How U.S. immigration decisions are actually made
I study the machinery behind U.S. visa and immigration outcomes: how consular officers infer future conduct from a paper record, how discretion is produced at the lowest administrative layer, and how rarely reality finds its way back into law. This English edition publishes the abstracts, key concepts, and outlines of that work.
How U.S. Nonimmigrant Visas Are Actually Adjudicated
Proxy variables in DS-160, the consular interview, and refusal-rate governance without quotas
Twelve chapters and five appendices answering one question: how does the United States adjudicate a nonimmigrant visa when the conduct at issue has not yet occurred and present intent cannot be directly observed? The paper advances three original models — proxy-variable behavioral inference, competing-explanation adjudication, and refusal-rate governance in the absence of quotas — and documents nine institutional findings grounded in statute, the Foreign Affairs Manual, State Department disclosures, and OIG / GAO reporting, with evidence stratified across five tiers.
From Constitution to Street Level
How American law becomes reality, and how reality rewrites law
Seventeen chapters and two appendices. The paper proposes a three-plane model of American legal order (Authority, Implementation, Feedback Mesh), three gates through which reality returns to law (Detection, Correction, Norm Production), three forms of divergence, and three institutional adaptations. Its second contribution is institutional resolution mismatch: the unit that supplies external legal constraint, the unit at which administrative decisions actually occur, and the unit at which public data is recorded frequently do not coincide — so the way an institution is produced shapes not only how it governs but how observable it is at all.
The $100,000 H-1B Fee
Executive power, employer cost, and the employment-based immigration system
A structural analysis of the dispute over a $100,000 H-1B charge: can the executive branch reshape the cost of an H-1B petition by administrative action alone, and how does such a charge redistribute burden across employers, foreign workers, startups, and the U.S. labor market?
Trump v. Birthright Citizenship
The Fourteenth Amendment, jus soli, and the floor of American identity
Where does U.S. birthright citizenship come from, what exactly does the Citizenship Clause protect, why has jus soli become the floor of the American status system, and can executive action redefine it?
A Formal Descriptive Model of U.S. B-Category Nonimmigrant Visa Adjudication
LEO-FFψ-Σ Consolidated Specification · 2026.04
The paper builds a formal descriptive model of consular adjudication for B-1/B-2 visas. Factual variables, risk signals, narrative structure, ties, travel purpose, prior records, and status intent are organized into a single framework that can be analyzed, expressed, and argued about rather than described anecdotally.
Leo Li (Irvine Leo) writes and speaks — primarily in Chinese — about U.S. visa adjudication, status structure, consular procedure, and immigration policy, with a YouTube audience of roughly nine thousand subscribers. This English edition exists so the research itself can be read, cited, and argued with by practitioners and scholars who do not read Chinese. Nothing here is legal advice.