My Eastern European wife and I recently faced the decision of how to go about getting her a green card. At the time we lived outside the US.
One option was to enter the US on her B1 visa pretending to have no “immigration intent” and then “change our mind” a respectable number of days later and apply for AOS. The process for this was 1.5 to 2 years. I didn’t want to do it for that reason and because I wasn’t comfortable with what amounts to visa fraud, but our attorney presented it as a pretty standard option.
The other option was consular processing. This wasn’t automatic. Our attorney contacted a few consulates in the region where we lived to see if any would accept our case (due to war the consulate in her home country wasn’t handling routine cases). We got approved for consular processing in Budapest.
I had to go once as the US citizen spouse to submit our application packet and do a pro forma interview. Then a few months later it was my wife’s turn to go to the interview.
The process, like any immigration process, was paperwork heavy and nerve wracking. The final interview was very simple and felt like a formality.
In that case once approved she received a visa that would be stamped upon entry to the US and this would count as a temporary green card pending receipt of the physical card.
All of this happened during the second Trump administration so I was expecting a hostile or at least adversarial process. But it was quite the opposite. Total elapsed time was about six months from initial attorney consult to entry into the US as an LPR. It would have been faster if our attorney was more on the ball getting our final interview appointment.
If I were to find myself in need of a green card for a foreign spouse again I would opt for consular processing if given the choice. Now that it’s required I imagine there will be a longer backlog.
Obviously if you need to do this at one of the consulates that no longer offers consular processing that’s a different story. I was fortunate that the Budapest consulate agreed to take our case.
There’s precedent for Georgian dissidents fleeing to Ukraine. Saakashvili was living in Ukraine for a while before he returned and is AFAIK still in prison in Georgia.
I fled to Georgia when the invasion started and lived there 10 months. I’m grateful to the Georgian people for their hospitality towards me and my Ukrainian colleagues who took shelter there in a very dark time. But having said that we all subsequently returned to Ukraine.
Georgia isn’t a bad country. It’s very under rated in my opinion. The Georgian people are very friendly, their (private) healthcare is high quality, and as long as you don’t run afoul of the ruling party it’s pretty safe as well. But Ukraine even in a time of war is more advanced and has better economic infrastructure. If I were a Georgian dissident I could easily see myself fleeing to Ukraine.
If you really believe that you’d be better off somewhere else, and you’re a US citizen in decent financial shape, you are absolutely not trapped in the USA.
I’ve in Europe for 7 years now, not to escape any particular political ideology back home but suffice it to say that I was motivated. If you’re motivated and willing to endure some discomfort there are multiple options for European immigration available to you.
Making any statement about “Europe” is painting with a broad brush, that said I am not particularly bullish on Europe now, for various reasons. But I can’t think of any European country that has the same problems as the US; they all have their own problems, as well as just different ways of doing things.
I’ve never lived in an agrarian commune but I can say with certainty that it would be my absolute last choice.
I feel the same. What do you say in Slack to the guy who just told you he’s handed over his tasks to a colleague because he’s joining the territorial defenses and has to go and fight? “Good luck”? “Give ‘em hell”? “Слава Украины" is what I settled on but there’s just nothing you can say that conveys the weighty emotions of that kind of goodbye.
The very least that can be done is to not cut them loose because Russian bombardment has decreased productivity.
I’ve left behind a life and all of my possessions in Ukraine but more than that I feel like I’ve let them down since I’m living comfortably in Georgia while they suffer and could possibly die.
I’ll just do what I can to help keep the project going so we can keep supporting them. The cold reality is that a startup isn’t a charity so at some point some hard decisions need to be made, but that point isn’t five days into a war.
I am American, moved to Kyiv almost four years ago. My startup engineering team is 100% in Ukraine. As the warning signs mounted I urged my people to consider leaving but no one, myself included, thought it would come to this. Of course no one left.
I finally agreed to take a couple of weeks out of Kyiv to calm my cofounder’s nerves, sure that I’d be back and we’d have a laugh at how it all came to nothing. So I am in Tbilisi and my team are all stuck in Ukraine.
We’re doing all we can to help We can’t get the men out because the Ukrainian borders guards won’t let any men leave, and most of the women won’t leave their husbands behind. A few have joined the territorial defense forces and are defending Kyiv now. Many others are taking shelter in basements while the Russians shell their cities.
Today, 66% of my 45 person team were online and working. It’s astonishing the grit and commitment the Ukrainians are showing. We’re resolved not to abandon them and to do all we can for them but the shitty reality is that’s just not a whole lot right now.
If anyone can fight their way to victory in this war it’s them. I wish the west had done more when there was still time to make a difference, but now it’s up to Ukrainians to save themselves and make the Russian invaders pay for every meter they take.
FWIW, I've tried the Scaleway (Paris), MacStadium (Atlanta), and as of today also the Hetzner (Falkenstein, Germany) M1 offerings.
The Scaleway service had such awful latency on the VNC connection that I found it almost completely unusable. MacStadium and Hetzner are both better. That's particularly odd because I'm based in Kyiv, Ukraine, so I would have expected better latency to Paris than to Atlanta. It might have been a problem on my ISP's end, I didn't spend any time looking into it.
Besides that, the Hetzner offer is by far the cheapest, as is usually the case with Hetzner. If you don't mind having to do all configuration yourself, and you don't require a flashy whiz-bang UI for managing your provisioned resources, Hetzner is a great value.
The customer forum requires a login to access, and unfortunately is often in German.
The linked post says this:
"Danke für das Interesse an dem neuen Produkt!
Die Fragen zum Betriebssystem sollten sich durch die Veröffentlichung der Produktmatrix beantwortet haben. Es wird das aktuelle macOS Big Sur installiert.
Bei der Einrichtung und Zugangsmöglichkeiten haben wir uns nur für SSH entschieden. Nicht jeder Kunde möchte mit einem aktiven VNC-Zugang starten. Wie auch der eine oder andere beschrieben hat, ist die Einrichtung/Aktivierung nicht schwer. Gerne könnt ihr dazu auch einen Community-Artikel schreiben und weiteren Kunden helfen.
Welche Alternativen zu VNC würdet ihr Vorschlagen oder hättet ihr gerne, die wir uns mal anschauen sollten?"
I don't understand German, but I ordered one and received SSH login instructions, and was able to get VNC enabled and connected by tunneling port 5900 through the SSH connection.
We've been using Hetzner boxes to run our self-hosted GitHub Actions runners for a couple years now, except for Mac which we have run in MacStadium. This offering is much cheaper than MacStadium though; EUR 49 compare to USD 129.
I ordered one of these M1 Minis from Hetzner last night as soon as I saw the announcement. It was provisioned and ready this afternoon. Initial impression is good, it's a Big Sur M1 Mini. I paid extra (EUR 69/mo) to get two 1TB SSDs as well, since we often run up against the 256GB storage limitation.
Hetzner provide a dedicated IPv4 address and IPv6 /64, SSH access is via a password. Unlike MacStadium, VNC access didn't seem to be enabled initially, but some Googling around yielded the ASD command to turn that on. Our Hetzner firewall config blocks everything but port 22 anyway, so I tunneled VNC port 5900 through SSH and it worked fine.
The open question, which only time will answer, is network connectivity. MacStadium (or at least the Atlanta data center we use) seems to have pretty reliable connectivity, but our Hetzner runners sometimes fail with some transient network glitch while trying to download a random dependency now and then. Fortunately most of the tools we use will auto-retry, so even if we do have sporadic network connectivity glitches for the price it's well worth it.
My Eastern European wife and I recently faced the decision of how to go about getting her a green card. At the time we lived outside the US.
One option was to enter the US on her B1 visa pretending to have no “immigration intent” and then “change our mind” a respectable number of days later and apply for AOS. The process for this was 1.5 to 2 years. I didn’t want to do it for that reason and because I wasn’t comfortable with what amounts to visa fraud, but our attorney presented it as a pretty standard option.
The other option was consular processing. This wasn’t automatic. Our attorney contacted a few consulates in the region where we lived to see if any would accept our case (due to war the consulate in her home country wasn’t handling routine cases). We got approved for consular processing in Budapest.
I had to go once as the US citizen spouse to submit our application packet and do a pro forma interview. Then a few months later it was my wife’s turn to go to the interview.
The process, like any immigration process, was paperwork heavy and nerve wracking. The final interview was very simple and felt like a formality.
In that case once approved she received a visa that would be stamped upon entry to the US and this would count as a temporary green card pending receipt of the physical card.
All of this happened during the second Trump administration so I was expecting a hostile or at least adversarial process. But it was quite the opposite. Total elapsed time was about six months from initial attorney consult to entry into the US as an LPR. It would have been faster if our attorney was more on the ball getting our final interview appointment.
If I were to find myself in need of a green card for a foreign spouse again I would opt for consular processing if given the choice. Now that it’s required I imagine there will be a longer backlog.
Obviously if you need to do this at one of the consulates that no longer offers consular processing that’s a different story. I was fortunate that the Budapest consulate agreed to take our case.