Immigration & tax procedures for immigrants in the US

Immigration & tax procedures for immigrants in the US

This is the step-by-step section of MigrantUSA: the procedures Hispanic immigrants in the United States actually have to navigate, explained categorically — how each one works, what it costs, how long it takes, and where to find the official forms and sources. This is general procedural information, not legal advice. Choose a procedure below.

Before starting, it is worth clearing up the most common confusion in this whole section: a green card and a work permit are not the same thing — one is proof of a status and the other proof of a permission with an expiration date, which is why expiring means different things for each.

Before any procedure that involves leaving the country, it is worth understanding the 3-year and 10-year bars and how unlawful presence is counted — the clock starts on the day of departure, and accruing unlawful presence is not the same thing as being out of status.

Two of the protections readers most often confuse are Temporary Protected Status and asylum, which come from separate statutes that are nonetheless wired to each other in two specific places — what the law allows a person to hold at the same time covers the regulation that names maintained TPS as a circumstance that can excuse asylum’s one-year filing deadline, and the cross-reference that makes the mandatory asylum bars into TPS bars as well.

Another confusion that costs people money is the pair of words themselves: asylum and refugee status are the same protection reached through two entirely different procedures, and only one of them can be asked for from inside the country. A third category gets mistaken for both — parole is not asylum and is not an immigration status, because the statute defines it as temporary permission that expressly is not an admission.

Two TPS questions the law answers precisely and almost nobody explains well: which document USCIS issues to leave the country and get back in with TPS, which is not the same for someone already granted the status as for someone whose application is still pending. And what happens when a country’s TPS ends — the 60-day floor, the exact day status is lost, and why that termination carries no right of appeal.