A caller from Jamaica asked Jim Hacking a modern question the immigration laws never anticipated: he plans to adjust status through marriage while quietly keeping his full-time Jamaican job (paid in Jamaican dollars, into a Jamaican account) from inside the United States. He wanted to know if USCIS would call that unauthorized work.
mic What the Attorney Says
“You can do the job in Jamaica, but physically be present in the United States … I think that’s a gray area.”
The reason it is gray is that the rule predates the situation. Unauthorized employment is judged by where the work is performed, and the framework was written before a person could sit in an apartment in the U.S. and run an entire job in another country.
mic What the Attorney Says
“That was obviously before people could maintain their full job inside the United States … So, I’m about 50/50. It could go either way.”
The decisive fact in this case was not the job. It was the sponsor. Unauthorized employment normally bars adjustment under INA § 245(c) (8 U.S.C. § 1255(c)), and the forgiveness that saves most married applicants runs only to immediate relatives, meaning spouses of U.S. citizens. This caller is married to a lawful permanent resident, which puts him in the F2A category, not the immediate-relative exemption.
mic What the Attorney Says
“You’re working inside the United States without authorization. Um you’re not married to a US citizen, so that’s not forgiven. So, therefore, you are inadmissible and you need a waiver.”
That gap changes the whole plan. If the work is treated as unauthorized and there is no immediate-relative fix, the case needs a waiver, and a waiver can take about two years, roughly the same window in which the LPR spouse could naturalize and convert him into an immediate relative anyway. Hacking’s suggestion was the less glamorous one: leave, wait for the spouse’s citizenship, and come back clean rather than gamble on the gray area.
The trap here is the assumption that foreign-source income is invisible to USCIS. It rarely is, and the disclosure question on the forms cuts both ways, the same way that old unauthorized work surfaces at the marriage interview. Employment-based applicants get a much wider safe harbor under the 180-day grace of INA 245(k), but family cases do not, and even legitimate remote setups can draw scrutiny, as they do when someone works abroad too long and CBP questions the trip.