[beAbU]

Simila in Ireland: you are not allowed to seek work while in Ireland on a holiday visa, you can only apply for work permissions/visas from outside the country, and depending on the type of visa you get (general work vs critical skills), your spouse might have to wait a year before they can join you.

[rcxdude]

Sure, but AFAIK a green card is more like indefinate leave to remain: it's not a visa as such, but a thing you can apply for after you have already lived in the country for some amount of time (on a visa of some other form, generally one which allows you to legally stay for the required time in the country) which gives the right to stay permanently. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to require leaving the country to apply first.

[beAbU]

I see, that is different indeed, and rather silly to force you to apply from abroad!

Seems like it's a ploy to get all the undesirables out of the country, then it's "oops your application was denied, or it takes years to be approved, you can't come back. Sorry not sorry!"

[garbawarb]

Green card is completely independent of whether you're in the US. You can get one without ever having set foot in the US, and you can live in the country for 15+ years and still not be able to get one.

[CalRobert]

Note - I immigrated to Ireland from the US and went through the visa process (including huddling in the cold in January at 4 AM at burgh quay, and years later, writing a scraper for their insanely bad appointment system that managed to actually be worse than huddling in the cold)

It's pretty normal not to be able to look for work on a tourist visa in most countries - are you suggesting this is unusual? As far as spouses, they used to have an incredibly asinine system where they told you your spouse _could_ work, without sponsorship, if they got a special form, but getting this form was de facto impossible. It was a very Irish approach, in retrospect. The campaign to fix this was, eventually, successful. (https://reformstamp3.wixsite.com/home)

[AnotherGoodName]

Fwiw I’ve seen confused or misleading posters reply to this change with statements along the lines of ‘this only means that they don’t allow tourist to apply for greencards in the country’.

Which is nonsense, it applies to all non immigrant visas such as work visas. But it’s a line you’ll see various people try to claim as if this isn’t devastating to every spouse of a us citizen who now can’t get a greencard without leaving their us based job and family.

[thrownthatway]

Do they have yo quit their job to leave the county?

[AnotherGoodName]

If you’re on a work visa you can’t work from a foreign country.

[thrownthatway]

That doesn’t answer my question.

[csomar]

How is this the same? You can't apply for a green card on a holiday/tourist/non-working visa. You have to be already in the country for many years before you can do that.