alt Hacker NewsDevil's advocate: My wife thankfully just got her green card three months ago. She first came on a J-1 and then an F-1. She knows many, many people who come with the intent of staying either without status or via questionable marriage licenses. The vast majority of her acquaintances in the J-1 visa program were young (<25 year old) au pairs with no intention of learning English (they had 'mandatory' English language cultural lessons per J-1). My wife is an extreme outlier in that she learned English in 5 years and just got accepted to veterinary school in USA.
The bottom-line is that she thinks the J-1 / au pair program should be discontinued.
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As usual, the mentality of newly minted immigrants is “fuck you I got mine”.
If this is how immigrants want to treat their own compatriots, why should I care so hard about the global poor again?
The one thing to make me genuinely buy an anti immigrant thesis was the fact that over half of all Latino men and almost half of all Latino women voted maga in 2024. You want legal immigration? Earn it and reap what you sow!
When I studied in the US, a lot of our friends were au-pairs, and they all spoke perfect English.
Your wife's experience is an outlier, not the fact that she speaks English.
That is completely orthogonal. Whether any non-immigrant visa program should or should not be continued is immaterial. The topic at hand is about adjusting status to permanent residency, for which you need to independently satisfy the criteria for permanent residency. The admin is proposing asking people to go out of the US for their interviews as opposed to an interview in the US. The admin can just as easily deny AOS in the US, but people have more rights in the US and can seek legal recourse. They cannot outside the US.