7 ms·

What makes the immigration process in the US truly horrific is the extraordinary time it takes to approve or reject a greencard petition. In many cases it takes

What makes the immigration process in the US truly horrific is the extraordinary time it takes to approve or reject a greencard petition. In many cases it takes years - or even over a decade or more. That's insane. People bring their spouses here, they have kids who are born and go to school here, and all along the way their immigration status is uncertain. And meanwhile they are tied to whatever job they're in. It's insane. Make that process faster. Give people a thumbs-up or thumbs-down like 10x faster. Months not years.

rayiner 6y ago
It’s insane because it’s a kludge. The US doesn’t really have a general purpose skilled immigration visa. The H1B visa is a temporary worker visa. There is this whole legal fiction where, when you get one, you have to announce non-immigrant intent with a wink, then once you’re here you say “I just now changed my mind and I want to stay here, can I get a green card.” It was never designed to be a payday to permanent residency, because the grand bargain of the law in the 1960s was that it wouldn’t increase immigration. They should just repeal the law and design a real point-based permanent immigration system from scratch.
- doingmyting 6y ago
  The H1-B visa is a dual intent visa. There is no announ inc immigration intent with a wink. It's literally written into the law that it is ok to do so. I won't argue whether that's a good thing or a bad thing but simply saying it's a temporary work visa and leaving it at that is inaccurate at best and disingenuous at worst.
- what_ever 6y ago
  H1-B is dual intent - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent so there is no winking required. H1-B can last for 6 years (can be extended beyond that too but let's not get into that) and I think 6 years should be enough for one to get the GC. But otherwise I agree with rest of your points.
  - _jgdh 6y ago
    > I think 6 years should be enough I’m guessing you don’t know very many Indians?
    - what_ever 6y ago
      I am one. I was talking more about the intentions behind it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    > H1-B is dual intent - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent so there is no winking required. There is. It doesn't matter in practice, because it's a legal fiction anyway, but here's the legal logic: For all visa applicants, including H1B, there is a presumption that the person is an immigrant, and they cannot obtain non-immigrant visas until they convince the admission officer of their non-immigrant intent, see section 214(b) of INA. Crucially, you need to argue that you have no intention to abandon your foreign residence. Dual intent have nothing to do with it, this is true for all kinds of visas. The immigration law says that, as a rule, applying for permanent residency in the US (a green card) constitutes evidence of your intent to abandon foreign residence. Where dual intent policy enters the picture is that the above does not apply to holders of dual intent visas. For them, applying for green card "does not constitute evidence" of their intent to abandon foreign residence: this is the exact language used in section 205b of Immigration Act of 1990, which is the legal basis for "dual intent" policy. Note that they do not say that the rule of abandoning foreign does not apply to dual-intent visa holders, only that applying for green card no longer constitutes evidence of their intent to abandon foreign residence. Of course, none of it matters in practice, since it's all legal fiction, and in practice things works exactly as you believe they are. The point here is that the practice is based on the legal fiction, on the wink which requires immigration officials to pretend you do not intend to abandon your foreign residence, when everyone knows that this is exactly your goal.
    - 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- _ph_ 6y ago
  There should be both. I am German, work for an American company. It shouldn't be difficult for me to move to an US office for some time and return back home. Of course, there is some likelyhood, that if I stayed at a place for more than a coumple of months, that I want to stay at that place long term, and this should be possible without too high bareers. Here in Germany, you basically need a job offer which matches certain criteria, to be get a temporary residency. This can be prolonged as long as you stay employed in Germany. Similar rules exist for students. I have an Indian colleague who studied in Germany and now is working here. If you stay in the country for 5 years, it is pretty much just a formality to apply for unlimited residency and it is also reasonably straight-forward to even get German nationality, though this is less common.
- whack 6y ago
  > The H1B visa is a temporary worker visa. There is this whole legal fiction where, when you get one, you have to announce non-immigrant intent with a wink, then once you’re here you say “I just now changed my mind and I want to stay here, can I get a green card.” This is not true. Your description is accurate for the F1 student visa and TN work visa for Canadians - applicants for those visas are not allowed to have immigration intent. There is no such requirement for the H1B visa. The poster you replied to is spot-on about the ridiculous wait times for green cards, and this delay has nothing to do with the H1B program itself. The government really needs to speed this up, so that immigrants and their families aren't living in fear of the next arbitrary Trump executive order.
- foldr 6y ago
  H1-B is dual intent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent (Not sure why doingmyting's comment saying the same thing is flagged. Virtually all of this user's comments seem to be flagged for some reason.)
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    They’re shadowbanned. Basically, every post is instantly killed and must be vouched for
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
unishark 6y ago
The time to process applications is indeed on the order of months. https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/historic-pt https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/historic-pt I believe the I-140 is for employment-based green cards. The long wait times are due to annual quotas by country, not slow handling of paperwork.
- kolmogorov 6y ago
  it is not only due to quotas. there is BS request for evidence as well as random changes. for example, they added some disease to the process (I believe gonorrhea or syphilis) and then the exam I took entering the process wasn't sufficient at the time they actually looked at the exam. then it took them a long time to send that notice, then I got the new exam and the clock started again adding around 6 months from the "we need you to test for a disease that can be easily treated if you had it" to the approval. this is with highly paid lawyer support.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  EB immigrant visas take ages and then there's the archaic process of some poor schmuck sitting in an USCIS office asking the questions and checking boxes on a form that you submitted a second time...
- Florin_Andrei 6y ago
  From the p.o.v. of the person actually doing this, it takes years from the moment you apply to the moment you get the decision. This is what needs to change.
pgAdmin4 6y ago
Welcome to the modern day slavery.
ricktdotorg 6y ago
why would your comment be downvoted? do downvoters think you are lying, or do they think its a good thing that green cards take so long? what you say is correct. as a green card holder myself i can attest to both my initial approval period (3.5 years) and also the renewal period (2 years) being onerously long, and at times, having a particularly deleterious effect on my life. look, i can understand the initial approval taking a long time. they have a lot of stuff to check. but i applied for the renewal a full 18 months before my GC's expiration date (because i knew they took a looong time) and i received the card a full 2 years after my renewal + bio was accepted in the system, i.e. six months after my GC expired.
- Razengan 6y ago
  > why would your comment be downvoted? do downvoters think you are lying, or do they think its a good thing that green cards take so long? Or they don’t want other people to see what a comment is saying.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >why would your comment be downvoted? do downvoters think you are lying, or do they think its a good thing that green cards take so long? The tall nail gets the hammer. The inconvenient facts get the gray text.
refurb 6y ago
I assume your talking about the visa dates? The actual process is pretty quick, a friend went from start to finish with a green card in 1.5 years. The backlog is due to: 1) the limited number of immigrant visa defined in the law and 2) country based diversity quotas.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  That's not "pretty quick". That's 18 months. Pretty quick would be a month.
  - refurb 6y ago
    I’d love to see if any country does it that quickly. It’s a pretty involved process in the US with appointments, medical exams, etc.
    - JAlexoid 6y ago
      You mean... Like Singapore(7days), Lithuania(15days), Ireland(4 weeks), Netherlands and most other European countries - 90 day mandate. My first work authorization in US was the simplest L1b internal company transfer. That took from mid October 2016 to issue of the visa on 21 Feb 2017. That's considerably longer for the simple document. My blanket work authorization took 2.5 years... and 4 years for the LPR.
      - refurb 6y ago
        Are you talking visa or permanent residency? Those are very different. 7 days for PR in Singapore? That's not the experience I've hear from friends. In fact, you're at the mercy of the gov't as it's entirely discretional for PR. You often have to apply multiple times if you don't have the "right" profile.
        JAlexoid 6y ago
        Just a work permit. An equivalent of what you get in Singapore in 7 days is H1. H1B takes at absolute best - 6 months at 33% success rate.(If you miraculously get to file on March 31st and get to start October 1st.) Permanent residency in US takes years. Even Diversity Lottery takes at least 18 months.
gopi 6y ago
For Engineers and Doctors from India, its takes more than 20 years to get Green card now. Its because of the arcane country quota system which assigns the same numerical quota for each country regardless of population, so India and Monaco get the same number of Green cards. This is the remnant of the pre-1965 racist immigration country quota system which allowed only European whites into US.
- noozirul 6y ago
  quota alllow everyone in the us per quota. hence the name. i don't see what is racist. i'd say it is fair. the problem is that india is just too big and there the dream of any indian studying IT is sadly to emigrate to the us to work there. i wish india would be a nice place to work and live so that millions dont feel the need to leave.
- nullsense 6y ago
  Applicants from Oceania have 5% to 10% chance of winning the green card lottery in a given year. India is like 0.01 percent or something silly like that.
- wing-_-nuts 6y ago
  IIRC it's based on the number of immigrants from each country, not their race? As an example, a black person from Jamaica will have a much easier time than someone from India or China simply because there are fewer applicants from their small country.
- foolinaround 6y ago
  there is no racist element to this; all countries have the same quotas. India, China, Mexico, Philippines etc have backlogs because more people try to get in from these.
  - techie128 6y ago
    FIFO is a fairer strategy.
- gamechangr 6y ago
quantgenius 6y ago
What makes the immigration process in the US truly horrific is that it is racist. When the law was passed, the grand compromise was that it would not change the racial makeup of the country. So there are country specific (which is really just race specific with a wink and a nod) quotas for different countries. This means if you are from Sweden or Ireland, it's actually pretty easy to get a green card. There is even a green card lottery where you can apply in Ireland and get a green card and get one just because you entered because there aren't enough immigrants from there to balance things out. But if you are from India, it's going to take a decade or more.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  Shhh.... We don't tell American citizens that they are largely xenophobic, even though we have PEW Research data to prove it.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- foolinaround 6y ago
  Need citation for this. when the basis is country-specific, and all countries are treated equally, it is purely supply/demand. No one applies from Afghanistan, so it is easier to get a GC -- so is US biased towards Afghanistan?
  - mavelikara 6y ago
    > when the basis is country-specific, Not adjusting for population when the brunt of this policy is not borne by a country but a person, suggests malicious intent. All countries are treated equal, but all immigrants are not.
    - foolinaround 6y ago

rayiner 6y ago

It’s insane because it’s a kludge. The US doesn’t really have a general purpose skilled immigration visa. The H1B visa is a temporary worker visa. There is this whole legal fiction where, when you get one, you have to announce non-immigrant intent with a wink, then once you’re here you say “I just now changed my mind and I want to stay here, can I get a green card.” It was never designed to be a payday to permanent residency, because the grand bargain of the law in the 1960s was that it wouldn’t increase immigration. They should just repeal the law and design a real point-based permanent immigration system from scratch.

doingmyting 6y ago
The H1-B visa is a dual intent visa. There is no announ inc immigration intent with a wink. It's literally written into the law that it is ok to do so. I won't argue whether that's a good thing or a bad thing but simply saying it's a temporary work visa and leaving it at that is inaccurate at best and disingenuous at worst.
what_ever 6y ago
H1-B is dual intent - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent so there is no winking required. H1-B can last for 6 years (can be extended beyond that too but let's not get into that) and I think 6 years should be enough for one to get the GC. But otherwise I agree with rest of your points.
- _jgdh 6y ago
  > I think 6 years should be enough I’m guessing you don’t know very many Indians?
  - what_ever 6y ago
    I am one. I was talking more about the intentions behind it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  > H1-B is dual intent - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent so there is no winking required. There is. It doesn't matter in practice, because it's a legal fiction anyway, but here's the legal logic: For all visa applicants, including H1B, there is a presumption that the person is an immigrant, and they cannot obtain non-immigrant visas until they convince the admission officer of their non-immigrant intent, see section 214(b) of INA. Crucially, you need to argue that you have no intention to abandon your foreign residence. Dual intent have nothing to do with it, this is true for all kinds of visas. The immigration law says that, as a rule, applying for permanent residency in the US (a green card) constitutes evidence of your intent to abandon foreign residence. Where dual intent policy enters the picture is that the above does not apply to holders of dual intent visas. For them, applying for green card "does not constitute evidence" of their intent to abandon foreign residence: this is the exact language used in section 205b of Immigration Act of 1990, which is the legal basis for "dual intent" policy. Note that they do not say that the rule of abandoning foreign does not apply to dual-intent visa holders, only that applying for green card no longer constitutes evidence of their intent to abandon foreign residence. Of course, none of it matters in practice, since it's all legal fiction, and in practice things works exactly as you believe they are. The point here is that the practice is based on the legal fiction, on the wink which requires immigration officials to pretend you do not intend to abandon your foreign residence, when everyone knows that this is exactly your goal.
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
_ph_ 6y ago
There should be both. I am German, work for an American company. It shouldn't be difficult for me to move to an US office for some time and return back home. Of course, there is some likelyhood, that if I stayed at a place for more than a coumple of months, that I want to stay at that place long term, and this should be possible without too high bareers. Here in Germany, you basically need a job offer which matches certain criteria, to be get a temporary residency. This can be prolonged as long as you stay employed in Germany. Similar rules exist for students. I have an Indian colleague who studied in Germany and now is working here. If you stay in the country for 5 years, it is pretty much just a formality to apply for unlimited residency and it is also reasonably straight-forward to even get German nationality, though this is less common.
whack 6y ago
> The H1B visa is a temporary worker visa. There is this whole legal fiction where, when you get one, you have to announce non-immigrant intent with a wink, then once you’re here you say “I just now changed my mind and I want to stay here, can I get a green card.” This is not true. Your description is accurate for the F1 student visa and TN work visa for Canadians - applicants for those visas are not allowed to have immigration intent. There is no such requirement for the H1B visa. The poster you replied to is spot-on about the ridiculous wait times for green cards, and this delay has nothing to do with the H1B program itself. The government really needs to speed this up, so that immigrants and their families aren't living in fear of the next arbitrary Trump executive order.
foldr 6y ago
H1-B is dual intent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent (Not sure why doingmyting's comment saying the same thing is flagged. Virtually all of this user's comments seem to be flagged for some reason.)
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  They’re shadowbanned. Basically, every post is instantly killed and must be vouched for
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

unishark 6y ago

The time to process applications is indeed on the order of months. https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/historic-pt https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/historic-pt I believe the I-140 is for employment-based green cards. The long wait times are due to annual quotas by country, not slow handling of paperwork.

kolmogorov 6y ago
it is not only due to quotas. there is BS request for evidence as well as random changes. for example, they added some disease to the process (I believe gonorrhea or syphilis) and then the exam I took entering the process wasn't sufficient at the time they actually looked at the exam. then it took them a long time to send that notice, then I got the new exam and the clock started again adding around 6 months from the "we need you to test for a disease that can be easily treated if you had it" to the approval. this is with highly paid lawyer support.
JAlexoid 6y ago
EB immigrant visas take ages and then there's the archaic process of some poor schmuck sitting in an USCIS office asking the questions and checking boxes on a form that you submitted a second time...
Florin_Andrei 6y ago
From the p.o.v. of the person actually doing this, it takes years from the moment you apply to the moment you get the decision. This is what needs to change.

pgAdmin4 6y ago

Welcome to the modern day slavery.

ricktdotorg 6y ago

why would your comment be downvoted? do downvoters think you are lying, or do they think its a good thing that green cards take so long? what you say is correct. as a green card holder myself i can attest to both my initial approval period (3.5 years) and also the renewal period (2 years) being onerously long, and at times, having a particularly deleterious effect on my life. look, i can understand the initial approval taking a long time. they have a lot of stuff to check. but i applied for the renewal a full 18 months before my GC's expiration date (because i knew they took a looong time) and i received the card a full 2 years after my renewal + bio was accepted in the system, i.e. six months after my GC expired.

Razengan 6y ago
> why would your comment be downvoted? do downvoters think you are lying, or do they think its a good thing that green cards take so long? Or they don’t want other people to see what a comment is saying.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>why would your comment be downvoted? do downvoters think you are lying, or do they think its a good thing that green cards take so long? The tall nail gets the hammer. The inconvenient facts get the gray text.

refurb 6y ago

I assume your talking about the visa dates? The actual process is pretty quick, a friend went from start to finish with a green card in 1.5 years. The backlog is due to: 1) the limited number of immigrant visa defined in the law and 2) country based diversity quotas.

JAlexoid 6y ago
That's not "pretty quick". That's 18 months. Pretty quick would be a month.
- refurb 6y ago
  I’d love to see if any country does it that quickly. It’s a pretty involved process in the US with appointments, medical exams, etc.
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    You mean... Like Singapore(7days), Lithuania(15days), Ireland(4 weeks), Netherlands and most other European countries - 90 day mandate. My first work authorization in US was the simplest L1b internal company transfer. That took from mid October 2016 to issue of the visa on 21 Feb 2017. That's considerably longer for the simple document. My blanket work authorization took 2.5 years... and 4 years for the LPR.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Are you talking visa or permanent residency? Those are very different. 7 days for PR in Singapore? That's not the experience I've hear from friends. In fact, you're at the mercy of the gov't as it's entirely discretional for PR. You often have to apply multiple times if you don't have the "right" profile.
      - JAlexoid 6y ago
        Just a work permit. An equivalent of what you get in Singapore in 7 days is H1. H1B takes at absolute best - 6 months at 33% success rate.(If you miraculously get to file on March 31st and get to start October 1st.) Permanent residency in US takes years. Even Diversity Lottery takes at least 18 months.

gopi 6y ago

For Engineers and Doctors from India, its takes more than 20 years to get Green card now. Its because of the arcane country quota system which assigns the same numerical quota for each country regardless of population, so India and Monaco get the same number of Green cards. This is the remnant of the pre-1965 racist immigration country quota system which allowed only European whites into US.

noozirul 6y ago
quota alllow everyone in the us per quota. hence the name. i don't see what is racist. i'd say it is fair. the problem is that india is just too big and there the dream of any indian studying IT is sadly to emigrate to the us to work there. i wish india would be a nice place to work and live so that millions dont feel the need to leave.
nullsense 6y ago
Applicants from Oceania have 5% to 10% chance of winning the green card lottery in a given year. India is like 0.01 percent or something silly like that.
wing-_-nuts 6y ago
IIRC it's based on the number of immigrants from each country, not their race? As an example, a black person from Jamaica will have a much easier time than someone from India or China simply because there are fewer applicants from their small country.
foolinaround 6y ago
there is no racist element to this; all countries have the same quotas. India, China, Mexico, Philippines etc have backlogs because more people try to get in from these.
- techie128 6y ago
  FIFO is a fairer strategy.
gamechangr 6y ago

quantgenius 6y ago

What makes the immigration process in the US truly horrific is that it is racist. When the law was passed, the grand compromise was that it would not change the racial makeup of the country. So there are country specific (which is really just race specific with a wink and a nod) quotas for different countries. This means if you are from Sweden or Ireland, it's actually pretty easy to get a green card. There is even a green card lottery where you can apply in Ireland and get a green card and get one just because you entered because there aren't enough immigrants from there to balance things out. But if you are from India, it's going to take a decade or more.

JAlexoid 6y ago
Shhh.... We don't tell American citizens that they are largely xenophobic, even though we have PEW Research data to prove it.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
foolinaround 6y ago
Need citation for this. when the basis is country-specific, and all countries are treated equally, it is purely supply/demand. No one applies from Afghanistan, so it is easier to get a GC -- so is US biased towards Afghanistan?
- mavelikara 6y ago
  > when the basis is country-specific, Not adjusting for population when the brunt of this policy is not borne by a country but a person, suggests malicious intent. All countries are treated equal, but all immigrants are not.
  - foolinaround 6y ago