Hacker News Reader

"30 years" is factually incorrect. The requirement is to be a permanent resident for 5 years (I can find links if needed). Source: I'm currently awaiting my naturalization appointment, if all goes well the total time from setting my foot in the US to becoming a citizen will be few months short of 9 years (~2.5 years on work visa & 5 years on green card + ~1.5 years wait for naturalization appointment).

View on HN

With that said, it may be tricky to become a resident [1] in the first place. There are per-country-of-birth quotas, currently the wait times for people born in China / India can be significant (if taking the work visa route), up to 11 years. The longest wait that I see is for family-based immigration from Mexico - 24 years' wait for "married sons/daughters of US citizens". [2]

[1] resident to me means lawful permanent resident

[2] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

That may be true for you or the Greek person here. Not for indians, Chinese, and Mexican.

Only one category ("married children of US citizens"), only for Mexicans, comes close enough to ~30 years total time (~24 years waiting to become LPR, +5 years being an LPR in USA) to consider the "30 years" as valid IMO. The fact still remains that the requirement for citizenship is to be a LPR for 5 years (this is the upper bound, there are cases where less is possible), it is the LPR part that may take time, as I've already mentioned in a reply to my comment. For China and India the total times are closer to 15-20 years. All of this is for family-based immigration, which I'd expect to be generally less interesting as it requires people to already have a fairly close family member who is a US citizen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com