By “skilled immigrants” I mean people with advance degrees (PhD, MD, …) holding all types of highly technical and managerial positions.
Asking this because skilled immigrants, at least in theory:
- knows, and has first-hand experience of how much bullshit one has to go through to immigrate,
- has enough bargaining power to move to another immigration-friendly country,
- let’s just say that the upcoming US policies don’t seem to be friendly to any immigrants at all…
But then US tech and research are supported largely by the same skilled immigrants. So I’m curious how that is supposed to play out…
Sorry this is a bit of a strange question.
P.S.: I’m… not asking for a friend. I’ve been constantly worried for the past two weeks; I try not to rush to conclusions, so the fact that I’m still worried concerns me. Double quotation marks because in the US it’s literally the same government agency that manages all immigrants no matter how they got in the country (highly skilled worker, family of citizen, asylum, literally just crossed the border, …)
The sad part is that the brunt of this will likely be borne by nationals from countries that the US President has officially deemed “shithole countries”. Or, in other words, not white. You only have to look at his “Muslim ban” from last time, and know that he will expand it, to see how bad things are gonna get.
You may think you have some protection if you are a permanent resident. And you may have some protection if you are in a state that will not assist the Federal government in rounding people up. But you will continue to deal with the hassle every time you enter or leave the country. Which state you live in doesn’t matter at the border (and the airports are technically borders).
In my uninformed opinion, if you decide to stay, you shouldn’t make any plans to leave the country, because you will never really know if your authorization to stay in the country will be arbitrarily denied while you are away. It is probably better to just plan that the next time you leave the country, it will be for the foreseeable future. We will, unfortunately, not be very hospitable to you for the next 4 years (and maybe longer). Unless you are white. Which is all sorts of wrong. But the way it is these days.
This is the most important bit: If you weren’t born in the US and aren’t white skinned, avoid any border crossings from 2025-2028 if you expect to get back in.
So it might be worth planning a location outside the US where you can meet up with those you care about if things DO go sideways.