5 ms·

Wow one is definitely out of your hands. Can you expand on the martial law circumstances? Does something like that always automatically lead to resident status

• mturmon 11y ago
  This must be referring to the 1981 declaration of martial law by Polish General Jaruzelski, following pressure from the Solidarity trade union and others. Due to Cold War politics, you can see the US might want to address this by allowing Poles stay in the US.
  • schoen 11y ago
    A similar thing happened with the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Student_Protection_Act_of_1992 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Student_Protection_Act... In this case the automatic permanent resident status was created by a specific law; it wasn't a consequence of general legal principles. The U.S. government does offer a relatively automatic asylum when people experience or fear certain kinds of persecution abroad, but the determination is supposed to be very individual and fact-intensive. There was an exception to the detailed factual inquiry for Cubans: generally any Cuban who made it to the U.S. -- evading the U.S. Coast Guard, which was trying to prevent people from taking advantage of the policy -- would be given permanent resident status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_feet,_dry_feet_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_feet,_dry_feet_policy
• idlewords 11y ago
  The blanket residency grant was a political move by Reagan. The circumstances were that most of Poland had joined an independent trade union, which is awkward for a Communist country that is theoretically run by the working class. You can wikipedia 'martial law in poland' and get all the context.