This is immigration attorney Parviz Malakouti and in this video i want to
talk about two concepts that are related, similar but
totally different and get confused all the time in immigration. And that is
REMOVABILITY and INADMISSIBILITY. Okay so first of all, removability
basically means a ground that makes somebody who's
within the united states subject to being put in "removal
proceedings" and removed aka DEPORTED. The grounds of inadmissibility, excuse me,
removability are talked about, are memorialized in the
Immigration and Nationality Act aka the "INA" subsection 237(a)
. It's only about 10 pages. i'm going to link to it in the video description
below. Okay, now moving on to inadmissibility.
Inadmissibility are grounds that basically
prohibit somebody from being able to do one of three things and i'm generalizing
here. This is a basic basic explanation. Inadmissibility gets very complicated
actually but those three things are if you're
inadmissible you cannot, 1) enter the united states.
2) You cannot get a visa to enter the united states,
and third if you're in the United States, you cannot
ADJUST STATUS which basically means going through the green card process
staying entirely within the united states, rather than going abroad to do
what's called "consular processing." Okay so we have removability in INA
subsection 237(a) and we have inadmissibility in INA
subsection 212(a). Okay now why do they get confused? They
get confused because there's a lot of grounds that make somebody BOTH
removable and inadmissible. There's a lot of crimes
that if you can commit them, makes you removable, subject to removable
removability and also inadmissible okay. But it's not a 100%
overlap. There are certain bases, certain actions
that make somebody RMOVABLE but don't make somebody INADMISSIBLE. And there are certain actions that make somebody INADMISSIBLE
but don't make them removable. Okay so removability is about,
in the INA about 10 pages long okay. INA subsection 212(a) for inadmissibilityis
about 18 pages long. Again i'm going to link to them both in
the video description in case, maybe you're a law student or you like
reading up about this stuff and you want to get into it. I encourage you to do so.
So if you have a crime, or even an arrest on your record and you
are an immigrant, whether documented or undocumented, when you
visit a qualified immigration attorney you're going to be screened,
probably for both removability and inadmissibility.
It gets very complicated very quickly. I try to make some videos to
help people understand the basics on this because everybody should have a
basic level of understanding of what their situation is so that at very least
they can speak to their immigration lawyer in an informed manner but the
reality is that if you find yourself in this situation,
you really want to get a professional on the job. At very least you want to
consult with a qualified immigration attorney, if not actually be represented
by one because you don't want to rush an
application, whether it be for a green card or whether it be for naturalization
other status and risk getting yourself
put into removal proceedings. So those are the differences between
removability and inadmissibility. As a bonus, I'm going to talk about a
third concept which is very important, which is basically
, what i'm going to call "ADJUSTABILITY."
And that is in INA subsection 245 and what i call
"adjustability" I actually made up the word i don't think there's actually a
word adjustability but basically this is a subsection that determines
what immigrants are eligible to "adjust status"
which as I mentioned before, means to stay WITHIN the United States
during the entirety of your green card process. Why do people want to stay in
the United States and adjust status versus going abroad for console
processing? That's because it's safer to stay in the United States
because if you go abroad for consular processing then you open yourself up to
being INADMISSIBLE, right? Remember i said one of the things that makes
, one of the effects of being inadmissible is that you cannot enter
BACK in the United States. So people prefer and us (we) as immigration
attorneys, we prefer to have immigrants adjust status if possible,
rather than taking the risk of going abroad for consular processing.
So grounds that makes somebody eligible
for adjustment of status are in INA subsection 245
So, it gets a little bit confusing, it gets complicated.
We want to read these all together when we're evaluating an
immigrant situation and determine what the best path
is available for them, keeping in mind whether they can stay in the
country to adjust status, whether they're subject to grounds of
inadmissibility and also whether they are subject to grounds of
removability. Okay that's it. I hope this video helped.
Stay safe and keep educating yourself!