5 ms·
I received my green card in 2023 and I have mixed emotions. On one hand, I'm so relieved that I have been able to dodge everything that the administration has
by esalman 5mo ago
I received my green card in 2023 and I have mixed emotions.
On one hand, I'm so relieved that I have been able to dodge everything that the administration has been throwing at immigrant (legal and illegal alike), trying to see what sticks, like mass deportations, border wall expansion, visa restrictions, asylum crackdown, H-1B cuts, and chain Migration Ban.
On the other hand, we cannot apply for citizenship for 3 more years, even though me and my wife have been in the US for combined 25+ years, and paid over $100,000 in taxes last year alone, and it's jarring to imagine what the administration will come up with next to make the process less straightforward than it seems.
Most disturbing is the fact that a lot of people I know who climbed the same ladder will go out and cheer what the administration is doing.
- Underphil 5mo agoI received mine in 2020 and have decided to move back home. The uncertainty in general just keeps me up at night. Feels like the goalposts could move at any moment. I know I'm likely overreacting but it is what it is.
- 999900000999 5mo agoIf anything everyone else is under reacting. You have ICE officers randomly abducting people off appearance alone and then detaining them for days if not weeks. If you were a citizen the whole time, cool who cares. No one in America has any rights. That aside, even as someone who's been in this country for generations, I've been exploring options to leave. America is behind most of the developed world in terms of standards of living. I was in Asia for a while and I felt a fraction of the fear I constantly do at home. It's not getting better.
- BowBun 5mo agoGC holder of 25 years with citizen parents. I agree with you and I stress about this daily. It's always been a shitty deal though - we are taxed with no representation in government.
- throw-the-towel 5mo agoGenuinely curious why didn't you pursue citizenship though? (No pressure to answer of course, that might be a deeply personal thing.)
- BowBun 5mo agoWe did not meet continuous residency requirements for 10-15 years due to travel for my dad's work. Afterwards, it took me nearly 5 years to meet that requirement due to the fact that I lived and graduated abroad for highschool. I tried around COVID, was denied based on truthfully admitting I had smoked some weed in the previous 5 years while I lived in Colorado. That reset my clock for another five years. I constantly wrestle with whether I even want to be associated with this country for the rest of my life. I'm prideful and a high earner, there's only so much I'll accept before moving my family and assets somewhere else. Hope that provides some color. To all the fans of the current immigration policies - you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
- joe_mamba 5mo ago>we are taxed with no representation in government. In which country can you emigrate to and be allowed votes in government representation just because you pay taxes? I'm an EU citizen and living in another EU country and am not allowed to vote in that country's government elections, just local ones. If you want to vote at government level then you need to apply and get citizenship which also comes with the responsibility(or obligation more accurately) of military draft. Everything about this seems pretty fair to me. I'm not sure why not to you. If you're not a citizen you shouldn't be allowed to vote at gov level since you're not subject to a draft, because in case the shit hits the fan militarily, unlike citizens, you can just pack your bags and go back to your home country and avoid dying in the front lines. So why would any country let people who aren't subject to draft vote? Makes no sense. You don't have the same skin in the game as citizens who are draftable just because you pay some taxes. Now if you're paying taxes in a foreign country where you can't vote, it means you're there voluntarily because you're getting a much better deal than being in your own country where you can vote. Probably you're in the US because you make orders of magnitude more money than in your own country, but nobody in the US dragged you there against your will to work and pay them taxes, you agreed to this situation voluntarily because it also benefits you personally, and you would just as easily leave if it stopped benefiting you.
- tdeck 5mo agoAmerica is also run by a cabal of pedophiles and despite that being pretty out in the open at this point, there have been no consequences for them at all. It's not a good looking situation when even CSA and genocide are met with an "eh, what can you do?" shrug by a populace that has been led to accept worse and worse every year.
- matwood 5mo agoDon't forget the blatant corruption at a scale we've never seen. Literal crypto scams are being run out of the Whitehouse, and no one seems to care. Complaining about Hunter Biden being on the board of some company seems so quaint at this point.
- JuniperMesos 5mo agoIf this was actually true, there wouldn't be so many people from the developed world trying to immigrate to the US, and upset about the US government making this harder.
- salomonk_mur 5mo agoMany, many people immigrate for an imagination of what life in the US will be. Objectively speaking, the US really is far behind most of the developed world in standards of living . Also, money. Salaries are simply higher in the US (even if life is worse and less fulfilling overall)
- wyclif 5mo agoI'm an American currently living in the Philippines, and that's utter nonsense and I know it. Developing world countries are so far behind the US in infrastructure, clean water, food quality, pollution, overpopulation, waste disposal, cleanliness, littering, open public spaces, and numerous other vectors that your comment blithely ignores. The only possible way you could write a comment like that with a straight face is that you've never walked through a barrio in a developing world country with brick block contruction and tin roofs with tires holding the roof on, or favelas in Brazil with crowding, unsanitary conditions and resulting disease, drug crime, and gang warfare. The standard of living in the US is vastly better than in these third-world shitholes, and it requires a stunning amount of out-of-touch suicidal empathy to project that it doesn't.
- xboxnolifes 5mo agoThey said behind the developed world, not the developing world.
- wyclif 5mo agoThe US is not "behind the developed world", it's literally the developed world. The lightbulb. The airplane. The telephone. NASA. Space X. Tesla. And on and on...
- Underphil 5mo agoThe reason I think I'm overreacting is because I'm a natively English-speaking straight white guy. If I wasn't I'd have already fled.
- simonklitj 5mo agoI don't think you're overreacting. Received mine in 2020 and decided to move as well.
- bvan 5mo agoGave back my green card the moment I left the US. No longer wanted the hassle and ties to an unpredictable regime. Haven’t looked back.
- garbawarb 5mo agoNot just uncertainty, but the apparent speedrunning of making the US an undesirable place to live compared to other countries. Where did you move to and what are you doing now? (I'd love to hear from anyone else who's left too)
- brokenmachine 5mo agoYou're not overreacting in my opinion. If it looks like 1930s Germany and quacks like 1930s Germany, get as far away from that duck as you can.
- selfmodruntime 5mo agoNot every (slightly) authoritarian government is akin to a regime that was responsible for the industrial scale killing of more than 11 million people.
- dmacedo 5mo agoPerhaps you should wait to make that case, we're starting to see ramifications from USAID cuts as the worse one, but there's also health and nutrition effects from Medicaid/SNAP reductions, and whatever in the world is happening on immigration and detention with insane ICE behaviour, plus second order effects from abortion and public health changes.
- brokenmachine 5mo agoWe shall see. I hope you're right.
- pixelatedindex 5mo ago> and paid over $100,000 in taxes last year alone Genuinely curious, what does taxes have to do with it? Everyone pays taxes, legal or illegal in some form. I don’t think paying your dues should make you more likely to get through the pipeline. After all, you paid those taxes because you made good money, which is what people come here for.
- imajoredinecon 5mo agoTaxes are supposed to pay for public services. An efficient visa system is a public service. If you pay tons of taxes but don’t get a public service that’s personally very important to you, it’s natural to feel let down
- pixelatedindex 5mo agoYeah that’s fair, I feel let down all the time with how my taxes are (ab)used. Not a surprise, It’s been like this as long as I can remember.
- bonsai_spool 5mo agoI think the point is that they are contributing to the US, and were the best option for their employer, and are supporting their communities, etc. All things that we should be supporting if we are indeed wishing our nation to prosper. A plurality of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, so we’re essentially turning away someone who is building up our country.
- ipaddr 5mo agoSomeone else would have taken that job maybe for a higher salary.
- bonsai_spool 5mo agoAt a certain point, there aren't enough Americans for these jobs. So the choice is to let other nations absorb these skilled laborers, or simply hire the best people. It's funny how we forget about meritocracy as soon as the median American is threatened.
- root_axis 5mo ago> me and my wife have been in the US for combined 25+ years, and paid over $100,000 in Sounds like you may be a good candidate for Trump's gold card. I'm being fecitious of course, but I'm just pointing out that thinking of citizenship worthiness in monetary terms is something the president has already considered.
- cybercatgurrl 5mo agoi’m fairly confident the gold card is the only kind of immigration they want to encourage now. you either pay up or go home and cross your fingers
- frogperson 5mo agoHave you tried being white? The trump admin is rolling out the red carpet for white south Africans. I'm being facetious of course. I hate what maga is doing to our wonderful melting pot.
- noncoml 5mo agoDon’t listen to this op, you don’t need to change your race. If I was you I’d choose to be a multi-billionaire instead and keep my race.
- lovich 5mo agoNot entirely safe even if you naturalize as they are now making noise about stripping citizenship[1] [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-administration-working-expand-effort-strip-citizenship-foreign-b-rcna255427 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-administr...
- QGQBGdeZREunxLe 5mo agoThey're doing this on the basis that crimes were committed before naturalization so therefore the N-400 submitted was fraudulent.
- lovich 5mo ago[flagged]
- QGQBGdeZREunxLe 5mo agoYou mistake me reporting the method they intend to use for support of this action. I think denaturalisation should be impossible and constitutionally protected.
- lovich 5mo agoAh, my apologies then
- thegjp210 5mo ago[flagged]
- fumar 5mo agoIt is not as a country. Certain regions within the nation are still growing.
- mbgerring 5mo agoThat was literally the premise of America at its foundation, and it’s a better national identity than this weird, ahistorical attempt at white christian nationhood currently popular on the American right.
- gottorf 5mo agoThat America was founded as an economic zone open to all seems more ahistoric. The phrase "ourselves and our Posterity" appears in the first sentence of the Constitution. And you cannot deny that the founders were in fact white Christians[0]. Look, I'm a visibly nonwhite immigrant. I am proud to be a naturalized American and have renounced all legal ties to the country of my birth. I think dual citizenship is at best weird, and I honestly don't understand how one squares that against the oath of allegiance. I believe the onus is upon the immigrant to assimilate, and that America is a rare place where that is in fact possible. I have no desire to recreate the country of my birth in America, especially not in a segregated ethnic enclave. I would like to live in a colorblind America and, though it may sound implausible to you, I believe the American right has the better claim to that future than the left. I do not empathize more with potential immigrants from my ethnic background than I do with my fellow Americans, and I quite dislike it when those from the left automatically assume the former, because it means they are treating me as being fundamentally different than any other American. And I think this mindset is table stakes for any immigrant to any nation. Much of the West has seen levels of immigration over the past few decades beyond the capacity of the native population to absorb in a way that results in assimilation. It has increasingly been from cultures that are substantially different, further hampering that effort. It's disconcerting to see that any efforts to pump the brakes even a little bit immediately results in accusations of racism or fascism. [0]: I don't want to split hairs over 18th-century Deism. All of that was contained within the Christian cultural framework, anyway.
- catlikesshrimp 5mo ago"Most disturbing is the fact that a lot of people I know who climbed the same ladder will go out and cheer what the administration is doing." I always joke that all naturalized (citizens) immigrants automatically become republican. I say it in earnest because effectively all naturalized people who I know side with anti-immigration, except agaisnt people they know, but none of them take my "joke" seriously.
- Der_Einzige 5mo agoThis shit is sadly true.
- moosedev 5mo agoEven those still halfway up said ladder: https://x.com/flowersslop/status/2058161240350794165?s=20 https://x.com/flowersslop/status/2058161240350794165?s=20
- testing22321 5mo agoI’m An immigrant, so I can relate. Not in the US. I left my home country for a better life. If the country I moved to was going downhill, I’d be looking to move again. I already did it, so I know it’s worthwhile.
- tflinton 5mo agoIf it makes you feel any better, and I’m sure it won’t. There are US citizens outraged by this as well. And I’m one of them.
- cloche 5mo agoI got mine in 2019 and feel the same way. I'm actually in the process of applying for citizenship and my application seems to have stalled - it's been nearly 10 months when the USCIS processing times page says I should expect 7 (it was 5-6 when I applied). There's been some articles that the government is going to force everyone to retake fingerprints again although there's been nothing official about that yet. I really wish I had applied for citizenship as soon as I was eligible.
- QGQBGdeZREunxLe 5mo agoI was approved 2 weeks ago. The process took 4 years end to end. I've been updating my paperwork (SSN, Global Entry and CA DL). I saw this news and immediately thought that it would've impacted me and I wouldn't've been able to maintain my job until a consular interview. Also a consular interview has no appeal process. A denial stands unlike AOS.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- AdrianB1 5mo agoI am paying taxes in US for over 20 years, don't hold a green card, not interested in ever getting one and not complaining that I don't have the right to vote. How are these things related?
- geodel 5mo agoWhat's with tax thing? Is it only paid in US? Are they not supposed to pay taxes when they have taxable income? If one paid 100K+ in taxes I assume one had opportunities to make such high income by being in US which one can be thankful for. > On the other hand, we cannot apply for citizenship for 3 more years, ... I am sorry but I am just seeing too much of an entitlement here.
- esalman 5mo agoI'm also seeing a lot of broken promises here.
- bamboozled 5mo agoSame is happening in Japan because the politics here loves to copy the USA. It’s fucking lame.