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Comment by jimz | Hacker News Reader

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My wife, a green card holder, applied for citizenship in April and was naturalized yesterday (from an EU country). Not that I don’t believe it could be true but where are you getting the 3-4yr timeline? If that’s accurate she/we may have dodged a massive bullet.

Spouses always get better treatment as there is a voter who would be mad otherwise. They check for scam marriages but otherwise hurry the process through - if they don't a voter contacts their congressman to push the process. That voter will also likely know a lot of other voters and thus influence the next election while someone not married is unlikely to have that local network to use.

This is patently false for one reason - once someone has a U.S. green card and has met the residency requirement to apply for citizenship, the application form and process are the same for everyone, regardless of how they got their green card (through work, marriage, asylum, investment, etc.).

Once you are eligible to apply, the whole process is basically form N400->biometrics->interview (just doublechecking your name and other paper info, takes 5 minutes)->civics test->ceremony.

However, the timelines and process for getting the green card itself is different depending on the nature of your visa, and they will indeed try to check for scam marriages before you get your green card (if you were applying for it through the marriage visa).

Not exactly, if you're married to a citizen the residence requirement is 3 years not 5, and the form clearly distinguishes the 3 and 5 year options (3 years requires extra evidence of marriage and spouse's US citizenship)

Yes, I am aware, which is why my grandparent comment said “[…] once someone […] has met the residency requirement to apply for citizenship.”

The amount of time one has to wait before meeting the residency requirement (aka before they can apply for the US citizenship) depends on other circumstances. With the default being 5 years (technically 4 years and 9 months, because by the time process finishes and you get your citizenship, you will hit the required 5y mark, so they officially let people apply at 4y9mo mark; there is even a first-party "early filing calculator" tool[0]), and the number going down depending on whether it was through marriage, whether you served in the US military and applied for the expedited process, etc.

However, my post explicitly mentioned that I was talking about the time one has to wait after they apply for the US citizenship, to which this has zero relevance.

0. https://www.uscis.gov/archive/uscis-early-filing-calculator

I stand corrected.

I would love to see data that backs this up. While definitely plausible the pathway she followed to naturalization was based on time in country and not our marriage. I didn’t need to push but I’ve generally found my congressman (who is also almost our neighbor) to be pretty unresponsive on any other issue.

My understanding - which may not be correct - is the length of the process primarily depends on your country of origin and secondarily on how you are eligible. Very interested in any source showing that a relatively normal process has pushed out from months to years.

3-4 year timeline makes more sense for Greencard application to Naturalization, that was 4.5 years for my wife. But its not 3-4 years N400 to Naturalization, no way.

Timelines for USCIS depends heavily on where you are, since some offices just have more people to go through than others. So I have talked to people that one step might be 4 months for them and a year for another person.

I don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense.

Indeed, the real problem is a pervasive attitude that the USA is the best country in the world by far and everyone is clamoring to get in. We don't really care if foreigners come or not, and they'll come anyway, so why bother making the process friendly?

It's not new. Rabid ideologues on the other side blamed Obama for things that pre-dated his administration, as well. Some people just can't be rational when it comes to politicians they don't like.

I don't see how blaming the pre-existing website on the current administration makes sense.

Many federal web sites were very quickly altered or replaced by the new administration.

This is common. Work begins on some web sites immediately after the election. For example, when a new president is sworn in, the White House web site flips immediately.

More to the parent poster's point, it has been widely reported in the legitimate media repeatedly that many federal web sites have been replaced or significantly altered by the current administration. There's an entire pseudo-department for it that also makes headlines for its greater transgressions.

Add to that severe and sudden budget and staffing cuts, and like all government functions -- you get what you pay for.

So you claim the visa website was also changed by this administration?

People really really dislike when you point out that the democrats are also broadly anti immigration in practice. They forget Biden deported 4.6 million people vs Trump's 2 million.

Elon Musk set out hundreds of very young and arrogant programmers to modify code throughout the federal government including to change decades old code used by Treasury, Social Security, etc. While this went on he would tweet idiotic statements like "Dead people are getting social security!" (because he didn't understand the deceased have beneficiaries) and "we're giving social security to people who are 150 years old!" (because he and we presume some subset of his young programmers didn't understand date fields being set to the epoch indicated the date of birth/death had not been recorded).

All this is to say we probably shouldn't assume any current US government website, especially ones that have to do with immigration, hasn't been completely modified by this team.

Is your claim that they found zero people fraudulently collecting social security through a dead relative?

no, this is an entirely bad faith representation of my words as written

he most certainly did not understand that the vast majority of what he perceived as "dead people getting benefits" were completely legitimate cases where beneficiaries were receiving those benefits and/or the data was encoded without a real birth/death date

since you appear to be of the opinion that Musk was somehow indicating a useful fact of some kind, here's mainstream media reporting of the claims made by Trump and Musk (we can assume Trump was advised by Musk) and their extreme inaccuracy:

https://apnews.com/article/social-security-payments-deceased...

> since you appear to be of the opinion that Musk was somehow indicating a useful fact of some kind,

No but I am glad he took action to fix it.

The Cobol 150 year thing is also incorrect and was widely criticized in tech circles: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/31288/did...

Musk wasn't criticizing COBOL he was criticizing a specific thing he misunderstood in social security code which people in that thread said as much. I think you're trying to see something you want to see there.

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