United States

The United States requires a visitor visa from everyone except nationals of countries designated as programme countries under the visa waiver statute. Designation is not an agreement and not a reward: the Secretary of Homeland Security may designate a country only if it meets statutory qualifications, and the first of them is arithmetic - the average refusal rate for visitor visas from that country over the two previous fiscal years must have been under 2 per cent, and under 2.5 per cent in either of them. A country whose nationals are refused often cannot be designated, which means the test measures how the United States has been treating that country's travellers.

Naturalisation by residence asks for three counted things and one judged one. Five years of continuous residence after lawful admission for permanent residence, immediately before the application. Physical presence inside the United States for at least half of that time. Three months of residence in the State or district where the application is filed. Continuous residence again from the application to the oath. And throughout all of it, good moral character, which the statute states as a condition rather than defining.

The United States tests residence for income tax with a formula rather than a threshold. An individual meets the substantial presence test if they were present at least 31 days in the current year and the weighted sum of days over three years reaches 183 - current year days count fully, the first preceding year a third, the second preceding year a sixth. Someone who spends about 122 days a year in the United States crosses it every year without ever spending half a year there. An exception releases a person present fewer than 183 days in the current year who establishes a closer connection to a foreign country. Holding permanent residence makes a person resident separately, without any count.

Most American work categories ask about the job. One asks about the passport. The treaty trader and investor category is open only to a national of a foreign state that has a treaty of commerce and navigation with the United States, to carry on substantial trade principally between the two states or to develop an investment. There is no equivalent for a national of a state with no such treaty, however qualified or well funded. Since 2022 the category also carries an anti-abuse clause aimed squarely at citizenship by investment: where the relevant nationality was acquired through a financial investment, the applicant must additionally have been domiciled in that state for three continuous years before applying.

The United States has two investor routes and they are not alternatives: one gives permanent residence and one does not. The employment creation preference takes up to 7.1 per cent of the worldwide employment-based level and requires capital invested in a new commercial enterprise, expected to stay invested for at least two years, creating full-time employment for at least ten American workers who are not the investor's own family. The treaty investor category gives a temporary status instead, and is open only to nationals of treaty states.

American family immigration splits in two. Immediate relatives of citizens - spouses, minor children and parents - are not subject to the worldwide numerical limits at all. Everyone else joins a preference queue with annual caps written into the statute: 23,400 visas for unmarried adult children of citizens, 114,200 for spouses and unmarried children of permanent residents, and further classes below them. Those queues are then cut again by the seven per cent per-country ceiling, which is why the same relationship produces a wait of months from one country and decades from another.

The student category is defined by two things that sit oddly together. The applicant must be a bona fide student qualified to pursue a full course of study at an approved institution - and must have a residence in a foreign country which they have no intention of abandoning. The second is a state of mind, and it is the applicant who must establish it. A student who is too convincing about wanting to stay is refused on the definition rather than on the course.

The United States belongs to no free movement regime. Nothing lets a national of any state in this corpus enter and stay on nationality, and the one trade agreement that creates a work category reaches Mexico and Canada alone. What does exist, and has no equivalent anywhere else recorded here, is temporary protected status: a designation made for a foreign state as a whole. The Attorney General may designate a state where there is an ongoing armed conflict making return unsafe; where an earthquake, flood, drought, epidemic or other environmental disaster has temporarily disrupted living conditions and the state has officially requested designation; or where extraordinary and temporary conditions prevent nationals from returning safely. Nationals of a designated state may then remain - not because of anything about them, but because of what happened at home.

The federal rule that makes banks ask for identification also settles what a foreigner may offer. Before opening an account a bank must obtain a name, a date of birth, an address and an identification number - and for a person who is not a United States person, the rule accepts a taxpayer identification number, or a passport number with the country of issuance, or an alien identification card number, or the number and country of any other government-issued document evidencing nationality or residence and bearing a photograph. A social security number is one option among several and is nowhere required. The address may be the street address of next of kin or another contact for someone with no residential or business address of their own.

Household effects enter free of duty and tax if they were actually used abroad for at least a year - furniture, carpets, paintings, tableware, books, libraries and other usual household furnishings - and are not intended for another person or for sale. The condition is use, not ownership: effects used for a year by a family of which the importer was a resident member for a year qualify whether or not the importer owned them at the time. And the year need not be continuous, nor need it fall immediately before the move.

The United States issues no driving licence. Fifty states and the territories do, each on its own terms, and a reader looking for a national rule will not find one. What federal law does is set what a state licence must satisfy to be accepted by a federal agency, and that rule reaches foreigners directly: a state may issue a temporary or limited-term licence only to someone with temporary lawful status, must verify that status through a federal system, and may not issue it for longer than the person's authorised stay - or, where the stay has no expiry date, for longer than a year.

The United States gives residents no general right to health care, and this corpus holds no federal statute that confers one. What it does hold is the emergency statute, and the words that matter in it are parenthetical: a hospital with an emergency department must provide an appropriate medical screening examination to any individual - "whether or not eligible for benefits under this subchapter" - who comes to the department and asks for examination or treatment, and must stabilise an emergency condition it finds. The duty attaches to the hospital and to the fact of arrival. Nothing in it asks about nationality, immigration status, insurance or ability to pay.

The United States has no residence category for a person who intends to live on their own money. Every immigrant preference is built on a family relationship, an employer, an investment that creates jobs, or a humanitarian ground, and every temporary category is built on an activity. A reader with capital and no intention to work, who would use a non-lucrative visa in Spain, an elective residence in Italy or a D7 in Portugal, has nothing here. The nearest provision is the employment creation preference, and it requires ten American jobs.

Nothing in the immigration statute is addressed to retired people and no category turns on age. A pensioner with means and no American family has no route of their own: the categories are family, employment, investment that creates jobs, diversity and humanitarian protection, and retirement is none of them.

There is no ancestry route into American residence. The immigrant preferences reach a citizen's unmarried adult children, married children and siblings, and a permanent resident's spouse and unmarried children - and that is the whole of what descent does. Nobody is admitted because a grandparent was American. Citizenship itself can pass to a child born abroad to an American parent, on conditions in a different part of the statute, but that is a question about whether a person already is a citizen rather than a route for someone who is not.