The majority of permanent residents gain their green card through a status adjustment (ie, from a nonimmigrant visa).
Status adjustments are the norm, not some fringe edge case.
The only large category of immigrants that does not come primarily through adjustment are the "family preference" categories for more distant relative such as adult sons and daughters and siblings.
https://ohss.dhs.gov/system/files/2025-07/2025_0725_ohss_leg...
Nice.
So, at least one
However, ignoring family-sponsored routes, it is extremely difficult to get an immigrant visa in the first place, usually requiring years + $10k+ of fees to work your way up to it. You also need a sponsor to pay the fees (legally, you can't pay it yourself). Therefore, the vast majority of people start on a non-immigrant (temporary, restricted employment) visa and eventually ask their employer to sponsor a green card.
When people say "if you wanted to immigrate, you should just get an immigrant visa", they usually assume any other route is a hack or loophole. But it's actually the most common way to immigrate by far. You can, of course, interview for a job from abroad and ask the employer to directly sponsor an immigrant visa, but they'd have to wait years (best case) until you could actually step foot in their office. Plus they'd be forking over thousands in legal fees for an employee they haven't even seen in person. Nobody would do this, so the commonly accepted way is to bring an employee over as a temporary worker first and then apply for a green card while they're in the country.
By the way, the same checks apply for immigrant visa applications both inside and outside the US. You might think that employers are scamming the government by turning purported temporary immigrants into permanent ones, but the exact same qualifications checks, eligibility requirements, waitlists and quotas apply if you do the process inside vs. outside the US. It's entirely possible, and common, for green card applications to get denied (and the applicant's location doesn't factor in to this).
As a practical matter, all these immigrant visas pretty much entail a greencard soon thereafter. In other words, to get them is about as easy as getting a greencard in the first place, give or take, more or less.
The discussion here is really about legal workers, students and others on temporary visas who convert to permanent status.
this is a good example, because let's say someone is here on a student visa or temp work visa, falls in love and gets married. without the ability to adjust their immigration status they now have to leave the country - probably for years - to apply and hopefully get a greencard. Good luck making that marraige work.
We should increase the number of immigrant visas and make it straightforward what the process is to get a green card like what one would see in other countries like Canada and Australia.
Meanwhile, non immigrant visas should remain non immigrant and very restricted criteria for changing status (eg. marriage) without reapplying abroad.
Also, it's quite hard to become a permanent resident/immigrant even without the obstacle of this being categorically prohibited. My family, for instance, overcame some very low odds of success to make this happen (highly educated, both PhDs, for what it's worth).
I have learned that most Americans, probably through no fault of their own, have absolutely no understanding of how their own immigration system works. The options for legal immigration were _extremely_ limited and byzantine, and have been for decades, long before Trump.