Can a green-card holder be out of the States for 1 year straight?
I copied the following information from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website (www.uscis.gov). Please scroll down for information concerning being out of the country for one or more years. Immigration is nothing to fool around with, green cards are a very valuable resource, and while your friend can work with Google’s lawyers, if she’s English-speaking, she’d be well-advised to check out the government’s websites for regulations herself. Lawyers are people, lawyers make mistakes all the time, lawyers frequently rely on paralegals and legal assistants to do their “cookie-cutter” type work for them. I’ve done immigration stuff myself as a legal assistant with my attorney only glancing over the paperwork about three minutes, because he trusted the quality of my work. Your friend needs to cover her own bases as well to be sure that all documentation concerning her permanent resident status is copacetic.
