And don't forget that US consulates in 75 countries, or approximately a third of the globe, have stopped conducting Green Card interviews.

By the way, if you move outside the country, you lose Domicile which is required to sponsor the visa. And if you don't spend enough time in their country visiting them, your application can be temporary "denied" (delayed) with a request for evidence (that the relationship is real) they'll spend 3 months deliberating over.

Today's news make this crystal clear: the current admin does not want citizens marrying outside the country, regardless of how quickly the marriage rate among US population is falling.

Happens as well in Germany and it's pure insanity. The US at least does not depend on migration as much as Germany, I believe.

Even the current right wing party CDU doesn't seem to want to make migration harder, but when the extremist party AfD gets voted into office, an already highly damaged balance will break.

Sad how people become so detected from reality that they make their society irrelevant and destroying a lot of wealth in the process.

IANAL. My understanding is that you can do consular processing even if you are in the US, it's just that you need to leave to do the interview (and things like biometrics) and get the actual visa.

Now I'm not sure if you are allowed to re-enter after your interview before your case is decided/you get the visa but I would imagine so (if have valid visa), you would just need to exit again to get the visa later.

> You need to be have a job and be on a valid visa to even apply for a green card.

False

You don’t need a job to apply for green card.

Valid visa, yes. But that’s easy.

From what I could understand from the 6-page memorandum, (my paraphrase) "the law allows us to be nice and convenient, but doesn't require us to be nice and convenient, so we decided to make things hard and cruel going forward"

The current administration is sending a pretty clear message to immigrants.

How is this good in any way?

How could this ever help to build stronger industries or trade relationships?

If somebody hands you a shit sandwich you don't need to pretend it tastes good.

Isn’t it better for the smart people in India to stay there and make India richer, instead of coming to the U.S. to make billionaires here richer? These countries absolutely suffer from the brain drain.

> Whatever they are trying to get to this is a big concern for all H1B employees.

Thankfully H1B is a small visa category.

You're not actually wrong, but your phrasing makes it sound like that somehow excuses this travesty of justice.

I can only assume that's accidental. You're the 17th most active person on HN, so I'm certain you've seen an overwhelming amount of evidence of how skilled immigrants are immensely beneficial to the US economy.

The H-1B is not the only path to a green card. There are many ways, every case is different, and pretty much all of the paths suck, even if you do everything right.

This decision only makes all of those paths worse.

Intent (are you planning to switch immigrant visa later) and status (immigrant/non-immigrant) are two different things. Visas like B1 are non-immigrant and require that you are not intending to abandon your foreign residence. In practice that means that when you enter US you cannot be planning to apply for immigrant visa. H1B is also non-immigrant visa, but it is dual intent visa meaning it doesn't have that requirement and thus it's fine to enter even if you intent to apply for GC. You can even exit and re-enter after submitting your application.

No, it is not. And if you fall in love and want to get married to someone on a student visa, your fiancée should not need to leave the country for a year or two to wait for paperwork to process. Which is one of the real world impacts of this change.

Absolutely not. My wife could apply for German permanent residency as well as now German citizenship from within Germany. She has been living in Germany for 10 years now and at no point in the process did she have to go through a German consulate (she is a US citizen).

For many immigration statuses in Sweden, you must leave and apply outside of the country (outside of Schengen for non EU-citizens) to change status. This was even the case before the current right wing government was elected.

Except for the part about requiring you to leave to process your application.

Wait times to process applications depend on your country of origin and visa type. If you are an H1B from India that was already decades approaching never. Same for Brazil and elsewhere.

And that was before Trump. All that was practically halted.

It's an insanely stupid move, but from what I'm seeing on Twitter, it's somehow not that unpopular among the less bright.