ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
60% Positive
Analyzed from 4369 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#country#visa#trump#leave#immigration#don#same#job#while#administration
Discussion (142 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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
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.
Naturalization never required leaving the country, at least in my experience but things might have changed.
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).
What would the steps be for this? Hopefully the other country has easier entry and that would be a possible route?
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.
This sucks but it isn't new, unfortunately.
It’s a chore, but very common around the world.
I know stuff like this happens for digital nomads in southeast asia or Schengen but the US generally doesn't approve of "visa runs".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Also encompasses the self-destruction of military power, alliances, and beneficial trade.
Trump is an Israeli asset:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/adelson-trump-four-more-ye...
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.
“Once we squeeze all we can out of the United States, it can dry up and blow away.”
—Benjamin "Netanyahu" Mileikowsky
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?
Either way, your whataboutism isn’t even relevant since those were congressional changes.
This is the executive trying to undermine the law.
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.
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.
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.
Why do you wonder if it's economic instead of the Trump administration's announced policies of stopping immigration, including unconstitutionally removing 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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
So like the DMV then?
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
By the way, you also haven't provided any evidence for your opinion, why would you burden type replies with it?
Huh. Do you have an elementary reading difficulty? The evidence is the title and the content of the article. Perhaps consider going back to a place of education for lessons in basic English reading comprehension.
Or are you stuck at the level of elementary reading where critical thinking hasn't been taught yet?
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 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".