based on my experience 20 years ago you could only renew the H-1B visa in the passport in-country under extraordinary circumstances. In the majority of cases they reject your request and would tell you to travel to a consulate.
Prior to the mid 00s you could renew at any consulate but they changed it so you could only renew in your home country.
You are talking about change (or extension) of status, not visa.
US is unique in that the visa sticker and your right to remain in the country (status) are two different things. The only purpose of the visa sticker is to allow you to travel to a U.S. port of entry, where you apply for admission, and therefore legal status. You can have legal status in the U.S. while the visa sticker has expired, and your status can be changed or extended domestically. However unless you have a valid sticker you cannot leave and return.
It's not unique: Japanese system is exactly as you described.
Australia too - however, to get a renewal all you need is an online connection and a credit card, the renewal (at least for me!) goes through automatically. (Notwithstanding that Australia just increased the PR-renewal cost from ~400-500 to ~1400-1500 AUD)
There actually is a pilot to renew h1-b visa foils while in the US without a consular appointment.
The pause on visa appointments does not apply to H1-B and L1 as they are nonimmigrant visas. It applies to family based immigration visa, diversity visa, and EB-1/2/3 when you do processing abroad.
(You might have known that, but I thought it's worth clarifying).
Hang on a tick: does that mean we may have been the baddies all along?
I say this as someone who just sent their daughter to NYC explaining how we used to try to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to poor immigrants who just assumed this was a land of kind people, WTF? Could we not take a decade off from being prissy about our democracy *and* total cocks about how we actually act?
Not trying to make a political point at all and perhaps a controversial take. But, it’s specifically and maybe implicitly by design. Meaning they made this way precisely so you have to reapply so they can change their mind or block you out later. Nothing about getting a visa is permanent and you’re fully at risk when you move here with that type of status. If you evaluate the situation that’s always been the case.
Unless you use the visa to marry Donald Trump, as his 3rd wife did.
The cruelty is the point.
Thank you captain obvious
Isn't this specifically for immigrant Visas? The work and student Visas (H1B / F1) are non-immigrant Visas.
Indeed it is. But that’s the point Miller, etc are trying to make.
We’re so screwed. Good luck to us ever building up goodwill again.
the current admin are working hard to destroy the U.S as if they're foreign agents.
not only are they making it hard & unbearable for families of US citizens & PR holders to be together.
while at the same time - discouraging talent to come to the US at a crucial time when talent is at a premium due to A.I development.
last the backwards energy policy of banning renewable energy.
> the current admin are working hard to destroy the U.S as if they're foreign agents.
Trump is an Israeli asset:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/adelson-trump-four-more-ye...
Even if this was true how would it be in Israel's interest to weaken the US of all countries?
You'd have to ask them:
“Once we squeeze all we can out of the United States, it can dry up and blow away.”
—Benjamin "Netanyahu" Mileikowsky
That's the only source that I've heard for this quote:
> U.S. intelligence sources report that the one Israeli who is considered an extreme threat to U.S. national security is former prime minister and current prime minister hopeful Binyamin Netanyahu. Not only has Netanyahu visited convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in his North Carolina prison cell and advocated strenuously for his release, but he was once overheard by an ex-CIA agent as saying to a group of his supporters, "Once we squeeze all we can out of the United States, it can dry up and blow away." Considering the damage the neocons and their Israeli facilitators are causing for U.S. national security, Netanyahu may soon have his wish.
(https://web.archive.org/web/20101121090204/http://onlinejour...)
I don't like Bibi and he should definitely go, but if that's your source... Enjoy.
Israel is trying to stoke anti-immigrant policies, specifically they want to exacerbate Islamophobia. They're also well aware that the US is about to become staunchly anti-Israel once the baby boomers are gone.
There are many possibilities. The conspiracy theorists like to talk about how the people pushing the "pro Israel" actions in the U.S. are more loyal to Israel than they are to the US and so their end goal is to make Israel a regional superpower in the Middle East and to them in the end, it doesn't matter what happens to the US. I mean if you are loyal to Israel and not the US I could see this. Each country acts in their own interests and these people have been able to exploit the weakness of money in politics for their benefit. I personally don't fully buy that, but that's one theory.
Another theory is that the leadership in Israel is not really thinking long term. They are suffering from the same issues that other poor leaders like Trump are suffering from. They're just looking at themselves and what benefits them in the short term, so the moves that they're making are beneficial in the short term but very detrimental in the long term.
It's possible that they think that the US decline is inevitable due to uncontrolled spending, the decline in development in its people and other issues etc. and so they are grabbing as much as they can before it collapses and then afterwards they align with the next superpower there have been some moves in that direction to open up to China although small. Its a risky move because China may not treat them anywhere near as well so Israel has to work harder to earn its seat at the table but if the US decline is out of their full control then the next best move is to grab as much as you can before it comes crashing down and then move on.
Weakened so it can be controlled as a golem of sorts to carry out agendas like paving over the Middle East for them, not necessarily destroyed.
> the current admin are working hard to destroy the U.S as if they're foreign agents
The U.S. had a draconian restrictive immigration policy from 1921-1965. That worked fine. How can you say with a straight face that someone must be a “foreign agent” to think doing the same thing again will have the same result? Surely the burden is on you to prove the opposite, right?
And the U.S. has been doing even better since 1965. So really the question goes back to you.
Either way, your whataboutism isn’t even relevant since those were congressional changes.
This is the executive trying to undermine the law.
>And the U.S. has been doing even better since 1965.
Better for whom? People are struggling to afford groceries largely because the dollar is worth 1/165th of its 1913 value and the minimum wage hasn't been raised in 17 years.
I found a job that pays in BTC and I'm super hopeful about that one because my effective salary won't go down by 3-8% every year but instead will appreciate relative to what things are priced in.
Do you pay your taxes in btc too?
Who cares when I can sell BTC to USD in seconds?
So, it really doesn’t matter that your job is paid in BTC, given that you could just convert your USD income to BTC whenever you want
That doesn't follow. I'm pretty sure they're talking about the effect of nominal wage stickiness: you're not constantly renegotiating your rate, so when there's fluctuations in relative value, it matters what unit the original number is denominated in. Compare with the case of a US expat being paid a steady salary in USD and converting to the local currency to make purchases, if you want an example with a similar mechanic but very different intuitive feel and practicalities.
(I'm not sure they're right about the overall effect though.)
> Better for whom?
Minorities and women, for a start.
Oh god I hope this lie is part of an attempt to get right-wingers on board with a “let’s roll immigration policy back to what we had in 1950!” push.
I hope this because it’d be hilarious if they got what they wanted and realized that meant actual open borders with most or all of the Americas.
Before Hart-Cellar we had national origin quotas, it wasn't a free-for-all.
For those outside the Americas, yes. Western hemisphere immigration had no meaningful restrictions until 1965.
We had little meaningful immigration pressure from the america at the time. The foreign born population dropped from 15% in 1921 to under 5% by 1970.
We’re backing away from:
> The U.S. had a draconian restrictive immigration policy from 1921-1965.
to “well ok not really but it didn’t matter”?
It did matter. It was restrictive in actual effect, in that it blocked immigration from the places it was mainly coming from, and dropped the foreign born population under 5% by 1970.
"Worked fine" is a pretty vague description for the year we had a Great Depression, world war, Jim Crow, Japanese internment to name a few.
The U.S. was at the apex of its power during those years. Those years are also why we remember earlier immigration waves as “working.” The foreign born population dropped from 15% to under 5% during that period. The Italian and Irish enclaves disappeared and so did the separate ethnic identity of those groups (to a large degree).
The rest of the world was bombed to pieces while the USA had an untouched industrial output.
That’s a common misconception. The U.S. actually became the world’s largest industrial power before World War I. Germany had 60% of the US’s GDP per capita in 1910. It dipped during the war itself, but by 1960 it was closer to 70%. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/us-gdp-per-cap....
Whether or not what you say is correct, it does not at all contradict GP’s two claims.
[delayed]
Bombed to pieces by the USA, ironically enough.
Mmmmhmmm. Ah yes 1921, the year both the Klu Klux Klan (and European Fascism) metastasized in society. All immigration controls come from a rather interesting, dark place; shifting of the Overton Window, and all that.
I believe that human flourishing is a better goal than state power relative to its rivals.
We also had strong unions and income tax rates as high as 95% on the highest income brackets.
“I’m okay with racial prison camps if it makes us powerful” is the exact sort of moral bankruptcy to be expected from the people who defend this administration.
This was never about talent. It's about companies hiring foreigners on h1b visas at below market wages where their life in the USA is contingent on their job performance forcing them to work harder and longer than their peers to remain in the country. It's a situation that only benefits companies, while harming US citizens who have to compete with the lower wages of foreigners.
Isn't that a work visa and not an immigrant visa
H-1B / L-1 are non-immigrant visas, immigrant visas are green cards yes. Pausing green card processing in consulates after (on sketchy legal grounds) forcing folks to not do adjustment of status for getting an immigrant visa inside the country is, indeed, how the admin is trying to get around doing their job the way the INA intends them to.
H-1B is dual intent, isn't it?
If you mean the memo earlier this year, it was about tourist visas and similar doing aos in country when they are not dual intent visas, which makes it iffy.
They explicitly said that for h1b and l1 aos wouldn’t be affected as they are dual intent visas.
Recently[1] Microsoft laid off several thousand domestic employees while simultaneously hiring a couple thousand employer-sponsored-Visa workers.
[1]https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-2026-xbox-h1b-vis...
Oh cool, good thing labor isn't fungible and nobody ever outsources.
What a brilliant plan. Lets make sure that we restrict the supply of doctors and medical personell, that's sure to improve care!
And yet, they never applied the simple option of ranking the visa applications by salary, and approving in order of demand for the talent.
That would be a market based solution that allows everyone to get the talent they need without driving down American wages.
But the point isn't about helping Americans, it's about being peedormatively against letting in brown people.
They are doing that now too, however the problem is that h1b is used for roles outside of tech, believe it or not, and if you measure everything by Bay Area tech salaries a bunch of necessary but lower paying jobs will go unfilled
If it's truly necessary, the fact that it's unfilled would be directly related to it being low paid.
And if the employer isn't willing to pay the cost of labor to fill the position, it directly raises the question of whether its "necessary".
I was a hiring manager. H1B candidates got exactly the same wage as native born. There were no differences.
The idea is that the "same wage" you are talking about is too low to hire enough employees in the time needed that the company needed so they had to look abroad for people willing to work for that amount.
Being paid the same as the other guy doesn't necessarily mean the wages themselves stayed the same. Adding H1B candidates to the talent pool exerts downward pressure on salary due to the law of supply and demand. I can't say for sure whether the allure of a green card or threat of deportation play a material factor in lowering the average salary that H1B immigrants are willing to accept. But in an environment where talent is treated as fungible (even if it isn't always so), any such downward pressure affects everyone.
The prevailing wage for H1B software engineers is a very good salary for most software engineers in the world.
It's common for the prevailing wage to be double what that person could earn in their country of origin.
And still exert downward pressure on wages. Just by virtue of having more people in the pool.
"Superpower Suicide" in the words of historian Timothy Snyder.
Also encompasses the self-destruction of military power, alliances, and beneficial trade.
I used to think things like this as an American. But let's simplify. What if they're just fucking idiots and they realized they could rally a bunch of other fucking idiots to the polls?
So if you were essentially having a spasm about how no one understands how perfect the world was when you had all the advantages, I mean, we don't need a fancy theory at that point. It's literally old people spewing up acid about why their kids don't come to Thanksgiving, only we managed to create such a presence in the world media, it's a damned disaster.
Like if your racist grampa got put in charge of US Treasuries, tell me how things would be worse.
These visa policies have already encouraged large tech companies etc to expand their Indian offices. It erodes the US tax base and means talent stay in their home country, which means more innovation happens outside the US. More start-ups are been founded in these countries because more talent is now there.
Trump first term was make Mexico and Vietnam Great Again as companies moved their manufacturing there. This term its make India Great Again as companies retain and train their tech talent there.
They will and after a cyberleek incident they'll rethink that plan.
I wonder if this has to do with the current economy and job market. Anecdotally I have found it very tough to find a new job (software engineering), though my previous employer continues to post job listings for green card applications as part of the required labor market test.
I'd say it's on the Trump administration being full of racists and white nationalists and wanting to deport immigrants.
Why do you wonder if it's economic instead of the Trump administration's announced policies of stopping immigration, including unconstitutionally removing birthright citizenship?
Conflating not wanting to compete with foreigners for jobs in your own country with racism is bad faith bullshit. Foreigners of the exact same race are equally unwanted competition.
Even taking you at your word, immigrants also create far more jobs. The economy is not some zero sum thing, with some fixed amount of jobs and fixed amount of work and fixed amount of wealth to be split.
Every economic analysis I have ever seen shows that there's economic surplus from immigrants entering a local economy; more jobs and more wealth is created, per person, than if those people had not come. In particular I'm thinking of some studies of local economy in Miami when there have been bursts of immigration.
Birthright citizenship is so weird, because when I think of my son’s birthright, I imagine things he’s entitled to because he’s my son. He’ll inherit from my estate, he’ll enjoy my love and encouragement and support, etc. The location of the hospital where he was born doesn’t really have anything to do with it, but now I have an entirely new fear about foreign countries claiming my child if my wife happens to give birth early while on a vacation. Like, I want to go to Israel, but don’t they have compulsory military service? I wouldn’t want the baby to accidentally become an Israeli citizen and forced to serve for some foreign army. Same with China. I’d love to see the country, but they’ve had some weird and draconian laws like the one child policy. For all I know they take some children to be raised by the state. Whatever their laws are… I don’t think they should apply to my children.
You can always relinquish citizenship. No one is forcing your child to be a dual citizen if they are born abroad.
Lol, no you can't. Most people these days can't.
Costs $2500 AND payment of all student debts.
This place (USA) is literally a fucking company town.
go make your own anarchist nation then
you have a kid like billions of other people in the world, nothing special tbh besides it is "your" kid
you just want a subscription pass to a country, and i think people like that are useless freeloader people who want none of the stakes and all of the benefits
cool you can code and get hired by some company, or maybe you start a company. so what?
This is rather weird framing since usually an additional citizenship (especially one in a country like the US) is considered a valuable thing to have for your child. Usually people claiming birthright citizenship are weird are doing it because they also see it as valuable. It’s also woven into the traditions of New World countries.
Regarding your concerns, I don’t see why it is unreasonable to simply renounce citizenship later or just simply double check your travel itinerary during the late stages of a pregnancy. This seems like at best an unfounded concern.
I agree that you can "just renounce" although notice that this won't necessarily work (it will for the US assuming you follow the procedure properly)
However being a dual citizen isn't necessarily all upside. Citizenship comes with requirements, particularly in some countries military service is mandatory and so if you're a citizen - even though you are a permanent resident of somewhere else, you must either go do your service or maybe pay a fine depending on the country.
You also get treated differently if things go wrong. Foreigners are entitled in most cases to diplomatic assistance from the representatives of their country. Your country can't necessarily do much for you, but typically you will get that phone call home to let loved ones know what happened, they can find a lawyer who speaks your language (but you'll need to find a way to pay them), if there's some paperwork snafu they might be able to help (often for a fee). It's at least nice, if you're jailed or in hospital after surprise food poisoning or whatever, to hear somebody who speaks your language.
None of this applies to dual citizens. You're "home" from their point of view, so no need to contact your diplomatic representative, maybe you have never been there since the day you were born and can't speak a word of the language but too bad.
> You also get treated differently if things go wrong.
Not treated differently. Treated the same.
You are required by law to enter your country of citizenship using that country's passport (this is true for every country). Not doing so can result in fines or jail time. This is precisely to stop idiots from playing the "foreigner" card to try to, for example get out of paying a speeding ticket or parking fines.
The failure mode is statelessness, and that's a very cruel fate to wish on anybody's baby.
I think many (if not most) countries in the developed world should reduce immigration, and usa in particular should abolish birthright citizenship.
The first because a lower supply of labor is going to create breathing space for an entire working population who will see tremendous job upheaval due to AI automation. A lower aggregate demand on houses, services will also be welcome to take the fuel out of inflation, and maybe we'll regain some of that experience of true affluence, where scarce things (e.g. access to cabin in the woods, a rowhome in a walkable city, ...) are in abundance. There is also the import of an idle, criminal element that has very clearly reduced quality of life and safety in many places.
Birthright citizen should be abolished because birth tourism and illegally crossing the border to have anchor babies are a vector for foreigners to participate politically and claim imho undeserved welfare benefits.
I think largely these are the stated reasons of the administration too.
The administration has never justified immigration policy on economic terms, only keeping out criminals.
If it were really part of a coherent anti-inflation, pro-housing strategy, then, well, a lot of other policies would be different... (Including signing the ROAD act, not starting trade wars, or driving up the price of oil)
FWIW the Road ACT became law anyway without his signature, but yeah if he wanted to demonstrate he cared about such things he would have signed it promptly and proudly.
Birthright citizenship is a constitutional right in the US same as freedom of speech, religion, the press, and the right to sue the government.
The change would require 2/3 of all states to approve a constitutional amendment. It won't ever pass. Most of us are only citizens because someone up the chain was born under this rule.
My family came here in the early 1700s and fought in the revolution. It would be a disgrace for me to do anything other than support immigrants.
This doesn't stop our politicians from completely ignoring the 2nd amendment so whats the difference
Just how many people are being born through birth tourism and end up claiming more in welfare than they pay in taxes?
I think birth tourism is an overblown fear, but I suppose their answer is that poor welfare sponges and rich-ish passport collectors are both threats, for different reasons.
Many don't bother coming back but the ones the do are almost always very expensive.
straight up lying and doomer boomer mentality, sad and gross.
very consistent correlations between migrants being net positive economic providers, more law abiding then native citizens, and just straight up regurgitating racist myths
mass deportations won’t solve anything economic when it’s the same admin hamstringing prices and rates with tariffs, war, and defacto support of the oligopoly
i really wish basement dwellers like you though of something original now and then
Our birthrate has been below replacement for several years now. We need immigrants to mitigate that.
Or, crazy idea, we make life livable for the locals and then we incentivize them to have kids of their own? And before you say it, I'm an immigrant from the 3rd world myself. I'm not anti-immigratiom, but the birth rate talking point is a very poor one.
Not to mention how unsustainable it is anyways, what happens a few years down the line when the immigrants stop having kids? There isn't an infinite ocean of people you can import on a whim, and definitely not forever.
Are you... genuinely this naive and ignorant to what's happening in USA?
didn't big tech co's layoff thousands of people here and then filed for thousands more h1b ?
Attempts to find plausibly deniable rationales for this administration's anti-immigrant policies other than "gutter racism" are ridiculous.
Occam's razor. When somebody shows you who they are, believe them. Nativism is possibly the only stable and coherent political ideology this admin holds. Everything else is negotiable, but not this one.
"Everything I don't like is racist/sexist/ableist/something-ist"
They certainly aren’t doing this out of any particular love for American workers.
I wonder what it would take for some people to give up assuming this administration is acting in good faith. I totally understand believing it during Trump 1.0 and I know that people might be hesitant to accept it early in Trump 2.0, but haven't we seen enough at this point for everyone to understand how this administration operates?
They are not connected - this is a pause on immigrant visas, not work visas.
This is the most missed point in all of the flame throwing in this thread.
Does this even buy love from the voters? What about the GDP decrease from this?
This is a response to the supreme court ruling on birthright citizenship. They're using the levers they do have, since that was removed. Anyone who agrees with the ruling should really read justice Thomas' dissent.
This one doesn’t mention tourist visas, so I am guessing they will be issued? I don’t get what benefit they see by inconveniencing and potentially harming folks that are already in the country legally to just live their lives. I get that this administration’s goal is to completely shut down all immigration and potentially even remove folks here legally too but there will be a cost to bear for the country because of that. It will be slow to come and so they will be able to blame it on the next administration
This is specifically for immigrant visas. USCIS distinguishes two broad categories of visas: immigrants and non-immigrants. Tourists are part of the latter group.
That's not accurate. H-1B is a non-immigrant visa. It's not intended for tourists.
From CBP's own website[1], emphasis is mine:
[1]: https://www.help.cbp.gov/s/article/Article-1027?language=en_...
Well, for starters, good.
We all know this whole H1-B situation was to cripple wages and to get an indentured workforce. Glad its being "paused". Would love to it being modified to not being tied to a company, or gottennrid of for good.
Sorry about the people who were using it, but also not sorry.
Maybe we Americans can get some of those jobs the companies were scamming the govt with.
H1-Bs aren't being paused. This is for immigrant visas.
Pity. Cause that's the system that needs overhauled for killed.
"We're not anti-immigration, we're only anti-illegal immigration!"
* indefinitely pauses legal immigration *
Slanted take here, but this is exactly what they are doing with the federal government.
They like to complain that "big government inefficient and bad" while actively making it inefficient and bad. They are fulfilling their own prophecies.
Similar to immigration I'm sure. If all immigration is illegal then it's all bad!
It’s not slanted, it’s accurate.
The right wing doesn’t want to run the government, they want to occupy it so it doesn’t run except to enrich themselves.
If you're saying that's hypocritical, it's not.
Being anti-illegal immigration and pro-legal immigration doesn't mean you want to flood the country with legal immigrants. That's the case in the UK, by the way, where the vast majority of immigrants are legal and it's the reason for the growing anti-immigrant attitude of the natives.
People who are anti-illegal immigration and pro-legal immigration also have requirements like:
- there should be a fixed number of legal immigrants
- they should be well vetted (this may be lacking in the US and UK)
- legal immigration should be points based
- quotas for legal immigrants should be increased contingent on the number of illegal immigrants which are expelled
- there should be checks to verify that visas are not abused (the way H1Bs are abused in the US with under qualified immigrants)
- asylum should be abolished because it's abused. It can be replaced by paying poorer countries to permanently host asylees.
It most certainly is hypocritical. You can not be simultaneously pro-legal immigration and support banning legal immigration. If you support banning legal immigration, you are by definition anti-legal immigration.
> Being anti-illegal immigration and pro-legal immigration doesn't mean you want to flood the country with legal immigrants.
If only there were something between 0 and unrestricted immigration, some sort of program where people apply for permission and the government issues approvals for individuals to enter its borders after meeting legal criteria.
> You can not be simultaneously pro-legal immigration and support banning legal immigration.
Nobody is banning legal immigration. It's being restricted. The headline itself says "pauses". Do you think no legal immigrant will be let into the US until 2028?
> some sort of program where people apply for permission
Yes, and if that program is being abused (just ask people here on HN about H1Bs to see how they feel), then you pause it until you figure out how to solve it.
You're giving the current government the benefit of the doubt, which I never do.
In 2024, I didn't think we'd be murdering protesters in the streets or kidnapping heads of state or inciting global tariff wars paid for by US citizens or watching the president take billions of dollars of bribes using cryptocurrency.
Why do you think thos government is responding to something in a good faith attempt at improving a system?
Everything they say is a lie.
Is this in retaliation for a federal judge ruling three days ago that Trump's pause on Diversity Visa processing was unlawful?
Or is this in retaliation for a federal judge ruling 6 days ago that Trump's ban on immigration from 75 countries was unlawful?
Yes.
What will be next in Trump's destruction of the American Economy?
So far he has driven away allies, put huge tariff on our most loyal allies. Driven away manufacturing by tariff policies. Driven away immigrants and academics. Pushed a last century oil based economy. Shown us how our exquisite weapon tech will fail (this might actually be good in the long run). Along with crippling our cybersecurity and state departments.
Well at least you're healt... oh wait.
50% of all American unicorns were started by immigrants. This is sheer stupidity to prevent the best of what the world has to offer when they are knocking at your door.
It’s unquestionably bad for the United States, but it will be good for the rest of the world. Time for US dominance to end, and Trump is doing a good job of that.
And now they can be more evenly distributed all over the world. I'd call it a net win even if administration did not think it this way.
People think immigrants come to just take. When they can contribute to the economy.
The impact on academics and research has already been felt over the last decade. US used to be the default destination for academics and skilled workers from China ever since the cultural revolution. They engrained themselves in the country, studied/worked at top univerities, taught multiple generations of students, did key research, worked at top tech companies, and overall were major contributors to American technological superiority.
Then starting ~2016 Trump and his DoJ made it borderline impossible for Chinese nationals to get visas, specifically targeting research universities. Since then new Chinese skilled immigration has slowed down to a trickle, and there has been a massive "brain gain" of existing talent in China's favor.
The result - China now has a booming tech industry, Chinese universities have overlapped Amercian ones in research output, China is a very close 2nd in the AI race. And as skilled immigrants continue to be driven out of the US China in particular will enjoy the benefits.
I think what voters want is for highly skilled founders to come and start companies and for normally skilled employment to go to Americans before foreigners.
What is a "normally skilled" job? Working at Home Depot?
What % of immigrants create unicorns?
Not just immigration, seems like travel in general is becoming difficult too.
It's a real shame that just when we have the tech and infrastructure to allow people to travel anywhere in the world within a day, for a single person to be able to explore the entirety of this awesome planet for the first time in human history,
that the worst among us have to enforce artificial borders and deny everyone this basic freedom.
Travel should be codified as a human right.
If someone can support themselves and doesn't harm anybody, what ethical justification does anybody have for denying a person from living where they want?
> to enforce artificial borders and deny everyone this basic freedom.
a very postnational view, humanist in a way, lipsius or erasmus would recognize it.
that sort of individuated cosmopolitanism only works for educated men and women with means, who have or have the capacity to self-actualize.
not for the masses. the nation is still a cradle to protect and nurture the commonwealth, and given that they took hundreds to sometimes thousands of years to form, i don't think borders are artificial in the least.
There's no reason why we should worship borders, or the state.
> that sort of individuated cosmopolitanism only works for educated men and women with means, who have or have the capacity to self-actualize.
So because not everyone can afford to travel freely we shouldn't let anyone do that?
This is really frustrating. I'm (native-born US citizen) naviagting the visa process with my future wife. She has no intentions of working (enjoys being NEET) and there's zero risk of her becoming a public charge (our hh gross income is closer to 7 digits than it is to 5 digits), very frustrating that we're getting screwed by this under the justification of labor market competition and public charge risk.
> closed for training
So like the DMV then?
Same ruling class that goes on a bunch of tangents about birth rates stops immigrant visa processing for US citizens who married abroad.
This is classic goomba fallacy.
Right wing oligarchs want infinite immigration because they get a larger labor pool and lower wages. Right wing normies want less immigration because they don't want to compete with the entire world for a job and don't want to become a minority in their own country.
Spend some time on X and you can see the two parts of the right wing attack each other over this issue.
> don't want to become a minority in their own country.
Yet in the next thread over, people are crucifying DHH for saying the same thing, except they are spinning it as "denying their right to exist"... somehow.
It's an obvious thing that anyone can understand, any group of people on the planet would behave the same way. It is natural to oppose becoming a minority, minorities are treated poorly and marginalized, by dint of human nature. The data showing it's happening are undeniable, the only way to defeat the argument is to shut it down by labeling the people who make it as hateful.
What? Where is the contradiction? DHH is deplorably wrong for the same reason that these right-wingers are deplorably wrong. (Even more so in the US because none of them are "native" to the country in the first place. Their immigrant ancestors just got here a little bit faster.)
Jobs will just move abroad then: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-11/trump-s-h...
Most right wingers are fine with that. As the recent GTA 6 leak shows, companies that embrace offshoring too eagerly learn the hard way that not all jobs can be sent to the other side of the planet.
Huh, this is rather useless argument. People in US already how companies, sport teams extract exorbitant tax breaks to move or stay put in particular state/city etc and nonetheless still end up moving because someone offered even better incentives. The jobs that are moving will not stay here for long even if all hurdles removed for immigration.
Ultimately, there is some value in each position, and in a corresponding set of positions on the left. Unlike many issues in US politics, in the long run this one is not well left-right aligned, and there is no single correct number for how much immigration is best. It's a bunch of trade-offs, which should be made democratically and end up somewhere around the number that the median person wants, such that roughly half of us are unhappy because too many immigrants come in and roughly half unhappy because too few. Arriving at that number and changing it slowly would be far better than wild swings.
They stopped it for those who married men as well
The US seems hellbent on destroying its own economy, immigrants have always played a key part in it. Looking forward to Trump yelling about how the radical left has somehow undermined the US economy in a few months.
Everything is someone else's fault. The buck never stops with him.
I’d guess Miller is the main driver of this given what we know about that loser (and freak).
Huge freak
I often think about how far the Republican party has fallen from Truman with his "The Buck Stops Here" plaque on his desk to Trump's "I don't take any responsibility at all" response to poor Covid testing in 2020.
Meanwhile, just this week, he's taking credit for Biden's legislative efforts on cost reductions for pharmaceuticals that every single Republican voted against, and Trump campaigned against.
Truman was a Democrat.
Plus he outright stole government money, not even the pretense of some kind of pass-through contracting entity or something, just brazenly stole cash. And later went on a PR tour lying about being destitute to get Congress to give him a big pension (presidents didn’t get one before that; and he was doing quite alright financially without it).
Whatever the party affiliation, he was an actual thief and scam-artist at the public’s expense, so wouldn’t be a great example of some high water mark for public service.
Well, others can bent in other direction and boost their economy by taking in all immigrants that were US bound.
And they are. I read somewhere a few days ago that France is vacuuming up academics and advanced students that have been displaced by various recent policy changes that have proven to be hostile towards academia and research.
As a former academic scientist, I suspect it's not gonna work out like they think it will--the process will self select for mostly lemons.
Ah, vacuuming academics and advanced students is same as taking million immigrants for low skill jobs.
I don't know about vacuuming good students ... you probably have no idea what kind of students get hired in the USA nowadays.
The recruiting at a typical research university has an woke dimension to it - and I am reporting my personal experience, not hearsay:
Out of five scores each student was graded on, three were basically pure wokism like: describe how you overcame a difficult prejudice in life, or talk about how your presence will contribute to an inclusive environment ... only one was probing actual skills ...
PS: I have nothing against immigration - I am an immigrant myself ... a former immigrant student at that ...
I am against the selection process that ignores talented, skilled people and replaces them with mediocre people with some (probably made-up) nice woke story.
If you can't understand the utility of having welcoming and creative/tenacious people involved in your science (which your questions listed are asking about) then you are not nearly the expert in qualifications you think you are.
You misunderstood my reply completely.
I am saying we are not selecting for those people.
When we hire at the university, we ignore creative, tenacious people and instead select mediocre people with a nice woke story that meets the woke requirements.
I would encourage you to reflect on what you think "woke" is, and why things that you think are woke are mutually exclusive from the skills and qualities you value.
"Woke" is a nonsense scare phrase at this point, when what you're actually taking issue with is valuing people's lived experiences and backgrounds as a part of what they contribute. Understanding where people come from and how that colors their world view is simply a good practice when doing anything, but especially when you're trying to do science/academia. Too many similar minds in a room will never produce what one with a diverse group will. Diversity is good science, and valuing it is not "woke".
Pretending the word doesn't mean anything is the most obvious sign that the person saying that is one of them.
If you don't like the term given to your basket of political beliefs give one that encapsulates it that you like better.
"MAGAts" is the obvious 'other side' parallel. Both sides have their crazies and denying that one exists means you're obviously one of them. As a Pacific Green I don't even like the fact that I can say "both" and people both know what I'm talking about and perpetuates the misguided notion that only two parties exist.
>When we hire at the university, we ignore creative, tenacious people and instead select mediocre people with a nice woke story that meets the woke requirements.
Which university? Name some "creative, tenacious people" who were rejected by said university.
There's nothing in your HN profile to out you to anyone, so have at it. If you are unwilling to do so, I call bullshit on your anecdote. Or as they say, "pix, or it didn't happen."
I'm sure you can name this university, then. So we can compare the actual questions versus your weasel wordy, "basically" "like".
Looking forward? He never stopped. It's been 10+ years of narcissistic scapegoating, even for times when he was President, even while Republicans controlled congress, and even over trade-deals, policies, and laws that he took-credit for and bragged about. (e.g. USMCA in 2020.)
> Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work!
-- 1984
The parallels between Emmanuel Goldstein and Trump Derangement Syndrome are impossible to ignore for anyone who's actually read 1984.
To borrow from Baum (The Wizard of Oz): today there's not only a curtain with men behind it, but a man in front of the curtain that everyone is pointing to (a la Goldstein). And if he stops being useful they'll replace him. This has happened several times already while the men behind the curtain and long standing policies he people hate remain unchanged.
Donald Trump: Billionaire in one of the top government roles of one the most powerful countries in the world; puts enormous banners of his own face over buildings; runs a personal distribution network to announce what he hates every day to his followers; regularly "jokes" about being a dictator; triggers perpetual wars with other countries; etc.
Emmanuel Goldstein: An exiled academic in hiding with a death-sentence over his head for criticizing the despotic government.
You: "People like myself who actually read 1984 know that Trump is basically Goldstein! Not any other character. The parallels are impossible to ignore."
If you really read the book, then that's tragic, because all you learned was how to embody doublethink.
Most damage will be realized after he's dead
And in the interim he's positioning his family and cronies to benefit from any rebuilding. Just as he literally sat in the White House and said, verbatim, "My children insider trade all the time".
As noted clearly in the article, this is a temporary pause while personnel are brought up to speed on the protocols. The real question is how just or unjust the refusals will be once it is unpaused. It's bad enough that the process is excruciatingly slow.
Users keep downvoting my comment even though it is the only literal interpretation supported by the evidence, without any evidence to the contrary. I would rethink only if it lasts over three months.
Note also that courts would easily overrule Trump if the pause became unreasonable.
Or as the saying goes: nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.
Also, lol @ "the courts will fix it!" Fat fucking chance. I'm looking into my crystal ball: I see a 6-3 supreme court ruling supporting the administration's executive order to liquidate congressional power and fold it into the executive branch (as the founding fathers intended...)
If you believe such nonsense, go bet on it on Polymarket. Put your money where your mouth is. Don't post such ridiculous assertions here.
You're obviously wrong, it obviously doesn't make sense to close down instead is implementing the training for the new protocols in parallel. And the current disruption is just as real of a question as the future refusals. And obviously courts couldn't do it easily.
By the way, you also haven't provided any evidence for your opinion, why would you burden type replies with it?
The evidence is the title and the content of the article, so read it. I am not the one to jump to conclusions.
Consular staff are trained on this as-is. It is hard to imagine a re-training on process that could take any more than two days.
And yet we have an entirely open-ended "We have nooooo idea how long this will take!"
Garbage. This is the same administration that paused all immigration from Africa except for "Caucasian South Africans" who were classified as refugees by default, regardless of their motivation on immigration.
This is just Stephen Miller doing exactly what he said he intended to do, and exactly what Project 2025 said the government should do (meanwhile, Trump, "What's that? Never heard of it").
> "We have nooooo idea how long this will take!"
It will take about two weeks. Is that right, two weeks? We'll have it done in about two weeks I'm told by some, very intelligent people.
It's a temporary, presumably short, pause to train the consular staff on the economic viability (or liability) of immigrant visa applicants. Why is it unreasonable?
Because if that were the case they should have just kept the existing staff that already had the requisite knowledge instead of letting DOGE fire 400 people from DHS who did this kind of thing. You have no backing for your presumption either. The Iran war was supposed to be short. The Trump admin is full of pathological liars. Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, we should assume good faith, the Trump administration has a clear track record of being reasonable and sticking to their word.
What, were they untrained before? Is there a reason this training would take more than (at most) 16 hours?
It's a bullshit excuse that's barely more palatable than the truth, brought to you by the same people who paused immigration for almost all of Africa except for "Caucasian South Africans".
Afrikaaners are a subgroup of what you refer to as Caucasians in South Africa.
Because you don't need to pause applications to train staff? Schedule a training meeting for an hour on Wednesday. Reschedule the appointments you would have had then. No pause in application.
They aren't really pausing for training. The training is an excuse for the pause. The pause is to cause pain and difficulty and try to get people not to immigrate. Because they don't like immigrants.