I want some advice from the people more experienced along the US immigration journey- hopefully without being judged and talked down to as is the wont of some on this forum. What I am going to share with you is a personal struggle with the immigration issues.
Let me give you the background. Please bear with me. My wife and I, both Pakistanis, met in college in the US in 1999. We graduated, returned to Pakistan and married each other to build a life in that country. This was 2002 and 2003 for me and wife. We build a pretty ok life for ourselves, but I faced several health challenges namely a life threatening brain tumour for which I went through two awake craniotomies in 2017 and 2020. Then Pakistan's economy slowed down and this is significant. I will come to it in a minute. Unrelated to our life in Pakistan, my brother in law who had become a US citizen some 25 years ago, sponsored us for F4 visa in 2005. We thought of it as a back up option. Meanwhile our daughters grew up and naturally the question arose of where they should go to school. My wife and I quickly realized that while my parents had managed to educate me in the US, Pakistan's economic conditions no longer afforded us the same opportunity to educate our daughters in the US, especially since my own career had stalled because of my illness. Meanwhile our immigrant visas came last year and we moved in time to the US to educate our daughters here. The idea behind this immigration is two fold: to give our daughters the opportunity to become US citizens so that they have options - Pakistan has been declining for a while and one can never be completely certain of its future. Secondly like I said to educate them in the US. As a barrister, I have great regard for the US first amendment and therefore moving back here has an ideological component i.e. my belief in secularism and freedom of speech and expression. Indeed that has been my main preoccupation as a lawyer in Pakistan- at least the human rights part of my practice. FYI my full name is [deleted by VJ Moderation]. You can look me up - I am not posting this here to show off but to give you an idea of where I am coming from. Now I come to the second part of the challenge. My father passed away in 2007. My mother, a medical doctor by profession and therefore a very independent woman otherwise, is nonetheless old, alone, a cancer survivor who recently survived hip surgery as well. She is living alone in Pakistan. I am her only child. Obviously till (or if) I become a US citizen the question of her moving here does not arise. Frequent travel is also not possible for her given her ailments.
So my ask of you is to advise me as to how can I structure my immigration journey in a way that I can continue to visit my mother in Pakistan and therefore maintain ties to that country (maybe even contribute in some pro bono capacity to the human rights space there), without jeopardising my residency in the US and remaining on the citizenship track hopefully (though I must add that citizenship is not necessarily my first priority). Please bear in mind that Pakistan will be either on the yellow or the orange list later today.
I do hope you will take this post in the spirit it is intended and I hope I am not opening myself up for ridicule. It is just that I have gotten some good advice on this forum over the years and given all that is going on with the current administration, I am slightly desperate - desperate enough to open up here in this manner.