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The leaving part is not the issue, as you try to immigrate into a country you're subject to the rules that country sets. You're always free to not immigrate into that country (this is not about asylum).

The issue here is that, if you just left the country to do everything the country asked you, you are now in limbo.

For how long? No one can tell.

Does this mean you lose your job? Maybe.

And when you decide it's no longer worth it, you might even have issues getting back in to get your stuff...

Retraining your people CAN be done without it being so disruptive, they chose not to.

The cruelty is the point.

Unless you use the visa to marry Donald Trump, as his 3rd wife did.

Thank you captain obvious

Lots of countries have temporary worker status. The requirement to leave the country to re-up it appears to be a distinctively American thing.

Were the visas for the US? B1/B2?

I know stuff like this happens for digital nomads in southeast asia or Schengen but the US generally doesn't approve of "visa runs".

Were they able to come back when they did this?

In the EU you do not need to leave to renew your visa. I don't know how common it is elsewhere.

Sorry, but that is not common around the world. Most countries do not have such a system. I.e. none of the EU/UK/Australia countries have that.

Is it? You’re generally able to renew without leaving. Unless you mean abusing a visitor visa?

You are talking about change (or extension) of status, not visa.

US is unique in that the visa sticker and your right to remain in the country (status) are two different things. The only purpose of the visa sticker is to allow you to travel to a U.S. port of entry, where you apply for admission, and therefore legal status. You can have legal status in the U.S. while the visa sticker has expired, and your status can be changed or extended domestically. However unless you have a valid sticker you cannot leave and return.

Based on my experience 20 years ago you could only renew the H-1B visa in the passport in-country under extraordinary circumstances. In the majority of cases they reject your request and would tell you to travel to a consulate.

Prior to the mid 00s you could renew at any consulate but they changed it so you could only renew in your home country.

The pause on visa appointments does not apply to H1-B and L1 as they are nonimmigrant visas. It applies to family based immigration visa, diversity visa, and EB-1/2/3 when you do processing abroad.

(You might have known that, but I thought it's worth clarifying).

Speak for yourself, I voted for exactly these policies.

I've had a couple of reports that this applied to. It's incredibly disruptive. "I've got to fly back to India to renew my visa." "Okay, when will you be back?" "I have no idea, it depends when I can get an appointment. It could be next week, it might be in a month." "[State department] We're pausing all visa appointments." "Well fuck."

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.

Hire Americans?

Hundreds of thousands of tech workers have been laid off in the last two years. There are many skilled Americans on the job market. Foreign workers are here for the benefit of the United States, not as charity to the rest of the world, or as a source of cheaper labor for global employers seeking to undercut American wages.

The scale is new. Obviously a nightmare or even a tragedy for individual people that it happens at all. But this happening to (tens of?) thousands of people all at once is a whole different thing.

The term "illegal immigration" got moved to "people who have proper papers and did everything legally but were granted access by someone I don't like" - anyone who was an informed voter could see that "against illegal immigration" was just red meat for the base.

Surely you would admit that this Administration’s approach to immigration has been both chaotic and cruel. The workers who were given status in the United States expected a predictable process, not one that changes weekly based on the unserious personal whims of a bored, ill-informed and vindictive man. In any case, the prioritization of citizens’ wellbeing writ large is demonstrably _not_ a feature of this Administration’s agenda.

The government should not be doing inhumane things to people. This should not be a controversial statement.

The first responsibility is to protect the rights of all people in the country. Citizenship is not required for protected rights

How, in any way does this help the wellbeing of a citizen? Why bring up that very strange point, which is completely unconnected to the massive harm here.

If anything, these policies harm the citizens of the US in a myriad of ways. There's zero benefit to be had from any of this. Except for the joy tha tthe cruel feel in causing others misery, but that's not citizens, that's just a few sick people.

The mere suggestion that this admin is doing this or anything else for the wellbeing of its citizens is a complete departure from reality.

It's very clear what the motivations are, and just because they don't seem harmful in isolation doesn't mean it's going to have no consequences for everyone else.

And its going so great for our citizens wellbeing. Oodles of programs for the needy smashed to bits. Corruption and self dealing out the wazoo. Protestors shot to death by ICE agents. A legendarily stupid war fucking up international shipping. Illegal tariffs changing daily.

In Canada you never have to leave to renew or change status; it's just sometimes faster to do so. It's always the applicant's choice. I went through the whole work permit to PR to citizenship pipeline without ever having to leave the country.

"Flagpoling" was the beautiful euphemism for this.

OP isn't criticizing the practise of leaving to renew. He's criticizing the this new policy of not letting you back in when you leave.

Really? My spouse and I lived in Canada on work permits and were not required to leave in order to achieve PR status; nor to achieve citizenship status.

You forgot [INCOMPETENCE]

It will take generations -- if we even get the chance.

There are arguments from the other side too. Many H1B folks do keep one foot back in the country they are from. But then a lot of backlash on specifically Indian folks for sending most of their salary back home. They know that this is transient state, many of them have rented housing, but still these visas are not like weekly visas, they are for 3 years, people would build somewhat of a life in that time and uprooting them instantly is inhumane indeed.

It is always possible to make rules stricter for the new applicants. While there was some complaints with visa price hikes, they were for new visas so it was okay. Denying existing legal visa holders entry or time to wrap things up doesn't seem bad to you? These are not criminals per say.

Did you read the article? They postponed all appointments.

I work in a global company. As an interviewer, I don't even know if the person I interview is a US citizen. I don't even know if they live in the US or another country, and I'm probably not allowed to ask. I just rate their performance. And everybody is paid the same.

I think the situation is quite simple. Companies want the best candidates they can get, and the larger the recruitment pool, the better.

If tomorrow you were to tell (let say) Google they now need to hire only US citizens, would they lower their hiring bar, or would they expand their Shanghai or Zurich offices? Are US citizens entitled to work at Google more than others for the sole reason they have a particular citizenship?

I was a hiring manager. H1B candidates got exactly the same wage as native born. There were no differences.

Actually they get normal wages now. H1B’s get hired because H1B’s are now in hiring, recruiting, HR, etc.. they stack the candidate pool with their own shamelessly. I’ve seen it first hand.

The news is about immigrant visas and H1B is temporary non-immigrant visa...

Isn't that a work visa and not an immigrant visa

How does companies hiring h1b-holders (a non-immigrant visa) relate to a pause on immigrant visa applications?

Oh cool, good thing labor isn't fungible and nobody ever outsources.

What a brilliant plan. Lets make sure that we restrict the supply of doctors and medical personell, that's sure to improve care!

As a hiring manager no one tells you who is an immigrant and who isn’t when you interview them.

Recently[1] Microsoft laid off several thousand domestic employees while simultaneously hiring a couple thousand employer-sponsored-Visa workers.

[1]https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-2026-xbox-h1b-vis...

And yet, they never applied the simple option of ranking the visa applications by salary, and approving in order of demand for the talent.

That would be a market based solution that allows everyone to get the talent they need without driving down American wages.

But the point isn't about helping Americans, it's about being peedormatively against letting in brown people.

It looks more like homicide to me. Almost exactly like being pushed out the window of a skyscraper. But who would do such a thing?

I see you trying to kick a field goal all the way from the school parking lot, good luck with that.

They will and after a cyberleek incident they'll rethink that plan.

Who cares where this so called innovation happens? Won't it be cheaper for all of us if the salaries are in much lower cost of living places? Why would a US citizen give a shit?

I've never worked at a company that gave offshore teams the same responsibilities as onshore employees. When shit gets real, and someone's head needs to be on the chopping block, it's always a same-shore employee. But reduced responsibility also means reduced impact. Let's see if that changes, and I'd love to see it happen, but I'm not holding my breath.

Like if your racist grampa got put in charge of US Treasuries, tell me how things would be worse.

And the U.S. has been doing even better since 1965. So really the question goes back to you.

Either way, your whataboutism isn’t even relevant since those were congressional changes.

This is the executive trying to undermine the law.

"Worked fine" is a pretty vague description for the year we had a Great Depression, world war, Jim Crow, Japanese internment to name a few.

Oh god I hope this lie is part of an attempt to get right-wingers on board with a “let’s roll immigration policy back to what we had in 1950!” push.

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.

How can you with a straight face equate “fine for 1921-1965” with “best for 2026”?

Even odder: what makes you find it plausible that an understanding of the policies of this period and their effect on the economy were part of the decision-making process of this administration - especially when they have actively voiced opinions that fully explain this action? At some point bending backwards to provide some benefit of the doubt is saying more about the speaker than the topic - I am certainly of the opinion that we are well beyond that rubicon. I cannot fathom the reasoning at this point.

What do you think EB visas are: immigrant visas or work visas? Answer: they are both.

This is the most missed point in all of the flame throwing in this thread.

Conflating not wanting to compete with foreigners for jobs in your own country with racism is bad faith bullshit. Foreigners of the exact same race are equally unwanted competition.

Birthright citizenship is so weird, because when I think of my son’s birthright, I imagine things he’s entitled to because he’s my son. He’ll inherit from my estate, he’ll enjoy my love and encouragement and support, etc. The location of the hospital where he was born doesn’t really have anything to do with it, but now I have an entirely new fear about foreign countries claiming my child if my wife happens to give birth early while on a vacation. Like, I want to go to Israel, but don’t they have compulsory military service? I wouldn’t want the baby to accidentally become an Israeli citizen and forced to serve for some foreign army. Same with China. I’d love to see the country, but they’ve had some weird and draconian laws like the one child policy. For all I know they take some children to be raised by the state. Whatever their laws are… I don’t think they should apply to my children.

I think many (if not most) countries in the developed world should reduce immigration, and usa in particular should abolish 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.

Attempts to find plausibly deniable rationales for this administration's anti-immigrant policies other than "gutter racism" are ridiculous.

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.

didn't big tech co's layoff thousands of people here and then filed for thousands more h1b ?

It's also amusing that you won't ever hear conservatives like Thomas making the same argument when it comes to, say, the 2nd amendment.

That's not accurate. H-1B is a non-immigrant visa. It's not intended for tourists.

From CBP's own website[1], emphasis is mine:

    An immigrant visa (IV) is issued to a foreign national wishing to live permanently in the United States.

    A nonimmigrant visa (NIV) is issued to a foreign national with permanent residence outside the United States but wishes to be in the United States on a temporary basis for tourism, medical treatment, *business,  temporary work, or study*, as examples. Note: There are more than 20 different categories of nonimmigrant visa classifications.

It’s not slanted, it’s accurate.

The right wing doesn’t want to run the government, they want to occupy it so it doesn’t run except to enrich themselves.

By "they" it is that every single politician lies.

So of course that is the tiniest small print of every promise any politician makes, such that once it is a promise broken it is someone else's fault and not theirs.

Therefore their entire job is to lie.

It most certainly is hypocritical. You can not be simultaneously pro-legal immigration and support banning legal immigration. If you support banning legal immigration, you are by definition anti-legal immigration.

> Being anti-illegal immigration and pro-legal immigration doesn't mean you want to flood the country with legal immigrants.

If only there were something between 0 and unrestricted immigration, some sort of program where people apply for permission and the government issues approvals for individuals to enter its borders after meeting legal criteria.

Pity. Cause that's the system that needs overhauled or killed.

There's no real Us culture to preserve.

> Letting the entirety of the world into your country without stops is cultural suicide.

The natives of the Americas, Australia, and the many nations previously colonized by European countries, know that better than any descendants of the colonizers.

Did they get to have any say?

> that sort of individuated cosmopolitanism only works for educated men and women with means, who have or have the capacity to self-actualize.

So because not everyone can afford to travel freely we shouldn't let anyone do that?

There's no reason why we should worship borders, or the state.

> and given that they took hundreds to sometimes thousands of years to form, i don't think borders are artificial in the least.

"Borders" as they are treated today began barely 200 years ago, and only started being enforced so strictly since WW1 and then even worse after WW2.

For the vast >95% of human history, if you could walk to somewhere and survive there, you could live there.

The real ironic shit is that most of the travel and immigration restrictions of today are instituted by the descendants of people that invaded and occupied the lands of other people :')

You can't ignore the impact of China also becoming a better place to live as well. China is a different place no than it was 20 years ago, and the need to go overseas anywhere is probably felt less today than back then.

What is a "normally skilled" job? Working at Home Depot?

Jobs will just move abroad then: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-11/trump-s-h...

Ultimately, there is some value in each position, and in a corresponding set of positions on the left. Unlike many issues in US politics, in the long run this one is not well left-right aligned, and there is no single correct number for how much immigration is best. It's a bunch of trade-offs, which should be made democratically and end up somewhere around the number that the median person wants, such that roughly half of us are unhappy because too many immigrants come in and roughly half unhappy because too few. Arriving at that number and changing it slowly would be far better than wild swings.

> don't want to become a minority in their own country.

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.

The parallels between Emmanuel Goldstein and Trump Derangement Syndrome are impossible to ignore for anyone who's actually read 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.

And in the interim he's positioning his family and cronies to benefit from any rebuilding. Just as he literally sat in the White House and said, verbatim, "My children insider trade all the time".

I’d guess Miller is the main driver of this given what we know about that loser (and freak).

I often think about how far the Republican party has fallen from Truman with his "The Buck Stops Here" plaque on his desk to Trump's "I don't take any responsibility at all" response to poor Covid testing in 2020.

And they are. I read somewhere a few days ago that France is vacuuming up academics and advanced students that have been displaced by various recent policy changes that have proven to be hostile towards academia and research.

The evidence is the title and the content of the article, so read it. I am not the one to jump to conclusions.

Also, lol @ "the courts will fix it!" Fat fucking chance. I'm looking into my crystal ball: I see a 6-3 supreme court ruling supporting the administration's executive order to liquidate congressional power and fold it into the executive branch (as the founding fathers intended...)

> "We have nooooo idea how long this will take!"

It will take about two weeks. Is that right, two weeks? We'll have it done in about two weeks I'm told by some, very intelligent people.

Afrikaaners are a subgroup of what you refer to as Caucasians in South Africa.