Former Green card holder now Citizen as of a few days ago.
Submitted an online form 4 months ago, received an interview date two months ago, had my interview last week.
Interview was at 8:30am Oath ceremony was at 9am Registered to vote at 9.15am Back at work at 10am!
Submitted passport application the day after.
Interview was straightforward and most of the time was double checking all the information I had previously submitted was accurate. Learning the answers to the civics test was fun.
I think there is a cliche of a stern interviewer who is looking for any excuse to say no, but this officer was kind and encouraging.
The oath ceremony was actually quite moving. I often see most displays of patriotism as some kind of pseudo mental illness but the patriotism shown by the officiant was actually rational, inclusive and inspiring.
All that to say, am lucky and pleased to have such a smooth journey to citizenship and am happy to be able to vote!
Ours was even faster. Submitted our naturalization application March 31. Had passport in hand by mid May. Interview and ceremony was between those dates.
>I often see most displays of patriotism as some kind of pseudo mental illness
Why is that? It just doesn't seem rational to me to see it that way, but if that is how you feel then that is how you feel. I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise, I already know I can't, but just some explanation would be valuable.
When there is no reason to display it, i find it weird tbh. Not aggressive, just weird and uncomfortable. I get it for sports or official ceremonies, but else it often just seems to either seek conflicts (Hooligans), or more often, seek cheap branding.
And there is ways to display it. A pub calling itself "Penny Lane" and displaying a liver bird is totally fine, but when an english pub looks excessively, in-your-face english, i just can't, and i would bet most englishmen living in the same city couldn't either. It's just so weird.
> I get it for sports
It actually makes no sense at all for sports beyond billionaire owners trying to make fans feel like we’re all one, big, happy family. What on earth does the National anthem have to do with grown men playing baseball or football? Do they sing the National anthem before you sit down and start coding every day?
The belief of "I should" is one of the core part for Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD, not confused with OCD). The behaviour is largely driven by the anxiety of "fail to e.g. be citizen" and sometimes is considered a little extreme from others' view.
A patriotism that sounds like "we are the best" often coincides with spurning rational and empathetic assessment of reality in favor of using this patriotism as a prideful crutch.
Congratulations!
Wow, they really streamlined it. I wonder how they did that. I spent a decade in the US (Permanent Res), wife was American, had two kids, worked for a solid 10 years, payed an enormous amount of taxes, had two properties, no record, not even a parking ticket and it took about 12 months and that was pre 911.
I guess they must have changed the requirements since and hired 1000's of people to process everyone. Lucky you.
I remember my wife going through all stages of visas. Student visa, H1B, green card, then citizen. If you've never gone through it, it's complicated and involves a lot of waiting. Green card was the most complex out of all of them. We had less paperwork getting a mortgage and buying a house. It's very bureaucratic, and could use with some simplification. But once you're a citizen, it's smooth sailing.
> We had less paperwork getting a mortgage and buying a house.
Generally, yes, this is the way it should be. Path from visitor to citizen should involve way more checks than owning a home.
What is the check that we need to do for aspiring citizens that wouldn’t interest a lender?
Also, making sure the house is sufficient collateral for the loan is a whole bunch of additional overhead.
US Citizenship is worth a lot more than a house....
Australia, on both sides of the house, also understands the importance of Immigration.
However we just neglected to build anywhere for them to live...
We are in a cost-of-living crisis, a per-capita recession.
One of the reasons we are not in a full-blown recessions is the wealth that immigrants brought with them!
Building firms are going under, and we gutted the trade schools years ago. So the housing crisis isn't going to resolve anytime soon...
I think there is a lot of divisiveness towards illegal immigration in the United States and securing the border, but there is a lot of agreement that the mechanism for legal immigration here is also broken and should be fixed and that’s a totally different thing. It’s sad that the fix is about who they think these people will vote for though.
I never understood that lack of understanding by politicians on what people need - totally understandable in US where corporate lobbyists rule congress. Australia, Canada governance are mysteries to me.
On the residential homes - i assume it not a question of land/resources.
> Australia, on both sides of the house, also understands the importance of Immigration.
Then you proceed to list the ways things are worse. Maybe immigration is not good for you and you should not take it as an axiom?
The Australian and the USA's immigration system are substantially different in terms of underlying values. The Australian system assigns points based on skill and merit. The US has an emphasis on reuniting families, a lottery system, and difficulty through ambiguity. Anecdotally, my friend who immigrated from Silicon Valley to Australia was able to explain his process to me in about an hour. In contrast, I have had the USA system explained to me many times, and it still hasn't clicked. I can't help but to feel like this is by design.
As for our (USA's) housing crisis, the New York Times had a podcast about that just four days ago [1]. There are some notable parallels to what you have described. TL;DR: The 2008 recession pushed us from building 2.2 million houses a year to 600K, for the last 20ish years. The skilled laborers and tradesmen who used to build houses have closed shop. Now here we are years later and millions of houses short with no clear way to reboot the industry.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/podcasts/the-daily/housin...
There's substantially more immigration to Australia through university scams (fronts that don't actually educate) than genuine immigrants. The majority is not skill and merit based because of the "temporary" "students" who can work and never leave the country, as well as the chain migration loopholes.
Australia has almost the highest immigration per capita in the world, and a massive chunk of that is pure fraud. [1]
75% of "students" come in via unregulated agents, many of whom direct students to these university fronts.
In fact, Australians overwhelmingly reject mass immigration. 71% oppose it and are regularly ignored by the powers that be on both sides. The left imports immigrants for ideological reasons and the right imports them for cheap labor for their corporate buddies.
[1] https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/fake-schools-fake...
All else being equal immigration drives down wages by increasing the labor supply and drives up housing by increasing housing demand. Nevertheless sufficiently wealthy (if they actually onshore that wealth) and productive immigrants can be a net benefit for the receiving nation. Hence the point systems and such to select for them.
As it happens, the US powers that be are big fans of real estate appreciation and wage depression. They evidently don’t much care about selecting for high value immigrants either. Tech workers who pay big taxes and create bigger value get a way harder time of it than obvious public charges. It’s strange, but revealed preferences never lie.
If only Green Card processing was as efficient.
Now this is asking too much dude, the government can't get efficient in two places at the same time, that would be cheating.
It is limited right? I assume the quotas are done by October / early November I assume.
Original article, not the msn.com repost:
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-09-26/with-an-el...
MSN version isn't paywalled, though.
As with everything in the us immigration system. It’s not fast enough!
As much I like the points based system, I feel the family-based approach to which US pivoted to in 60s was the correct approach - you really cannot predict where the next einstein is going to be show up, and I always tell my wife we already lost her in Iran or Afghansitan
> the uptick in new citizens is due to efforts to reduce a backlog of applications that began during the Trump administration and exploded amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the article they just brought it back to 2014 levels.
Extending the franchise devalues the franchise.
I remember hearing that exact phrase, word for word, back in 2008 about gay marriage. Guess what happened next?
yay
It's a long process and people who have been vetted and through it don't deserve to be held up unless there is a good reason. I can understand if there is something amiss but to just put the entire thing on hold for "theater" is wrong.
Still from what I understand the US takes in more immigrants every year than any other country.
Worldwide, the United States is home to more international migrants than any other country, and more than the next four countries—Germany, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—combined
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
> Worldwide, the United States is home to more international migrants than any other country, and more than the next four countries—Germany, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—combined
That's a somewhat misleading way of presenting data.
It is true that in absolute terms, the US contains more immigrants than any other country on earth.
However, on a percentage of the population basis, the US is actually only around the OECD average in terms of numbers of immigrants: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/foreign-born-populat... – in 2019, Luxembourg was 47.30% foreign-born, Australia 29.90%, Switzerland 29.70%, Israel 21.20%, Sweden 19.50%. At 13.60%, the US was around the middle.
The fact that the US comes first in absolute terms, is not because the US is unusually welcoming to immigrants, it is because (among developed countries) it is unusually populous – at 333 million people, it is over 2.5 times more populous than the 2nd most populous OECD member (Japan).
The top five countries in the world by population are China, India, United States, Indonesia, and Pakistan. As mega-population superpower/rising-power type countries go, the United states is it for the embrace of immigration.
Our anti-immigration lobby is loud and politicized, but there are smart people doing policy behind the scenes no matter which bunch of belligerent blowhards are in office in a given year.
We should be even more welcoming of immigration than we are, and we should clean up our act on e.g. the southern border and the humanitarian crisis that's completely avoidable there. We don't have this right yet.
But when it comes down to it in realpolitik terms, populous nations are strong nations both today, and especially in 20-40 years when powers like the PRC are going to be faltering badly because of demographic collapse and we're still going strong because new blood kept the country young and vibrant.
> Our anti-immigration lobby is loud and politicized, but there are smart people doing policy behind the scenes
You mean traitors trying to subvert the democratic will to restrict immigration?
If there’s been a straight up or down referendum by the public on sweeping limits to immigration greater than already exist, I’m unaware of it. This could be my ignorance, in which case I’d thank you for educating me via citation.
And while it’s a rare tier-one politician these days that hasn’t merited the word “traitor” by selling their actual as opposed to ostensible policy to monied influence, I’m likewise unaware of any split there along lines of ostensible immigration policy proposal. I’ll likewise thank you for any correction of my ignorance there.
US can take in easily another 20-30 million immigrants over say 5-10 years - the question is always how to assimilate when there is already a distinct lack of affordable housing / schools / medical infra. There is literally no public investments in this.
That said the IRA act is poring money into manufacturing which is having direct effects in those states, but require a hard look at easing infra development,
Keep in mind
1) The US economy has no choice, it needs immigrants to keep the population from declining. This is why the southern border is what it is. We've trade an economic problem for an immigration problem.
2) In some - many? - cases these immigrants are a brain drain from their home country. That is, when "the best" come here instead of staying home to improve their on country, is that a net positive? We pat ourselves on the back but no one talks about how this hurts the from countries.
Down voted? Why? At least stand up and counter. HN ain't what it used to be. Sad really.
I’ve known many people that immigrated to the US. I grew up in a neighborhood that was 98% southeast Asian immigrants. The 1990’s and 2000’s were a better time in a lot of ways. But in 2024 with the recession still on and housing costing a fortune where are they going to go??? I mean especially considering the overwhelmingly high record numbers too. I mean this in the most practical and sincere way.
As an American with Southeast Asian immigrant parents, they will live in a way that most Americans would find intolerable. Whole families in a 1 bedroom, very long commutes, taking buses, and living apart from their children (CPS, I know).
To be clear, I did not grow up like this, but I know many that did.
Some, yeah. I grew up with the 1990’s OGs. Outside my project and literally across the street was a pocket of county within city limits and all the Hmong and Laos families lived like that there. I courted a girl that lived with like 15 people in a 2 bed 1 bath house there. But the families in my project had to follow government rules with respect to the number of people living in one unit.
Immigration is an economic geopolitical weapon against Russia and China.
America’s secret weapon, right there with no nearby enemies and two oceans
> with no nearby enemies
What is Cuba then?
Too weak to be an enemy?
You're never too weak to be an enemy. You may be too weak to be a threat, but that's not the same as not being an enemy.
Canada will rise again!
how old are you?
Probably because if Trump gets elected they'll crawl to a halt again.
Biden has 3.5 years to adjust the policy and only now have the numbers gone up? It's probably not strictly partisan.
Don't quote me but I swear I remember hearing somewhere the Obama actually deported more immigrants than Trump. Or maybe it wasn't Trump? The gist was that Obama wasn't as pro-immigrants as most thought he was.
As long as my social security checks do not bounce starting in ten years, let as many people in as you want.
Burning a bit of karma never hurts now and then.
Social Security benefits will reduce _despite_ immigrants, not _because_ of them.
Americans voted in extremely good terms on SS (always good COLA adjustments, the age of SS retirement never adjusting for longer lifetimes or easier labor). It was never sustainable without consistent massive economic growth.
Immigrants are generally young and seeking employment. Bringing in young workers is the best way to guarantee social security for yourself.