The End of the Green-Card Workaround

On May 21, the Trump administration ended a workaround that millions of foreign workers have used to get green cards without leaving the United States. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency issued a policy memo directing its officers to deny most applications filed from inside the country.^[1][3] People on temporary visas - H-1B engineers, students who married Americans, religious workers, corporate transferees - now have to fly home and apply at a U.S. embassy abroad.

The administration is enforcing the existing text of the 1952 immigration law rather than amending it. That law let the government grant green cards from inside the United States, but only at its discretion: the text says officers "may" approve these applications, not that they must.^[2] For sixty years officers approved them by default. The May 21 memo tells them to stop.

What Actually Changed

For decades, the standard path to a green card ran entirely inside the United States. A foreign worker arrived on an H-1B visa, the employer filed a petition, and the worker filed a second application without ever leaving. The May 21 memo ends that pathway for most categories. The petition stays. The green card itself now has to happen at a U.S. embassy abroad.

The list of affected categories is long. It includes H-1B specialty workers (most of them Indian), L-1 corporate transferees, O-1 extraordinary ability holders, R-1 religious workers, F-1 students who married a U.S. citizen, K-1 fiancés, and people who entered on humanitarian protection.^[3][4] The Trump administration kept a small exception for cases it judges to be in the national interest - a Nobel laureate, a major corporate executive, a humanitarian case with American children involved.

Why the 1952 Law Already Said This

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 - the McCarran-Walter Act - is the act that built the modern U.S. immigration system.^[7] Section 245, added a few years later, created the option of applying for a green card from inside the United States.^[2]

The key word is "option." The law says the government "may, in its discretion," grant the application.^[2] It does not say "must," and it does not give the applicant a right to be considered. The 1952 law treated inside-the-country approval as a discretionary convenience, available in certain cases at the government's choosing.

For the first fifteen years after the law passed, the federal government used the discretion sparingly. Most immigrants who wanted green cards applied from abroad, the way the law originally envisioned. Starting in the late 1960s, USCIS began approving inside-the-country applications by default. By the 1980s, adjustment of status had become the assumed path. Congress never voted for that shift. It happened through a series of administrative memos, each one extending the practice a little further than the last.

The May 21 memo reverses that drift. It tells USCIS officers to read Section 245 as Congress wrote it: a discretion to be exercised case by case, not approved on autopilot.

Why This Is Better Policy

A green card is permanent residence in the United States, and a step toward citizenship. The 1952 law treated it as a serious decision that warranted serious review. Several things change when that review happens at an embassy abroad rather than at a USCIS field office.

The applicant sits across a desk from a State Department consular officer trained in the source-country language and context. Document fraud is harder to pull off when the original documents - birth certificates, marriage certificates, police records - can be checked against the records of the country that issued them. Embassies have direct relationships with those records offices. USCIS field offices in the United States do not.

The applicant is outside the United States when the decision is made. Tens of thousands of people a year are denied a green card after applying from inside the country.^[5] Many are already out of status by the time the denial comes, and some remain in the country without authorization. When the decision is made at an embassy, a denied applicant is already home and stays there. The path from a denied application to an illegal stay closes.

Temporary visas are supposed to be temporary. The H-1B work visa, the F-1 student visa, and the B-2 tourist visa are all non-immigrant categories: the holder is admitted on the understanding that the stay is finite. For sixty years the government let those temporary visas serve as the first step toward permanent residence, with the holder never leaving. The May 21 memo directs officers to stop treating a temporary visa as a default path to a green card.

The Wait Time Argument

Critics point out that consular processing abroad takes 12 to 24 months, against 8 to 14 months for USCIS field-office processing.^[5][6] By that measure, the new system is slower.

Those numbers are accurate, but they measure the wrong thing. The wait at consular posts is long because the State Department has not hired enough Foreign Service Officers to handle the volume, a problem Congress can solve by appropriating money for consular hiring. Whether to fund more officers is a budget question. Whether green cards should be decided in person at an embassy is a policy question. The two do not depend on each other.

The wait-time argument also assumes faster is always better. For a tourist or student visa, where an error is small and reversible, faster is better. For a green card, which grants a path to citizenship and lifelong access to the country, speed matters less than getting the decision right. A longer review that verifies documents at their source and catches fraud is worth more than a quick one that does neither.

Recommendations

The May 21 memo can be undone with a single page from the next administration. Write the policy into law instead:

• Amend the 1952 law to require consular processing for most green-card categories, changing "may, in its discretion" to "shall not, except in extraordinary circumstances," with narrow exceptions for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens with American children, principal beneficiaries of O-1 exceptional-talent visas, and defined humanitarian cases.
• Authorize the State Department to add Foreign Service Officers at the highest-volume posts: New Delhi, Mumbai, Manila, Mexico City.
• Process applications filed before the memo's effective date under the old rules, return later filings with instructions to refile from abroad, and complete the transition within one year.

Sources

1. USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 7 Part A, Adjustment of Status - Updated guidance following PM-602-0199
2. 8 U.S.C. § 1255 / Section 245 of the Immigration and Nationality Act - Text of the law
3. NBC News, "Non-immigrant visa holders must return to home countries to apply for green cards," May 22, 2026
4. NPR, "Trump administration to force foreigners in the U.S. to apply for a green card abroad," May 23, 2026
5. USCIS, Quarterly Processing Reports, 2026 - I-485 backlog and processing times
6. U.S. State Department, Visa Wait Times by Post - Consular interview wait times
7. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (McCarran-Walter Act), Public Law 82-414 - Original 1952 codification