Immigration Lawyer Answers Immigration Questions

I'm Charles Kuck, law professor and immigration lawyer.

I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet.

This is immigration support.

[upbeat music]

This is a question from @DzambhalaHODL.

Okay, I realize I don't understand the difference

between a visa, a green card, a refugee,

or an asylum seeker.

A visa is actually a stamp

that a consular officer at a US consulate

puts in a foreign national's passport

to allow them to come to the United States

and apply for entry at the airport or at a border.

For a visa, there's many different bases.

For example, you can get a visa to visit the United States.

You can get a work visa.

Overall, there's 24 different types of visas

to just come here temporarily,

as well as an additional 30 immigrant visas

to immigrate to the United States.

A green card is actually evidence

of somebody's permanent residence in the United States,

they call it a green card

'cause it's green, kind of looks like a driver's license.

A refugee is an individual who is outside the United States

who goes through about a two year vetting process

and ultimately can become a permanent resident.

That refugee has to show

that they've been persecuted in some way abroad.

An asylum seeker on the other hand,

is someone who is in the United States,

either with or without a visa

or who comes to the border and asks to apply for asylum.

They have to show to an immigration judge

or the immigration officials that they have a fear

of persecution in their home country

because of their race, their religion, their nationality,

their political opinion,

or because they're a member of a social group, for example,

because they're gay or they're lesbian.

This question's from u/cooldude010.

How hard is it to legally immigrate

to the United States from the Mexican border

if you are not a citizen?

It's basically impossible.

If you just show up at the border,

you have no legal right to remain in the United States,

nor do you have a legal right to immigrate

to the United States unless you are applying for asylum

and even then you're likely to be detained

and at that point you will have to show an immigration judge

that you have this fear of persecution

of returning to your home country.

These types of decisions usually take months,

if not a couple of years to adjudicate

during which time you might be detained.

This question is from u/jsanchez030.

Why are Americans who live overseas called expats,

but everyone else who does the same as called an immigrant?

Expats is simply a term used by corporate America

as they send US workers abroad for temporary assignments.

Generally speaking, if somebody stays in that country,

they become immigrants to that country.

There are people on expat contracts to the United States.

You just never hear about that.

This question from u/Ra21red.

In this day and age,

can you still marry someone for a green card?

I tell individuals when they come to meet with me,

you have to fall in love first.

It's not just,

Hey, I'm gonna go find somebody to get married,

that's called marriage fraud

and that is quite illegal in the United States,

so the US Immigration Service pays a lot of attention

to marriage cases, especially when the couple looks like

they don't really belong together.

Somebody marries someone from another country

and they don't speak each other's languages,

at that point, the Immigration Service may have questions

about whether this is a real marriage.

Generally speaking, when you marry a US citizen

and you are approved for a green card

or permanent residence, you're only approved for two years.

At the end of those two years,

you have to go back to the immigration service

and prove that you physically live together.

Immigration requires, generally speaking,

co-mingling of assets,

shared bank account statements, for example,

living in the same location

with the lease in both your names.

Immigration has an entire task force of men

and women who go out

and check whether this documentation is real,

and I will tell you,

they do find people who try to scam this system.

Do some people get away with it? Absolutely.

Do most people get away with it? Absolutely not.

I love this question from @DirkLosman.

Where do Americans immigrate to?

Did you know that today there are over a million Americans

living in Mexico.

It's the highest source country for receiving Americans.

You can go anywhere in the world

and you will find a, quote, expat community.

There's been a large increase in the number of Americans

leaving the country since Donald Trump became president

the second time.

A lot of other countries are welcoming Americans generally

because Americans have money, Americans create jobs,

Americans have experience that maybe their countries lack.

This question from u/RelativeIncrease2215.

H1B laid off. What are my options?

An H-1B is a work visa sponsored by a US employer

for a foreign national.

Under our current immigration laws,

when an individual who has an H-1B is fired

or quits their job, they have a 60 day grace period

in which to leave the United States,

change their status to visitor or file a new employer H-1B

if they wanna remain here,

if they don't leave before the end of the 60 days,

they'll be put into deportation proceedings

and ultimately deported from the United States.

This question is from u/Mammoth_Mastodon_294.

Can Trump take away green cards

or make it more difficult than current?

Yes, permanent residents

can actually lose their permanent residence

under a variety of circumstances.

For example, if they're convicted of a crime

within five years of getting their green card,

they can be put into deportation proceedings

and their residents can be taken away.

If they stay outside the country

longer than 180 days a year,

their green card can be taken away.

The other reason that you see today in the news

is individuals who may have misrepresented themselves

to get permanent residence

or they didn't fill out the forms truthfully,

in that circumstance, their residence can be taken away.

Nothing is secure until you are a US citizen.

There are circumstances under which citizenship

can be revoked.

Generally it's because you have lied

on your citizenship application.

There is a specific question

that most people kind of laugh at

that is all in the application.

Have you committed a crime

for which you have not been arrested?

If you have committed a crime

for which you have not been arrested

and you're subsequently arrested,

they can use that as a basis to take your citizenship away.

This question is from u/EOFFJIM, and I love this question.

Is Trump's gold card for $5 million a good or a bad idea?

If you're asking people that wanna buy residence

for $5 million, it's probably a good idea,

but it's likely a bad idea for everybody else.

We have a visa called the EB-5 immigrant visa.

This allows individuals

to invest $1 billion in a business in the United States

and create 10 jobs through that investment.

That person gets a conditional green card,

good for two years,

so the program already exists since 1990 individuals

have invested this amount of money into the country

creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Why you'd want to pay more for it? I don't know.

Europe and other countries

around the world have created a golden visa.

Portugal has brought in thousands of individuals

willing to invest somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000

to $500,000 and obtained residents

and quickly they obtained citizenship

within about three years.

This question from @RedSmil61893898.

What jobs do immigrants take from Americans?

They don't take any jobs from Americans.

America is not just a pie that's this big.

America is a pie that grows every time somebody else

comes to the United States.

Now, immigrants do jump jobs that Americans will not do.

Everybody acknowledges this.

There are very few Americans with children

who tell their children,

Bobby, you should drop outta school

and go pluck chickens at the chicken factory.

We're constantly telling our children to get skilled jobs,

to go to college, to go to trade school.

We're not telling to do unskilled jobs,

which we still have a need for in the United States.

There are likely salaries at which you could pay individuals

to do these very difficult jobs,

but then you'd have to sell the product

of those jobs at prices that nobody would buy that product,

by a continual supply of immigrants to the United States

you enable us to grow our economy

and at the same time allow jobs

that would likely be outsourced to other countries

to remain in the United States.

Silicon Valley is, for example, a great example of this.

49% of the companies started up in Silicon Valley

in the last 30 years have been started up by immigrants,

people who bringing their ideas to a country

where those ideas can be put into action.

This question is from @Loonatic24.

How much do immigrants contribute to the USA GDP?

Immigrants generally are younger,

so virtually all immigrants in America today

actually work in jobs.

That's true whether they're undocumented or documented.

The undocumented population are not getting welfare,

they're not getting benefits.

They're not using free healthcare.

They're working every day in jobs that Americans won't do.

A lot of people complain about immigrants

that have come to the border illegally,

but why are these individuals coming

to the border illegally?

Nobody invited them to come except we did,

and I'm not talking about politicians.

I'm talking about our economy.

Our economy has invited people to come.

Now that has been cut off in this administration,

so you're seeing far fewer people come to the border

because they don't feel invited anymore.

Today, if we were to deport all

of the undocumented in the United States,

we would go into an instant recession

because we have nobody

to backfill those jobs in the United States.

So this idea

that immigrants are a drag on our economy

is one of the greatest falsehoods that exist,

in fact, they're a boom to our economy.

This question is from @Kram_Della_Kram.

Why are immigrants more likely to start a business

than that of the domestic population?

I am a living example of that.

My own grandparents came from farms in Germany

during the depression.

What did they do as soon as they got here?

They created businesses.

They saw opportunity

because they can employ themselves,

they can open up a little store.

Immigrants do this because they're driven,

lazy people do not walk across the desert.

That's why immigrants are more likely to create businesses.

This question from an @AnAimlessJoy.

What is chain immigration?

I see people talking about it a lot.

Chain immigration is a derogatory term

put on family-based immigration by anti-immigration

and nativist activists in the United States.

The chain is this.

You immigrate to America through your job for example,

when you become a citizen,

you can sponsor your parent to come to the United States.

You can also sponsor a child

or sibling to come to the United States

and they can sponsor their parent,

hence the quote chain immigration.

Regular people call it family-based immigration

and family immigration has been the core immigration

to the United States since 1952.

Over 70% of our visas every year are family-based visas.

This question from @adrianbosco.

What is the crime rate of illegal immigrants

compared to the general population?

Interesting question because the data is very sparse

and until recently,

only one state actually tracked that data,

the great state of Texas,

whenever they arrest anyone,

they find out their immigration status

and they publish those records online for the world to see.

Undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate

than US citizens.

Why is that, well, if you're undocumented,

you don't commit crime because you know you'll be caught

and sent back to your home country

despite what you see on the ICE Twitter feed every day,

undocumented immigrants are generally law abiding,

they have strong families,

they go to church on Sundays, many own businesses.

This question from @mmbrenn.

Do illegal immigrants vote in the United States?

No, because they can't vote.

Undocumented immigrants, no, they can't vote.

In federal elections, only US citizens can vote,

in state elections, only US citizens can vote.

Sometimes in municipalities,

they allow every person resident in that municipality

to vote but for the most part,

you have to be a US citizen to vote in the United States,

under President Bill Clinton

we created a law called Motor Voter,

when you applied for a license

they registered the vote.

Frequently in the 90s

and the early 2000s they registered everybody

who got a license, including individuals at the time

who were immigrants to the United States,

did a couple of those vote, yeah.

Every year you're talking about in the entire country,

fewer than a couple of dozen people vote illegally,

we're constantly in search of a solution to a problem

that doesn't exist on illegal voting.

This question from @joshieyamaguchi.

Where's Anna Delvey?

Better question, who's Anna Delvey?

Anna Delvey is from Inventing Anna fame.

She had defrauded a number of individuals

here in New York claiming to be a German princess

of some kind.

Ultimately, she was convicted

and served time in state prison

and was picked up by ICE at the end of her sentence.

She was ordered deported by an immigration judge,

but she hired a really good lawyer, me,

and we were able to overturn her deportation decision

on appeal.

She currently awaits a new decision from immigration judge,

not in ICE custody.

She was secured release and is living in her apartment.

She's currently under ICE detention with an ankle monitor

and occasionally you see her on television.

Good luck, Anna.

This question from @kdoright.

Can ICE arrest people without a warrant,

and if so, if they're not wearing a uniform, a badge,

or an ID, how are people supposed to trust them?

ICE can arrest individuals without a warrant

within a 100 mile zone around the entire United States.

This includes 70% of the US population.

So if you're in New York City,

an ICE officer walks up to you on the street and says,

Show me your papers, entirely legal for them to do that.

They also don't need a warrant to arrest someone

who they can positively identify as being in violation

of US immigration law.

Now, they do need a warrant to enter a home

unless they're in active pursuit of an individual.

Now, you're seeing today a lot of videos

of ICE officers out there with no ID

or ID that misstates who they are, the police,

ICE is not the police,

or refusing to identify themselves

as they arrest individuals,

but until you have an administration

that enforces requirements that they wear uniforms

and identify themselves, you will see this continue

until Americans get tired of it.

There are a number of US citizens that have been arrested

because they look foreign,

either they don't speak English very well

or they don't have papers with them,

in parts of the United States

where that is outside the 100 mile zone,

what ICE can do is they can surveil locations.

For example, an apartment complex,

mostly populated by immigrants.

ICE walks around on their phones with an app,

with the photos of anyone who's ever given their photo

to many DMVs, passports and immigration.

If you come up as somebody in their phone

known to be undocumented,

they will just arrest you without you saying anything.

But our advice as lawyers, as you simply remain quiet,

if you're not under arrest, you ask, Am I being detained,

I'm not being detained, walk slowly away.

If they say they're detaining you, you are under arrest

and then you say, I'm not speaking without a lawyer.

Don't resist arrest.

Don't run away, but you have no obligation to talk to them.

ICE did in January revoke guidance

that prohibited them from going to places like schools

and churches and hospitals.

They're not going to those places generally speaking

because there was a lot of pushback

and a lot of litigation that was mostly filed

against the Trump administration

for revoking those policies.

But they are arresting people outside of schools

so people just don't send their kids to school.

This question from @B1llyHossness.

What is inhumane about ICE deportations?

How are they different from Obama's 3 million?

Deporting people has been part of our immigration laws.

At the same time,

the conditions under which individuals are held

and the places to which they are sent

are inhumane in some circumstances.

For example, sending an individual from Vietnam

or Cambodia who cannot be deported to their home country,

to Sudan, a country in the middle of a civil war,

that is inhumane

because this is done to punish people in ways

that a regular deportation,

which is terrible for many people, does not do.

Obama is known in the Latino community

as the Deporter In Chief,

he deported more people than Trump could ever hope to deport

because he was first of all in for eight years.

But they can't deport people very fast

because even immigrants are entitled to due process.

That means they're entitled to go in front

of an immigration judge

and present their case for staying in the United States.

The Obama administration weaponized the immigration laws

by deputizing sheriffs around the United States

who detain people for traffic violations.

They would detain them

and then Obama's ICE would arrest them.

Keeping people in these immigration facilities,

which are not prisons, they are worse.

These are holding facilities

with nothing but three crummy meals a day

generally under very terrible conditions,

and people who are stuck there for 3, 4, 5 months

eventually give up.

That's what Obama was successful at

and what Trump is trying to repeat

with places like Alligator Alcatraz and Speedway.

They're trying to make it so bad for people

they will just give up their due process rights and leave.

This question from @contempathy916.

Are legal immigrants being deported?

Absolutely, they're being deported.

Legal immigrants are individuals

who are in the United States on work visas or travel visas

after they go through a process.

Now there's different processes depending on where you are.

If you show up at an airport

and you have a permanent resident or a green card,

but you've been gone for a year,

these officers will generally threaten individuals

and say, You've been gone too long,

I'm taking your green card away and sending you away,

if you wanna fight this, I'm gonna keep you in jail.

No permanent resident who's legal wants to stay in jail

so they turn around and go away.

Or individuals in the United States,

legal permanent residents

who it has found out obtain their residence unlawfully

or who commit a crime,

they're absolutely being put into deportation proceedings

and being deported, can they ultimately be deported?

Federal courts are ruling

against the Trump administration on this

and saying, Look, the First Amendment

trumps the immigration laws.

Residents have rights including First Amendment rights

in the United States.

Question here from u/Sad_Analyst_4470.

Should someone show up to court and risk deportation?

This question really focused on the reports

that we're seeing of ICE officers in the hallways

of immigration court arresting people

after they come out of their immigration court hearing.

In 1996, while Bill Clinton was president, he signed a law

that said, Anyone who's in the United States

less than two years can be deported without a trial.

This is called expedited removal.

These people show up in immigration court

'cause they have a pending asylum case.

ICE lawyers are telling the judge,

Judge, we no longer wanna pursue this person's deportation,

we wanna cancel the case.

So the person walks out thinking for some reason,

not understanding why their case is canceled,

and then they encounter the ICE officer outside

who has their name on a sheet and has their picture

and says, Oh, we're here to arrest you

'cause your case was terminated,

and then haul 'em downstairs in the building

and off to ICE detention center.

If that's gonna happen to you,

should you show up for your deportation hearing?

As a lawyer, I have to tell you,

you have to show up for your hearing,

but are people not showing up for their hearing?

Absolutely.

Failures to appear are skyrocketing in immigration courts

because what's worse,

not showing up for your court hearing

and getting a deportation order

or showing up to your court hearing and being arrested?

This question from u/throwaway 102013.

What should you do if you are a US citizen

and get deported by ICE?

One, you should call your family

and have them talk to reporters right away

'cause you need to get press on this issue right away.

Press solves problems.

Has this happened? Absolutely it's happened.

There have been US citizens

deported from the United States by accident.

What they need to do is go to the US Embassy

in whatever country they were deported to

and say, I'm a US citizen,

here's proof of my US citizenship.

If you don't have your passport, which you likely don't,

they will give you a travel document

to return United States.

That will not happen overnight.

That will likely take weeks,

but that absolutely happens today

and will continue to happen under the Trump administration.

This question from r/AskAnAmerican.

How dangerous is it really crossing the border?

Our side of the border in all the cities like El Paso,

San Diego, Brownsville, very safe.

On the Mexican side of the border,

that opposite side is dangerous, it is run by gangs.

There's extortion, there's rape.

People die crossing the border

either because of drowning along the Texas border

or die in the desert of thirst crossing the Arizona

and California deserts.

I would not recommend it to anybody.

It's just very, very dangerous.

Question from @yaafacomadre.

So if I get deported, what happens to my debt?

Nothing happens to your debt. It's still your debt.

If you're able to come back one day,

that debt will still be there.

Likely that debt is tied to a social security number,

which you will always have even if you come back legally

20 years from now, sorry.

This question from u/mtmag@dev52.

Thoughts on the differences between Jus Soli

and Jus Sanguinius bases for citizenship and nationality,

or how they are misused by modern politicians?

What do you think is the best form of citizenship?

Jus Soli means citizenship is based

on where you are born,

and Jus Sanguinius is citizenship based on blood or family.

The United States has a system based on both.

If you are born in the United States, you are a US citizen.

Unless your parent is a diplomat,

maybe you don't like that idea.

I personally think it's a good idea

because it establishes continuity.

There are a number of countries around the world,

mainly in the Middle East

where if you're born there, you're not a citizen.

So there are workers, three generations old in Saudi Arabia.

Their parents were born there, they were born there,

they are not Saudi.

If they leave for six months, they can't go back,

which creates stateless people, which creates refugees,

which creates broader problems around the world.

Oh, this is a great question.

This question from u/NoEggNoPlan.

What would revoking birthright citizenship look like?

First of all, you could not do it retroactively.

What Trump has done is revoke it going forward,

saying, As of originally February,

anybody born in the United States

whose parents weren't citizens or permanent residents,

even if their parents were legally here are not citizens

of the United States,

what would that look like going forward?

Creating an entire class of stateless individuals.

Our immigration laws don't let those kids

sponsor those parents until those parents

are out of the country for 10 years

so the parents aren't getting any benefit

out of their kids being born here

that is any way immediate

'cause you can't even sponsor your parents till you're 21.

At the same time, what are you gonna tell the kid?

The kid's not going anywhere now they won't have papers.

Are you gonna make them a resident?

Are you gonna give them a visa?

What are you gonna do for those kids?

This is a terrible idea whose time I hope will never come.

This question from u/Arktikos02.

How would you define the difference

between assimilation and integration?

Assimilation is an individual who adopts the mannerisms

and the culture of the society in which we come.

Integration is just being part

of the society of the economy.

It's not necessarily adopting every characteristic

of that society.

There's a lot of complaint in 2025

that immigrants don't assimilate.

This is simply not true.

If you're looking for immigrants the day they get here

to start having barbecue in their backyard with hot dogs

and hamburgers and abandon their culture

that they grew up with

and live with for a big part of their lives,

you would be going against the entire cultural history

of the United States, and it's not like you come to America

and are sworn in as a citizen

and we say, Hey, here's all these classes

to teach you to be American.

Immigrants come to America

and they integrate into our economy through jobs.

They integrate into our schools through their kids,

whether their own education, but assimilation takes time.

Sometimes it takes a generation

and if you wanna help people start a class in your area

to teach them English, start a culture class,

do things to help them assimilate.

I remember as a child in the 1960s

going with my grandparents to German social halls

where individuals only spoke German, played German music,

had German food.

Those social halls do not exist today, assimilation.

And Quora User asks,

What happens to all the paper forms you fill out

for immigration and customs?

I'm sorry I'm laughing 'cause yes,

they're still using paper.

Now, USCIS, which is the Immigration Service Agency

that runs and deals with most of the visas

and green cards and citizenship,

they are moving towards an online filing system,

but there are still billions

of paper records in immigration vaults around the world.

ICE on the other hand, ICE is all paper

and it's a paper nightmare,

is actually causing problems for the Trump administration

'cause they can't get the paper process fast enough

to get people into removal proceedings,

in respect to data protection in filing paper forms,

probably the least protected form of data

is a piece of paper which can be copied or photographed

and sent around the world.

The USCIS actually has a very robust

online filing system that is protected

by several different layers

and likely complies with every governmental standard

around the world for protection of data.

It'd be much better for them to move more quickly

to online data filing,

but the reality is they simply don't have

the physical capability of doing that yet.

As a follow-up question from @Phonex2717.

Can you explain what an F1 visa is and can it be revoked?

Well, we just saw a mass revocation

by the Trump administration in March

and April of this year of a number

of F1 visa holders actively studying the United States.

The Trump administration ran all 1.4 million students

who are here in the United States through the NCIC

to see if they'd ever been arrested for anything,

and approximately 6,000 fingerprint hits came back.

The Trump administration sent out notices,

Hey, we're revoking your visa

because you showed up in the hit.

The problem was, and I don't know if you know this or not,

but the police do arrest innocent people

and the vast majority of these individuals

had no convictions

and thus no legitimate basis to have their visas revoked.

Lawyers in more than 200 lawsuits

around the country in April, including myself

and our firm were able to reinstate these students

and get their status put back into place.

We are now litigating the actual visa revocation

in federal court in Washington DC for these students.

Visas can also be revoked if you are convicted of a crime,

if you get bad grades, if you take too few classes,

all those are reasons to revoke a student visa

in the United States.

This question from u/Budabing.

What were the main reasons

for the age of mass migration from 1850 to the mid 1900s?

And we can answer it with this chart.

In 1850, we were coming up on the Civil War

in the United States.

At the time, there were approximately 2.4 million immigrants

in the United States, 10% of the US population,

starting in 1865 shortly after the Civil War,

our population increased to more than 15%

of immigration doubling during that timeframe

in actual population, for the next 40 years,

immigration continued at a very rapid pace.

In 1924, our Congress passed laws

that limited legal immigration

to the United States from everywhere in the world

other than Western Europe.

What happened after 1924 up until 1965 is

that the percentage of immigrants in America went down.

There were no immigrants coming

and we went down to about 5%,

but since 1965 with the passage of the Immigration Act

and the restoration of worldwide immigration

to United States our numbers of immigrant population

has increased dramatically

while we have many more immigrants in America today

than we did in 1860,

we have many more people in the United States as well,

such that today the percentage of population

is basically a little bit less than it was in 1860,

even though we have many more immigrants in America.

This next question is from u/AppropriateDebt9.

How were previous immigration peaks perceived

at the time in the United States?

People who lived in the United States as Americans in 1910

to 1924 had the same reaction as we're having today.

An anti-immigration fervor

because people are generally afraid of things that are new

and when they see signs in Chinese going up

or people in school speaking Spanish to their kids,

they get afraid of that.

This is human nature

and it's something that America has typically overcome

after a period of time.

Hopefully, we've learned from our history

and we'll overcome that more quickly today.

This question is from @chicojuanito395.

How do undocumented immigrants pay taxes?

I would gladly hire undocumented,

which by the way would be a crime,

but everybody else pays taxes

so you're not getting away with not paying.

If you have work authorization documents

that really isn't undocumented, right?

Somebody explained like I'm five.

First of all, undocumented immigrants pay billions

of dollars in taxes every year in the United States,

not just through income tax

because they do pay income taxes with a taxes ID number.

These individuals do pay taxes as well on their food.

They pay taxes on their rent. They pay property taxes.

They pay taxes just like Americans do

at every level of society.

So undocumented immigrants are not getting away

with not paying taxes.

And finally,

if somebody does have work authorization document,

that means they have the ability to work

and have a social security number and you can hire them

and they will pay taxes.

Our next question is from @DonovanVice.

What if we just stopped immigration for a year

and saw what happened, see how things go,

and then we can decide the right balance.

Why would that be so terrible?

Ask the guy in love with the British woman

if he could just wait a couple years to bring her over.

Ask the employer who wants to bring in the lead scientist

on his project to create thousands of jobs for his company.

Ask the family who wants to bring dad to the United States

so they can take care of him as he enters Alzheimer's.

The reality is we need immigration

and we need it every year.

We need to grow our country

to remain competitive around the world.

You cut that off

and it'll be like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Hopefully our politicians in 2025

will continue to understand that.

That's all the questions for today, until next time.

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