U.S. immigration law is a system that resists explanation. I built these tools to explain it anyway. Each answers simple questions at a glance and progressively harder ones on closer reading. None of them exists anywhere else.
Every employment-based pathway from petition to green card. An employer petitions, or the immigrant self-petitions. Most employer cases begin outside this chart, with a permanent labor certification proving to the Department of Labor that no qualified U.S. worker is available. Everyone waits for a priority date.
Every family-based pathway from petition to green card. Whatever the relationship is (or was, in some cases), the legal machinery does not change. Immediate relatives move without a queue. Everyone else waits for a priority date.
Every U.S. nonimmigrant visa, classified by how it behaves rather than by what its statute calls it. This table maps behavior, reading each visa on several axes at once: its broad purpose, whether it requires a USCIS petition, whether it tolerates a pending green card case, and the limits of that tolerance.
Every country on earth the way it is seen by U.S. law. Where a person is from is not small talk. It largely determines which options exist, and whether any exist at all: per-country backlogs that stretch decades, treaty-based categories open only to some countries, pathways that close entirely depending on birthplace, visa bans imposed on entire nationalities.