Green card or permanent residency is the step before citizenship. If you enter the United States as a student, under the usual process you would apply for a green card either in your first job via your employer or if you have completed your Ph.D. and have a spectacular resume, you can apply it on your own under the extraordinary category. The most common pathway is via the employer. If you have completed an advanced degree, the entire process may be expedited and can take upto a year. Otherwise it can take anything between 2–10 years depending on your original country of citizenship.
There is generally a cap to the number of green cards issued to each country. For that reason, it’s usually an extremely lengthy process for people of Indian origin where it can take upto 10 years for the green card to be issued.
I had entered the country under a student visa to complete my graduate studies and was only able to start my green card process after 8 years of residing in the country and only obtained my green card after 10 years of residing in the country.
For someone who go through the legitimate lengthy process of obtaining the green card, it is quite infuriating to watch people commit fraud.
Lots of people also obtain their green card through marriage. If you marry an American citizen you usually have your green card within a few months and are eligible for citizenship within 2–3 years. However there are people who misuse this system where they get married under false pretenses sometimes to absolute strangers, sometimes to people they have met a few weeks earlier for the sole purpose of obtaining a green card. A lot of these people end up getting divorced after the process of green card/citizenship is completed. I do understand most people would only go down that path under dire circumstances. How acceptable or not this is, I leave that for you to decide. But I anticipate that it certainly wouldn’t be acceptable for people who end up spending hundreds of dollars getting a graduate degree, or working their ass off getting an advanced graduate degree and waiting a decade before they can be accepted as resident aliens.
There was an article published in NY Times in 2017 which also shed light on this topic:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/magazine/should-you-report-a-green-card-marriage.amp.html
