Those of you that support Donald Trump are likely yelling at your computer screens that even if Melania Trump lied about her immigration status that doesn’t mean she is illegally in the country today. But it does. If Melania Trump lied on her “green card” application that would make her resident alien status null and void which could lead to the revocation of her naturalization. You see, immigration laws are tricky and complicated.
First, let me point you to yesterday’s Politico article. According to the article by Ben Schreckinger and Gabriel Debenedetti, there are gaps in the timeline that Melania Trump has publicly provided and the type of visa she used to come to the United States. According to Melania Trump, she used the H-1B visa to enter the United States as a model. I previously wrote about how that visa type is routinely misused. In the case of Melania Trump, the Politico article points out that Melania Trump stated that she moved to New York in 1996 using the H-1B visa.
However, the recent racy photographs of Trump’s wife that were published by the New York Post, were taken in New York in 1995. Politico pointed out that Melania Trump has previously stated that in order to keep her legal status she would regularly return to Slovania to get her visa “stamped.”
I missed that important detail in my original research.
As an immigrant myself, I previously used the B1/B2 visa, which is a business or tourist visa issued on an I-94 card when you enter the United States on a non-immigrant status. It is a common visa issued to tourists to the US. They are limited in the amount of time they can be extended. I normally had to leave the US every three months, and sometimes I got lucky and was allowed to stay up to six months without leaving the country. The thing is that as a non-immigrant visa you are only allowed to stay in the United States for a short period of time before returning to your country for a renewal. You cannot renew it while in the United States.
I would return Mexico and get a new B1/B2 visa on my next trip to the United States.
As Politico rightly points out, an H-1B visa does not require you to leave the country until after three years. Even then, it could be extended another three years.
By Melania Trump’s own words, she used to leave the country every few months to get her visa “stamped”.
That would make her visa type a B1/B2 visa which would prohibit her from working as a model in the United States.
In other words, by modeling for the photoshoot in 1995, if Melania Trump did not have an H-1B visa in her possession, she would be “out of status”, or as Donald Trump would say, she’d be illegal.
That is the fundamental reality of the immigration problem that Donald Trump and those who oppose fairly fixing the broken immigration system is that it is not as cut-and-dry as telling someone to immigrate “the right way.”
As an immigrant herself, it really bothers me that Melania Trump orders other immigrants to do it “the right way” when she, herself, used loopholes in the immigration system to become a US citizen. Whether, she is correct in stating that she had the proper visa – H-1B – or whether it turns out that she was “out of status” does not matter because even her use of the H-1B visa is controversial at best and fraudulent at worst. What would be much worse is if she was actually illegally working in the US in 1995.
So, this is for Melania Trump, put it to rest and show us your 1995 visa.
Here is mine:
Where is yours?
By the way, I started an #illegalmelania hashtag yesterday on social media. Add your thoughts using that hashtag.
Chill out, Martin. Trump has about as much a chance of being president as Hillary has of being indicted.
CNN has a report with an interview from the photographer that shot the 1995 photos. He maintains she wasn’t paid. She posed for free for exposure. So she wasn’t in violation of her visa. Nice try, Martin, but already debunked.