The Trump administration announced last Friday that US visa holders who want a green card must first return to their home countries and apply from there, “except in extraordinary circumstances.”
On its face, this rule — which was officially promulgated in a memo from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — would upend America’s immigration system and the lives of hundreds of thousands of US residents.
For more than 50 years, through the “adjustment of status” process, visa holders in the United States have been able to remain in the country while applying for permanent residency. This was no small thing. For legal immigrants, the alternative to securing an adjustment of status is not taking a short sojourn abroad while Uncle Sam inspects their paperwork. Rather, due to various quirks of US immigration law, some immigrants must wait more than a decade for their green card applications to be approved.
President Donald Trump’s new rule therefore threatens to exile hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants — including physicians at understaffed rural hospitals, gifted technologists at Silicon Valley firms, the spouses of US citizens, and parents of American children.
Whether this will actually happen is unclear. Both the memo officially laying out the policy — and the administration’s messaging about it — contain ambiguities and apparent contradictions. For example, the administration has said that visa holders can only remain in the United States during the green card application process under “extraordinary circumstances” and that any visa holder who provides an “economic benefit” to America may still do so. Yet more or less all employed visa holders provide some economic benefit to the United States.
Regardless, the new memo represents a massive escalation in Trump’s crackdown on immigration. It also arguably marks the resolution of a years-long war for the soul of the MAGA movement.
Since Trump retook the presidency in 2024, his coalition’s hardline nativists and Silicon Valley patrons have been fighting over what an “America First” immigration policy actually entails.
America’s tech industry is heavily reliant on global talent. About one-fifth of our nation’s STEM workers in 2021 were foreign-born. For this reason among others, the tech right — a contingent of Silicon Valley luminaries who backed Trump in 2024 — advocate for a meritocratic brand of immigration restrictionism.
In their account, America needs to repel undocumented, low-skill migrants who threaten to burden its safety nets, warp its culture, and empower the Democratic Party. Yet the United States also needs to welcome highly talented, English-speaking, America-loving workers from around the globe in order to sustain its economic competitiveness and dynamism.
“I understand why we don’t want people to come to the US to be criminals, mooch on welfare…and otherwise undermine the country,” Blake Scholl, the Trump-friendly CEO of Boom Supersonic, posted on X after the latest immigration news. “But I don’t understand why we make it harder for motivated, ambitious, hardworking people to come to the land of opportunity.”
The nativist right isn’t so sure about that. In its view, whether immigrants engineer software in Silicon Valley — or deliver food in New York City — they are typically undermining native-born Americans’ interests, at least in their current numbers.
By deterring highly skilled, legal immigrants from seeking green cards, the Trump administration has made its allegiance to the second camp unambiguous.
Read Eric's full story here.
