Towards the end of last month, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a policy memo which, in their words, ‘reiterated’ ‘ long-standing immigration law and immigration court decisions’ about the application process for a Green Card.
As the USCIS spokesperson explained at the time:
We’re returning to the original intent of the law to ensure aliens navigate our nation’s immigration system properly. From now on, an alien who is in the U.S. temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances. This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes. When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the U.S. illegally after being denied residency
But while USCIS may have been at pains to suggest this was a mere ‘reiteration’ of existing policy, to many it seemed like an abrupt shift.
Indeed, of the 350,120 Green Cards issued in 2025, 190,350 – or around 54% of them – were issued to people currently in the United States and changing their status, a route which would be closed down – or at least made more complicated – under the so-called ‘reiteration’.
Since the end of May, the reiteration has been reiterated a few times. The day after the memo was released, USCIS clarified that “people who provide an economic impact or are otherwise in the national interest” could receive an exemption. And then, a week later, the Department of Homeland Security further clarified that “highly qualified and skilled green-card applicants will see no noticeable impact from a controversial policy announced last week that most people seeking permanent legal residency would have to apply from outside the US”.
But exactly who these ‘highly qualified and skilled’ applicants are has been left unclear. As an in-depth piece of reporting by Bloomberg recently explained:
But those clarifications have done little to alleviate the concerns of lawyers with cases in the system. Clients are already being pressed for more specifics about why they are asking USCIS for a green card instead of leaving the US to apply through State Department consulates, said Xiao Wang, founder of Seattle-based Boundless Immigration.
Some clients are now in limbo, with USCIS staffers advising they “can’t approve or deny or you should go consular,” Wang said.
In other words, the current legal framework is at best confused, and many green card applicants currently in the United States have little idea how to navigate it.
What is the economic impact of all this likely to be? That is a question to which the Clark Center’s US Economic Experts Panel recently turned.
The panel was first asked whether “requiring most green card applicants to apply for permanent residency from overseas would lead to a substantial reduction in the numbers of skilled immigrants in the US”? The results here were decisive, overwhelming, and unsurprising. 23% of respondents, weighted by confidence, strongly agree, and 71% agreed.
The panel was then asked whether “requiring most green card applicants to apply for permanent residency from overseas would have a measurably adverse impact on a substantial number of US businesses”?
Again, the response was decisive, with 24% of respondents – again weighted by confidence – strongly agreeing and 67% agreeing.
Chad Syverson of Chicago Booth did not mince his words, simply noting that “this is a stupid proposal”. Other respondents pointed to a variety of useful empirical papers looking at the actual impact of immigration, and particularly of skilled worker immigration, on the labor market.
As one 2022 paper argues, the impact of such a policy would not only be felt by the firms losing out on workers:
This paper uses US administrative data and other data sources to study the role of immigrants in entrepreneurship. We ask how often immigrants start companies, how many jobs these firms create, and how firms founded by native-born individuals compare. A simple model provides a measurement framework for addressing the dual roles of immigrants as founders and workers. The findings suggest that immigrants act more as “job creators” than “job takers” and play outsized roles in US high-growth entrepreneurship.
That touches on a wider point raised by Larry Samuelson of Yale, that “the desire of people abroad to work in the US is one of the United States’ greatest assets. Putting obstacles in the way of legal immigration devalues this asset”.
The proposed changes then, in the view of the panel, would likely rescue the flow of skilled workers available to US businesses, and that would have a material negative impact on those firms. More generally, one can read across from that to a wider negative impact on the US economy as a whole.
The proposed changes to the rules around green card applications may well not last. Businesses are pushing back hard against the administration’s initial proposals, and the rules have already been clarified several times. In the view of the panel, that would be no bad thing. In the spirit of the World Cup, the experts have held up a red card to the green card proposals.
