USCIS has dropped a new green card rule requiring those waiting for a green card to leave the country and return to their countries.
A new memo from USCIS that says every immigrant must leave the United States when they wait for their green card has sparked massive unrest as experts decipher what the new rules mean and what visa holders should do.
The agency said that a visa holder who is in the United States temporarily and wants to obtain a green card must return to their home country to apply.
The logic is: The visa holder is coming to the US temporarily, the green card is for permanent residents, so there is a conflict of intent, and therefore people on a visa should not be allowed to stay in the US while waiting for the green card.
Top scientists will stop working and leave the country, wonders the Russian founder
Russian-born venture capitalist and founder Nick Davidov condemned the move and questioned whether this meant every foreign-born scientist would have to stop their work, leave the country and wait for a green card in their home countries.
“So everyone on an O1 or H1B visa will have to stop working legally in the United States, return to their country and wait for years of backlog? This includes top scientists at our universities, and founders of billion-dollar companies.”
And if we look at individual countries, it becomes more BS. Indians will have to wait for decades. The Russians have nowhere to go (no US embassy in Russia, hello?). “This is the worst way imaginable to disrupt the important work of the country and pretend that you are fighting some loopholes,” Davidov said.
James Blunt, an immigration specialist, said that under this new policy, Melania Trump could even have been asked to return to her country and wait for her green card. “USCIS is supposed to be the plumber maintaining the pipes in our immigration system. Instead, these guys are using a sledgehammer for the entire water line,” Blunt added.
Is the H-1B exempt from the rule?
No, H-1B is not exempt from the new rule. The H-1B visa is a dual-intent nonimmigrant visa.
The dual intent part means it is a temporary visa but a person with an H-1B visa can intend to immigrate permanently. But this does not exempt H-1B visa holders from the “return to your country” rule. In its memorandum, USCIS stated that adjustment of status is “extraordinary relief” and that “maintaining legal status in the dual intent category is not sufficient, by itself, to justify the appropriate exercise of discretion.”
“Immigration lawyers said this rule will certainly be legally challenged since there is some ambiguity in the memo and that is not what Congress wanted when it started the H-1B visa program.
USCIS is inventing new rules to deny green cards to non-citizens, immigration attorney Cyrus Mehta said. “Although adjustment of status is discretionary under INA 245, it has never been interpreted as an extraordinary form of relief and USCIS is inventing a new standard to deny non-citizens green cards in the United States,” Mehta said.Adjustment of status is the process of applying for a green card from within the United States rather than leaving the country for a visa interview.
