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Tech firms' nightmare: Vanishing green cards

135 points by mavelikara 5y ago

cletus 5y ago
As someone who has gone through this process let me summarize some of the issues this always raises: 1. Green cards have a per-country cap (of 7%) but there is no per-country cap for work visas. This creates a bottleneck since India has the same quota as French Polynesia; 2. Applications for work visas and green cards from low-value employers, specifically IT body shops (eg Tata) are clogging up the system. Relatively few of both of these categories are actually being given to high0-value employers like the Big Tech companies; 3. H1B visas are for 3 years and can be renewed once, for a total of 6 years. After this there needs to be a gap of a year. But if you have a pending green card application you can stay indefinitely; 4. Demand exceeds supply (being the annual quota), which leads to a lottery situation. One of the few things the previous disastrous administration proposed that I actually agree with was the proposal to prioritize work visas based on compensation rather than handing them out randomly. This would help combat the body shops in (2); 5. The bottleneck in (1) means people from certain countries, most notably India, means employees may be in the queue for decades. This is actually an advantage for those aforementioned body shops. it is a modern form of indentured servitude. The employee can't leave nor complain about conditions because then they lose their application and have to return home; 6. This can go on so long that children of said employees age out of the system before their parents are granted a green card. If when granted a green card you have children under the age of 18 they automatically become permanent residents. After that, they don't. This can mean that children who turn 18 may need to leave the US and return to a country they have possibly never known. This is barbaric and inhumane; 7. Before the pandemic there were proposals to alleviate this situation by removing the per-country cap. The pandemic stalled this and it seems to be dead. I personally think this was the wrong solution as it means we would spend the next 3-10 years where only backlog applications would get processed. As such, it's likely to be met with resistance from other immigrant groups. We need a better solution; and 8. If a person is granted a green card and has a spouse and 2 children that counts as 4 in terms of the quota for employment-based green cards, both in total and per country of birth. This too is problematic.
- paxys 5y ago
  Re: 4 – the problem with compensation-based H-1B prioritization is that the skills gap in the country doesn't correlate very well with salaries. A hospital in rural Kentucky that needs immigrant doctors and nurses to serve a critical need to the community isn't going to be able to compete with a Silicon Valley startup that is burning through VC dollars and offering new grads mid-six figure salaries.
  - syshum 5y ago
    The hospital in rural Kentucky needs a physical person in KY Silicon Valley does not, I am not sure why SV would not just hire the programmer in India, instead of bringing them to Silicon Valley, infact I am pretty sure we are going to see that more and more in the next few years
  - cletus 5y ago
    This is a solvable problem. There are already categories for different occupations. You could put nurses (for example) in their own category with their own quota. Rand Paul, of all people, actually had a pretty reasonable alternative to the 2019 bill [1] that took a different approach: nurses were simply excluded from the annual quota. [1]: https://www.cato.org/blog/sen-pauls-believe-act-raises-skilled-migration-without-tradeoffs https://www.cato.org/blog/sen-pauls-believe-act-raises-skill...
    - paxys 5y ago
      That is a band-aid fix, not a solution. Sure Congress can pass a bill to exclude nurses from the quota. Then do they pass another bill when the shortage is over, to prevent abuse? What if the year after there is a shortage of welders? Should companies rely on Congressional action every few months and for every profession?
      - OldHand2018 5y ago
        You're right, and since the H1-B has effectively been "captured" by west coast tech companies, there are only a small handful of Senators that care to really fix it. Perhaps the best band-aid fix is to add H1-B quotas by state, because then you might end up getting enough support throughout the nation for an actual solution. The military industrial complex has a lesson for us to learn?
Grakel 5y ago
Maybe if the American education system wasn't horrible and getting worse, there would be a chance that the millions of unhappy American workers could get in on these job openings. Too many feelings and coddling, no rigor at all.
- VictorPath 5y ago
  There is too much coddling of children in kindergarten in American schools. They should be learning the basis of non-abelian groups and wave function collapse, not finger painting and talking about their feelings. Other states should be like Mississippi and bring back corporal punishment for naughty students.
  - syshum 5y ago
    Can we just agree that both extreme are bad. Hitting kids with rulers is bad Having Safe Spaces where people talk only about micro aggression, participation trophies, and how everything is a systemic *ist of some kind is also bad... We can have an education system free from both
    - Grakel 5y ago
      Completely agree. Let's just learn.
  - stadium 5y ago
    If I have to Google to understand what type of elementary school education you are selling, you are clearly not qualified to know what kindergartners should or shouldn't be learning about.
  - commoner 5y ago
    Physical punishment worsens behavior in children, and overwhelmingly harms children. > Physical punishment is increasingly viewed as a form of violence that harms children. This narrative review summarises the findings of 69 prospective longitudinal studies to inform practitioners and policy makers about physical punishment's outcomes. Our review identified seven key themes. First, physical punishment consistently predicts increases in child behaviour problems over time. Second, physical punishment is not associated with positive outcomes over time. Third, physical punishment increases the risk of involvement with child protective services. Fourth, the only evidence of children eliciting physical punishment is for externalising behaviour. Fifth, physical punishment predicts worsening behaviour over time in quasi-experimental studies. Sixth, associations between physical punishment and detrimental child outcomes are robust across child and parent characteristics. Finally, there is some evidence of a dose–response relationship. The consistency of these findings indicates that physical punishment is harmful to children and that policy remedies are warranted. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00582-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
baybal2 5y ago
What about raising salaries, so more Americans will finally get interested in these jobs?
- Supermancho 5y ago
  The sarcasm obscures what you are trying to communicate. The post looks like random noise generated by ML.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    Literal whataboutism.
- Kluny 5y ago
  Talk english, pal.
ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
The horror of H1B bosses not being able to only hire H1Bs from their own country!
- prudhvis 5y ago
  If we fix the issue with the H1-B system by letting them become permanent residents quicker, wouldn't that fix the problem faster?. The consequences would be that there is no longer a motivation to only hire H1-B workers.
ergocoder 5y ago
This may not be a popular opinion. I'm not sure why US is so against getting more of the best and the brightest, meanwhile we are pushing to get more refugees instead. H1B/greencard often acquires the very best mind of foreign countries. More is good. At the current state, we try hard to get less the best and the brightest and more refugees. I understand there's a humanity reason for the refugees. But why can't we do both?
- bfjyo68b 5y ago
  > At the current state, we try hard to get less the best and the brightest and more refugees. You are biased because you are Indian. It’s apparent in the way you type.
  - ergocoder 5y ago
    I'm from south east asia. So, nah.
- axiolite 5y ago
  > I'm not sure why US is so against getting more of the best and the brightest Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. > H1B/greencard often acquires the very best mind of foreign countries. Fine, change the H1-B rules so emigrants get full resident status immediately, and can work for any company without any setbacks to their status. Right now H1-B visas are modern indentured servitude, and makes non-residents far more appealing to companies. It's also responsible for the lack of job training by companies. Why have an employee learn new skills on your dime when you can find a foreigner who got experience at some other company, or perhaps just with the good sense to exaggerate their resumes...
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    > Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. Knowledge workers create jobs. Software begets more software. > Fine, change the H1-B rules so emigrants get full resident status immediately, and can work for any company without any setbacks to their status. Right now H1-B visas are modern indentured servitude, and makes non-residents far more appealing to companies. A lot of people desperately want this, but it is tricky to make improvements since any federal discussion of immigration immediately widens to include all forms of immigration.
sys_64738 5y ago
With remote work are we really in need of GCs anymore?
- pope_meat 5y ago
  Who do you owe taxes too out of your paycheck?
  - sys_64738 5y ago
    Wherever you are domiciled.
    - User23 5y ago
      Incorrect if you are a US citizen. By default, on global income, a US citizen owes both US taxes and whatever taxes the country of residence charges. Thankfully many countries have tax treaties with the USA that avoid at least some of this double taxation.
      - rswail 5y ago
        By default, US citizens overseas have the first $108K of foreign earnings excluded, but they still need to file. The US used to be unique in taxing citizens resident abroad, but Australia has in the past few years started to.
- theflyinghorse 5y ago
  I would imagine American companies can easily outpay anyone on the global market of remote workers. No GC really just sounds like a problem for the non-american companies who are now competing for their local talent with tech giants.
paxys 5y ago
The entire situation is a shitshow. I know multiple families who immigrated to the US on H-1B for tech jobs 20 years ago but are still waiting for residency. Green cards are legally available but USCIS just won't process their applications, citing lack of resources. Now as their kids – who were as young as one year old when they came here – turn 21 they are being deported to their "home country", that they have zero connection with. There is no DACA/DREAM equivalent for these people even though they did everything 100% legally and have greatly contributed to the US economy. There are estimated to be >960,000 people currently stuck in this limbo, mostly Asian and mostly in tech (https://www.fwd.us/news/per-country-cap-reform-priority-bill-spotlight/ https://www.fwd.us/news/per-country-cap-reform-priority-bill...).
- andi999 5y ago
  Here you could sue them to process the application; is this not viable in the US?
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Generally no. The US has relatively tight rules on when and why you can sue them.
  - sharmajai 5y ago
    That's being tried [1]. Although, it's not going well [2]. [1] https://www.visalaw.com/onboarding-mass-litigation-clients/ https://www.visalaw.com/onboarding-mass-litigation-clients/ [2] https://twitter.com/LilySAxelrod/status/1437846756394520582 https://twitter.com/LilySAxelrod/status/1437846756394520582
- throwdecro 5y ago
  Yeah, it's really unconscientious to have a system where the stakes are so high behave so unpredictably. People make important decisions based on how things are supposed to work. Whatever the "correct" parameters for immigration are, the system really should behave predictably.
  - deleted 5y ago
ergocoder 5y ago
Another unrelated note: I'd say it's infeasible to improve US education that can produce population as good as importing the best and brightest mind from foreign countries. Please note that I'm not against improving US education, but to think that we can improve it to the point that it can compete with importing the best mind from other countries is delusional. US has such a huge advantage on this part that an absurd green card system seems like a noise.
- deleted 5y ago
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- paxys 5y ago
  It's really a numbers game. Just China and India combined have 2.8 billion people, 10x more than USA. A lot of them are going to be geniuses. Since the 90s the USA has "won" by attracting the top talent of India, China and most of the rest of the world, resulting in a booming tech sector directly at the expense of those countries. Now in recent years immigration rules, politics and bureaucracy are making this less and less feasible, and you are already seeing the results. The next generation of teenagers worldwide are using TikTok, not Facebook or Instagram. Freshworks just had a $15B IPO and is shaking up the CRM market. There are countless other examples.
  - ergocoder 5y ago
    US starts losing an edge, I agree. With this strange politics that is really anti high-quality immigrants. I'm one of those who moves to US from a worse country, and I can tell you that I'm much happier. In countries like China, India, and many other developing countries, every aspect (apart from my family/friend being there) is worse... much worse. While US won at the expense of those countries, individuals get huge upgrade to their lives.
- adventured 5y ago
  The US education system already produces people as good as the best minds from foreign countries. That has been the case for well over a century. It doesn't produce all the best minds, of course, no nation can do such a thing and that's why high-skill immigration is valuable whenever you can get it. The argument for the US taking in the best from around the world, is that more is better when it comes to that. The US is a massive, diverse place, filled with good and bad outcomes. Just as Europe or the EU are, just as Asia is. There is enormous poverty and tens of millions of poor education outcomes across Europe. There are literally over a billion very bad outcomes spread across Asia, Africa and Latin America in terms of poverty and education. Asia still has a billion people trapped in third world outcomes. The top quarter in the US will match up very well against the top quarter from most peer nations. There may be a few exceptions among tiny elite nations, like Switzerland, just due to the fact that 1/4 = 80+ million people in the US.
throwaway210222 5y ago
If the tech firms are that desperate they can try dropping the must-be-US-timezone from their remote jobs descriptions. Or someone has to sit them down and explain what 'nightmare scenario' really means and when to use it.
- novok 5y ago
  Rather open offices in canada and latin american and import workers there than deal with that timezone difference tbh. It's a super sucky work style and vast majority on both sides hates it.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  Or maybe try hiring an American or two for a change?
anyfactor 5y ago
Tech firms have "adapted"(*) to capital gains taxes through using tax havens and they will surely adopt to declining green cards. As I am applying to US software consultancy firms as a remote dev I see more or less 80% of them will explicitly mention that they have an office in Eastern Europe or in India. I have heard stories of managers on H1b asked to open and manage offices back in their home countries. Industrial production has successfully left United States for bad policies and better opportunities. So will the tech scene.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  This is directly contrary to my experience. I see no evidence of a shift towards international talent, even with remote work, if anything I’ve seen the exact opposite. Oh, and it’s “adapt” not “adopt”.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - VictorPath 5y ago
    Walking around Sunnyvale over 20 years ago, I expected Silicon Valley to diffuse, at least across the US. If anything, tech is more centralized in the Bay than ever. Tech isn't even diffuse across the US or California, never mind people who speak another language 10 time zones away.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      We'll see post-covid, the push towards remote among line level workers is very strong, but the most "diffuse" possibility I see is that each region ends up with its own tech hub. Denver, Austin, New York, etc. There is very little chance that these will ever fully replace SV though, but they let tech hire people who would refuse to move to SV. The time zone issue you mentioned is the real killer. Working across time zones is hard. It's easy to dismiss them until you've had to work with a Ukrainian team who is a solid 9 hours off phase with you.
thrower123 5y ago
Tough. I have litte sympathy for companies that have been abusing the H1B system to import indentured servants at substandard wages for decades. The list of top H1B sponsors is a murderers row of the most awful bodyshops. https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2021-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2021-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp...
tsumnia 5y ago
The issue is also bleeding into academia. International students have been struggling to get updated passports during the pandemic, which then blocks them from other things like driver's licenses.
- bubblethink 5y ago
  I have never understood why drivers' licences tie into immigration. It is easy to see the rationale from the federal government's standpoint, but licenses are an entirely state run affair (not counting for things like REAL id). So, did all the states just agree to do this, or is there a law that mandates this ?
  - nocsi 5y ago
    They don’t. At least in western states like Washington. The standard license they will hand out to anyone since there are state laws protecting someone’s immigration status. Now if you want an enhanced license , you’ll need to prove your citizenship
lgats 5y ago
over 250k in process... https://visa.ooo/form/I-918 https://visa.ooo/form/I-918
seryoiupfurds 5y ago
Come to Canada, we'd love to have you here. https://www.canada.ca/en/services/immigration-citizenship.html https://www.canada.ca/en/services/immigration-citizenship.ht...
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  As someone who jumped from the US to Canada for precisely these reasons - do it! I got a PR (i.e Green Card) before even landing and from there you have a guaranteed path to citizenship in 3 years if you like. No amount of money can replace the security/flexibility of a PR instead of being shacked to an employer. Canada's immigration makes you actually feel wanted & welcomed by the country instead of being treated like a half-way criminal by border agents and immigration agencies. Salaries won't match FAANG SV but they're pretty good and they get better every year as more companies hire here and the marketplace heats up.
  - kokekolo 5y ago
    Canada's immigration system is built around the immigrant as a person. The US immigration system is built in the colonialism mindset, where the immigrant must fill a need of a US actor - a company (Employment-based), or a US citizen (family-based).
    - mardifoufs 5y ago
      What?! You literally cannot emigrate to Canada if you don't either go through the super harsh pointing system or fill a specific labor need. In both cases, the intent is very clearly to only allow in people who will be economically productive for Canadian companies. Good luck immigrating without a degree or without a contract. Even sponsorship/spousal immigration is super unforgiving, since you are on the hook for any money the state ends up spending on the people you bring in, especially if it's social spending. The only real exception is refugees but we send tons of them back and don't take anywhere close to the same amount of illegal immigrants as the US does. We also have agricultural labor immigration but again, it's nothing but Canada wanting cheap labor since they have to go back at the end of the summer with almost 0 exceptions. But your feeling is pretty widespread here, Canadians really like to think way way too highly of ourselves especially on immigration. When keep in mind, if your refugee status gets denied here you are almost assured to be deported, which is not the case in the US. In that regards the Canadian immigration policy is much more colonial and centered around a transactional relationship, which is also somewhat the case in the US but at least they have the very humane lottery system, DACA, etc.
sega_sai 5y ago
As an immigrant (first in the UK after than in the US, followed by return to the UK), I can say the annoying things about different systems are unpredictability and long delays. I agree that it is up to every country to set up the rules who gets to stay and under what conditions, but they need to be clear and predictable. I have found the UK system reasonable (although expensive) with a standard path of 5 years of working visa, followed by the indefinite leave to remain (green card) and then citizenship application (after another year). My impression of the US process was much worse with year long queues depending on nationality, quotas that are taken in first few days etc, and rules being changed on the hoof (in the last administration). I think that creates a really bad climate for people. And I do think the countries are responsible for making sure that migrants are treated fairly with clear well understood rules that are not changed unpredictably. For me this was one of the reason to go back to the UK as I didn't want to jump again through all the immigration hoops in the USA.
geodel 5y ago
One of thing that is not discussed a lot in these discussion of 20-100 year wait times for India origin H1B people is that one of the big abuser of Employment based GC are India based WITCH (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL) companies via EB1C visa. So who get these EB1C visa? Well technically International managers but over a decade and half these WITCHs have brought hundreds of thousand mid level, non-technical account managers on L1 visa and filed for their green cards which are processed in say six months as opposed to decades for H1B folks. Due to this rampant misuse, the availability of employment based green cards is reduced drastically for H1B folks around same time. EB1C abuse is one of the biggest source of green card delays for H1B folks. And since it is legal in letter of law all this abuse go unnoticed.
Cameri 5y ago
Apply to Canada!
pjscott 5y ago
People argue a lot about governments making decisions they disagree with, but something that I think is under-appreciated is the damage from unpredictable decisions. If you know how the government is going to act on some issue, for better or for worse, then you can make plans around that. What do you do if their future actions are an ever-shifting mystery? A few examples come to mind: 1. The Keystone XL oil pipeline was proposed in 2008. Construction was blocked by the Obama administration, unblocked by the Trump administration, and then re-blocked by the Biden administration, at which point the company trying to construct it gave up. In total, this process took 13 years and huge amounts of money, and nothing came of it. If there had been clarity and consistency in the government's policy here, the thing would either have been approved or rejected much sooner -- and either would have been a big improvement on what actually happened. 2. Covid-related rules have had much more harmful side-effects than they would have had if they were easier to predict. Rules surrounding masks, distancing, indoor and outdoor dining, and so on, all seemed to change a lot more frequently and arbitrarily than necessary in most places. To change the rules when the evidence and situation changes is one thing; changing them in seemingly random ways for dubious reasons is another. Even if the reasoning behind the decisions were consistent and well-thought-out, which is doubtful, there are advantages to having a predictable but sub-optimal policy rather than jerking everyone around in pursuit of perfection. 3. There are some federal student loan debt forgiveness proposals currently being considered in the US. I don't know how much, if any, will pass. If I were still in college, this would make me wonder: should I use money from a job to help pay my tuition, or just keep it? If I just take out more loans instead, and those loans get forgiven through a stroke of political luck a few years later, that's free money in my pocket -- but if that doesn't pan out, I'd end up paying a lot more interest. Whichever way Congress decides, I'd be better off knowing in advance -- but probably won't have that option, since the proposals seem to be (mostly?) retroactive in their design. 4. Finally, today's topic. If you apply for a green card, what are the odds that the paperwork just doesn't get processed? This is the kind of thing that would be really nice to know in advance, one way or the other. Without expressing an opinion on what the decisions should be in any of these cases, I'll say: there's no decision so bad that unpredictability can't make it worse.
- rswail 5y ago
  On 1) they refused to "give up" when it was blocked by the Obama administration. It was a dumb idea then and it's even dumber now. That's on the company, not the administration. On 2) agreed, except we're working through a 1-in-100 year pandemic with idiots denying reality on one "side" of the debate about rules. The science advances, so that the advice changes, but it hasn't changed much. Get vaccinated, wear a mask, socially distance, wash your hands. On 3) student debt is the dumbest own goal in US history. Provide funding for college, but do it as a loan, charge exorbitant interest rates and perverse incentives for colleges to charge more. The Federal government could start by reducing the interest rate to zero. Then reduce outstanding balances by a fixed percentage per year. People would redirect their available money into housing and consumables instead of paying back stupid loans. On 4) the US immigration bureaucracy has been stupid for years. When I was doing some work in the US back in 99/00, we were on 90 day business visas. Each time we applied, it took more than 90 days to get approval. The last time, I received a letter saying that it would be a year before they would approve the visa. I received the letter 6 months after I had left the US.
geebee 5y ago
I weigh in on this now and then. The H1B visa is a visa created by tech companies that allows them to run a shadow, parallel immigration system where they get to decide who is allowed to live and work in the US, what they are allowed to have studied, what jobs they are allowed to work, and the circumstances under which they are allowed to remain. They have been partially successful in convincing people that opposition to this is xenophobic. I'm not sure how much support there has been for a points based system like Australia or Canada has, where tech is one of many fields of study and work that is considered worthy of skilled immigration, and each field gets a determined number of points (plumbers get top points, as do many high educated fields outside tech). I do recall a debate where a spokesman from Oracle called a system like this "communistic" because it would allow the government - not business - to decide who to hire. That's the kind of toxic bullshit we've gotten in this debate in roughly forever. I don't hold participation in the H1B against anyone (really, truly, I absolutely do. not). The US immigration system is bizarre, and if you don't have relatives in the US, it's hard to immigrate. Tech immigration is one of the ways you can get access to one of the most lucrative job markets in existence. And the US closes off many other avenues - I've had international students explain to me how much harder it is to get into a US law or medical school and remain here, or what it means to graduate from a program with a STEM designation vs one without. But I do hold it against the tech firms, the people who claimed that there was a labor shortage while conspiring to fix and suppress wages. I think tech firms' real nightmare is a workforce, immigrant and otherwise, that is free to choose a career path according to how their own life interests align with market signals.
prpl 5y ago
According to VisaJourney, SF, Seattle, San Jose, Sacramento, etc… times are averaging more than 500 days between filing and decision, with Seattle over 700. My family-based AOS is at 385 days with no scheduled interview yet (SF field office, Biometrics were done in December)
joelbondurant 5y ago
Without green card slavery, California is over.
kylehotchkiss 5y ago
As somebody with an immediate relative in the immigration pipeline, it’s not much better for us either. Biden admin cancelled all the Trump green card bans yet added no capacity above what was running in the peaks of the pandemic so now things move at a glacial pace for everybody from spouses to parents too.
mdrzn 5y ago
Quick point about the formatting and not the content: I love this style of news and journalism. Quick bullet points with a bold title so one can choose to skim or read the whole of it. Love it

135 points by mavelikara 5y ago

As someone who has gone through this process let me summarize some of the issues this always raises: 1. Green cards have a per-country cap (of 7%) but there is no per-country cap for work visas. This creates a bottleneck since India has the same quota as French Polynesia; 2. Applications for work visas and green cards from low-value employers, specifically IT body shops (eg Tata) are clogging up the system. Relatively few of both of these categories are actually being given to high0-value employers like the Big Tech companies; 3. H1B visas are for 3 years and can be renewed once, for a total of 6 years. After this there needs to be a gap of a year. But if you have a pending green card application you can stay indefinitely; 4. Demand exceeds supply (being the annual quota), which leads to a lottery situation. One of the few things the previous disastrous administration proposed that I actually agree with was the proposal to prioritize work visas based on compensation rather than handing them out randomly. This would help combat the body shops in (2); 5. The bottleneck in (1) means people from certain countries, most notably India, means employees may be in the queue for decades. This is actually an advantage for those aforementioned body shops. it is a modern form of indentured servitude. The employee can't leave nor complain about conditions because then they lose their application and have to return home; 6. This can go on so long that children of said employees age out of the system before their parents are granted a green card. If when granted a green card you have children under the age of 18 they automatically become permanent residents. After that, they don't. This can mean that children who turn 18 may need to leave the US and return to a country they have possibly never known. This is barbaric and inhumane; 7. Before the pandemic there were proposals to alleviate this situation by removing the per-country cap. The pandemic stalled this and it seems to be dead. I personally think this was the wrong solution as it means we would spend the next 3-10 years where only backlog applications would get processed. As such, it's likely to be met with resistance from other immigrant groups. We need a better solution; and 8. If a person is granted a green card and has a spouse and 2 children that counts as 4 in terms of the quota for employment-based green cards, both in total and per country of birth. This too is problematic.

paxys 5y ago
Re: 4 – the problem with compensation-based H-1B prioritization is that the skills gap in the country doesn't correlate very well with salaries. A hospital in rural Kentucky that needs immigrant doctors and nurses to serve a critical need to the community isn't going to be able to compete with a Silicon Valley startup that is burning through VC dollars and offering new grads mid-six figure salaries.
- syshum 5y ago
  The hospital in rural Kentucky needs a physical person in KY Silicon Valley does not, I am not sure why SV would not just hire the programmer in India, instead of bringing them to Silicon Valley, infact I am pretty sure we are going to see that more and more in the next few years
- cletus 5y ago
  This is a solvable problem. There are already categories for different occupations. You could put nurses (for example) in their own category with their own quota. Rand Paul, of all people, actually had a pretty reasonable alternative to the 2019 bill [1] that took a different approach: nurses were simply excluded from the annual quota. [1]: https://www.cato.org/blog/sen-pauls-believe-act-raises-skilled-migration-without-tradeoffs https://www.cato.org/blog/sen-pauls-believe-act-raises-skill...
  - paxys 5y ago
    That is a band-aid fix, not a solution. Sure Congress can pass a bill to exclude nurses from the quota. Then do they pass another bill when the shortage is over, to prevent abuse? What if the year after there is a shortage of welders? Should companies rely on Congressional action every few months and for every profession?
    - OldHand2018 5y ago
      You're right, and since the H1-B has effectively been "captured" by west coast tech companies, there are only a small handful of Senators that care to really fix it. Perhaps the best band-aid fix is to add H1-B quotas by state, because then you might end up getting enough support throughout the nation for an actual solution. The military industrial complex has a lesson for us to learn?

Grakel 5y ago

Maybe if the American education system wasn't horrible and getting worse, there would be a chance that the millions of unhappy American workers could get in on these job openings. Too many feelings and coddling, no rigor at all.

VictorPath 5y ago
There is too much coddling of children in kindergarten in American schools. They should be learning the basis of non-abelian groups and wave function collapse, not finger painting and talking about their feelings. Other states should be like Mississippi and bring back corporal punishment for naughty students.
- syshum 5y ago
  Can we just agree that both extreme are bad. Hitting kids with rulers is bad Having Safe Spaces where people talk only about micro aggression, participation trophies, and how everything is a systemic *ist of some kind is also bad... We can have an education system free from both
  - Grakel 5y ago
    Completely agree. Let's just learn.
- stadium 5y ago
  If I have to Google to understand what type of elementary school education you are selling, you are clearly not qualified to know what kindergartners should or shouldn't be learning about.
- commoner 5y ago
  Physical punishment worsens behavior in children, and overwhelmingly harms children. > Physical punishment is increasingly viewed as a form of violence that harms children. This narrative review summarises the findings of 69 prospective longitudinal studies to inform practitioners and policy makers about physical punishment's outcomes. Our review identified seven key themes. First, physical punishment consistently predicts increases in child behaviour problems over time. Second, physical punishment is not associated with positive outcomes over time. Third, physical punishment increases the risk of involvement with child protective services. Fourth, the only evidence of children eliciting physical punishment is for externalising behaviour. Fifth, physical punishment predicts worsening behaviour over time in quasi-experimental studies. Sixth, associations between physical punishment and detrimental child outcomes are robust across child and parent characteristics. Finally, there is some evidence of a dose–response relationship. The consistency of these findings indicates that physical punishment is harmful to children and that policy remedies are warranted. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00582-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

baybal2 5y ago

What about raising salaries, so more Americans will finally get interested in these jobs?

Supermancho 5y ago
The sarcasm obscures what you are trying to communicate. The post looks like random noise generated by ML.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Literal whataboutism.
Kluny 5y ago
Talk english, pal.

ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago

The horror of H1B bosses not being able to only hire H1Bs from their own country!

prudhvis 5y ago
If we fix the issue with the H1-B system by letting them become permanent residents quicker, wouldn't that fix the problem faster?. The consequences would be that there is no longer a motivation to only hire H1-B workers.

ergocoder 5y ago

This may not be a popular opinion. I'm not sure why US is so against getting more of the best and the brightest, meanwhile we are pushing to get more refugees instead. H1B/greencard often acquires the very best mind of foreign countries. More is good. At the current state, we try hard to get less the best and the brightest and more refugees. I understand there's a humanity reason for the refugees. But why can't we do both?

bfjyo68b 5y ago
> At the current state, we try hard to get less the best and the brightest and more refugees. You are biased because you are Indian. It’s apparent in the way you type.
- ergocoder 5y ago
  I'm from south east asia. So, nah.
axiolite 5y ago
> I'm not sure why US is so against getting more of the best and the brightest Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. > H1B/greencard often acquires the very best mind of foreign countries. Fine, change the H1-B rules so emigrants get full resident status immediately, and can work for any company without any setbacks to their status. Right now H1-B visas are modern indentured servitude, and makes non-residents far more appealing to companies. It's also responsible for the lack of job training by companies. Why have an employee learn new skills on your dime when you can find a foreigner who got experience at some other company, or perhaps just with the good sense to exaggerate their resumes...
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  > Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. Knowledge workers create jobs. Software begets more software. > Fine, change the H1-B rules so emigrants get full resident status immediately, and can work for any company without any setbacks to their status. Right now H1-B visas are modern indentured servitude, and makes non-residents far more appealing to companies. A lot of people desperately want this, but it is tricky to make improvements since any federal discussion of immigration immediately widens to include all forms of immigration.

sys_64738 5y ago

With remote work are we really in need of GCs anymore?

pope_meat 5y ago
Who do you owe taxes too out of your paycheck?
- sys_64738 5y ago
  Wherever you are domiciled.
  - User23 5y ago
    Incorrect if you are a US citizen. By default, on global income, a US citizen owes both US taxes and whatever taxes the country of residence charges. Thankfully many countries have tax treaties with the USA that avoid at least some of this double taxation.
    - rswail 5y ago
      By default, US citizens overseas have the first $108K of foreign earnings excluded, but they still need to file. The US used to be unique in taxing citizens resident abroad, but Australia has in the past few years started to.
theflyinghorse 5y ago
I would imagine American companies can easily outpay anyone on the global market of remote workers. No GC really just sounds like a problem for the non-american companies who are now competing for their local talent with tech giants.

paxys 5y ago

The entire situation is a shitshow. I know multiple families who immigrated to the US on H-1B for tech jobs 20 years ago but are still waiting for residency. Green cards are legally available but USCIS just won't process their applications, citing lack of resources. Now as their kids – who were as young as one year old when they came here – turn 21 they are being deported to their "home country", that they have zero connection with. There is no DACA/DREAM equivalent for these people even though they did everything 100% legally and have greatly contributed to the US economy. There are estimated to be >960,000 people currently stuck in this limbo, mostly Asian and mostly in tech (https://www.fwd.us/news/per-country-cap-reform-priority-bill-spotlight/ https://www.fwd.us/news/per-country-cap-reform-priority-bill...).

andi999 5y ago
Here you could sue them to process the application; is this not viable in the US?
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Generally no. The US has relatively tight rules on when and why you can sue them.
- sharmajai 5y ago
  That's being tried [1]. Although, it's not going well [2]. [1] https://www.visalaw.com/onboarding-mass-litigation-clients/ https://www.visalaw.com/onboarding-mass-litigation-clients/ [2] https://twitter.com/LilySAxelrod/status/1437846756394520582 https://twitter.com/LilySAxelrod/status/1437846756394520582
throwdecro 5y ago
Yeah, it's really unconscientious to have a system where the stakes are so high behave so unpredictably. People make important decisions based on how things are supposed to work. Whatever the "correct" parameters for immigration are, the system really should behave predictably.
- deleted 5y ago

ergocoder 5y ago

Another unrelated note: I'd say it's infeasible to improve US education that can produce population as good as importing the best and brightest mind from foreign countries. Please note that I'm not against improving US education, but to think that we can improve it to the point that it can compete with importing the best mind from other countries is delusional. US has such a huge advantage on this part that an absurd green card system seems like a noise.

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paxys 5y ago
It's really a numbers game. Just China and India combined have 2.8 billion people, 10x more than USA. A lot of them are going to be geniuses. Since the 90s the USA has "won" by attracting the top talent of India, China and most of the rest of the world, resulting in a booming tech sector directly at the expense of those countries. Now in recent years immigration rules, politics and bureaucracy are making this less and less feasible, and you are already seeing the results. The next generation of teenagers worldwide are using TikTok, not Facebook or Instagram. Freshworks just had a $15B IPO and is shaking up the CRM market. There are countless other examples.
- ergocoder 5y ago
  US starts losing an edge, I agree. With this strange politics that is really anti high-quality immigrants. I'm one of those who moves to US from a worse country, and I can tell you that I'm much happier. In countries like China, India, and many other developing countries, every aspect (apart from my family/friend being there) is worse... much worse. While US won at the expense of those countries, individuals get huge upgrade to their lives.
adventured 5y ago
The US education system already produces people as good as the best minds from foreign countries. That has been the case for well over a century. It doesn't produce all the best minds, of course, no nation can do such a thing and that's why high-skill immigration is valuable whenever you can get it. The argument for the US taking in the best from around the world, is that more is better when it comes to that. The US is a massive, diverse place, filled with good and bad outcomes. Just as Europe or the EU are, just as Asia is. There is enormous poverty and tens of millions of poor education outcomes across Europe. There are literally over a billion very bad outcomes spread across Asia, Africa and Latin America in terms of poverty and education. Asia still has a billion people trapped in third world outcomes. The top quarter in the US will match up very well against the top quarter from most peer nations. There may be a few exceptions among tiny elite nations, like Switzerland, just due to the fact that 1/4 = 80+ million people in the US.

throwaway210222 5y ago

If the tech firms are that desperate they can try dropping the must-be-US-timezone from their remote jobs descriptions. Or someone has to sit them down and explain what 'nightmare scenario' really means and when to use it.

novok 5y ago
Rather open offices in canada and latin american and import workers there than deal with that timezone difference tbh. It's a super sucky work style and vast majority on both sides hates it.
commandlinefan 5y ago
Or maybe try hiring an American or two for a change?

anyfactor 5y ago

Tech firms have "adapted"(*) to capital gains taxes through using tax havens and they will surely adopt to declining green cards. As I am applying to US software consultancy firms as a remote dev I see more or less 80% of them will explicitly mention that they have an office in Eastern Europe or in India. I have heard stories of managers on H1b asked to open and manage offices back in their home countries. Industrial production has successfully left United States for bad policies and better opportunities. So will the tech scene.

ashtonkem 5y ago
This is directly contrary to my experience. I see no evidence of a shift towards international talent, even with remote work, if anything I’ve seen the exact opposite. Oh, and it’s “adapt” not “adopt”.
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- VictorPath 5y ago
  Walking around Sunnyvale over 20 years ago, I expected Silicon Valley to diffuse, at least across the US. If anything, tech is more centralized in the Bay than ever. Tech isn't even diffuse across the US or California, never mind people who speak another language 10 time zones away.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    We'll see post-covid, the push towards remote among line level workers is very strong, but the most "diffuse" possibility I see is that each region ends up with its own tech hub. Denver, Austin, New York, etc. There is very little chance that these will ever fully replace SV though, but they let tech hire people who would refuse to move to SV. The time zone issue you mentioned is the real killer. Working across time zones is hard. It's easy to dismiss them until you've had to work with a Ukrainian team who is a solid 9 hours off phase with you.

thrower123 5y ago

Tough. I have litte sympathy for companies that have been abusing the H1B system to import indentured servants at substandard wages for decades. The list of top H1B sponsors is a murderers row of the most awful bodyshops. https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2021-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2021-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp...

tsumnia 5y ago

The issue is also bleeding into academia. International students have been struggling to get updated passports during the pandemic, which then blocks them from other things like driver's licenses.

bubblethink 5y ago
I have never understood why drivers' licences tie into immigration. It is easy to see the rationale from the federal government's standpoint, but licenses are an entirely state run affair (not counting for things like REAL id). So, did all the states just agree to do this, or is there a law that mandates this ?
- nocsi 5y ago
  They don’t. At least in western states like Washington. The standard license they will hand out to anyone since there are state laws protecting someone’s immigration status. Now if you want an enhanced license , you’ll need to prove your citizenship

lgats 5y ago

over 250k in process... https://visa.ooo/form/I-918 https://visa.ooo/form/I-918

seryoiupfurds 5y ago

Come to Canada, we'd love to have you here. https://www.canada.ca/en/services/immigration-citizenship.html https://www.canada.ca/en/services/immigration-citizenship.ht...

zaptheimpaler 5y ago
As someone who jumped from the US to Canada for precisely these reasons - do it! I got a PR (i.e Green Card) before even landing and from there you have a guaranteed path to citizenship in 3 years if you like. No amount of money can replace the security/flexibility of a PR instead of being shacked to an employer. Canada's immigration makes you actually feel wanted & welcomed by the country instead of being treated like a half-way criminal by border agents and immigration agencies. Salaries won't match FAANG SV but they're pretty good and they get better every year as more companies hire here and the marketplace heats up.
- kokekolo 5y ago
  Canada's immigration system is built around the immigrant as a person. The US immigration system is built in the colonialism mindset, where the immigrant must fill a need of a US actor - a company (Employment-based), or a US citizen (family-based).
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    What?! You literally cannot emigrate to Canada if you don't either go through the super harsh pointing system or fill a specific labor need. In both cases, the intent is very clearly to only allow in people who will be economically productive for Canadian companies. Good luck immigrating without a degree or without a contract. Even sponsorship/spousal immigration is super unforgiving, since you are on the hook for any money the state ends up spending on the people you bring in, especially if it's social spending. The only real exception is refugees but we send tons of them back and don't take anywhere close to the same amount of illegal immigrants as the US does. We also have agricultural labor immigration but again, it's nothing but Canada wanting cheap labor since they have to go back at the end of the summer with almost 0 exceptions. But your feeling is pretty widespread here, Canadians really like to think way way too highly of ourselves especially on immigration. When keep in mind, if your refugee status gets denied here you are almost assured to be deported, which is not the case in the US. In that regards the Canadian immigration policy is much more colonial and centered around a transactional relationship, which is also somewhat the case in the US but at least they have the very humane lottery system, DACA, etc.

sega_sai 5y ago

As an immigrant (first in the UK after than in the US, followed by return to the UK), I can say the annoying things about different systems are unpredictability and long delays. I agree that it is up to every country to set up the rules who gets to stay and under what conditions, but they need to be clear and predictable. I have found the UK system reasonable (although expensive) with a standard path of 5 years of working visa, followed by the indefinite leave to remain (green card) and then citizenship application (after another year). My impression of the US process was much worse with year long queues depending on nationality, quotas that are taken in first few days etc, and rules being changed on the hoof (in the last administration). I think that creates a really bad climate for people. And I do think the countries are responsible for making sure that migrants are treated fairly with clear well understood rules that are not changed unpredictably. For me this was one of the reason to go back to the UK as I didn't want to jump again through all the immigration hoops in the USA.

geodel 5y ago

One of thing that is not discussed a lot in these discussion of 20-100 year wait times for India origin H1B people is that one of the big abuser of Employment based GC are India based WITCH (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL) companies via EB1C visa. So who get these EB1C visa? Well technically International managers but over a decade and half these WITCHs have brought hundreds of thousand mid level, non-technical account managers on L1 visa and filed for their green cards which are processed in say six months as opposed to decades for H1B folks. Due to this rampant misuse, the availability of employment based green cards is reduced drastically for H1B folks around same time. EB1C abuse is one of the biggest source of green card delays for H1B folks. And since it is legal in letter of law all this abuse go unnoticed.

Cameri 5y ago

Apply to Canada!

pjscott 5y ago

People argue a lot about governments making decisions they disagree with, but something that I think is under-appreciated is the damage from unpredictable decisions. If you know how the government is going to act on some issue, for better or for worse, then you can make plans around that. What do you do if their future actions are an ever-shifting mystery? A few examples come to mind: 1. The Keystone XL oil pipeline was proposed in 2008. Construction was blocked by the Obama administration, unblocked by the Trump administration, and then re-blocked by the Biden administration, at which point the company trying to construct it gave up. In total, this process took 13 years and huge amounts of money, and nothing came of it. If there had been clarity and consistency in the government's policy here, the thing would either have been approved or rejected much sooner -- and either would have been a big improvement on what actually happened. 2. Covid-related rules have had much more harmful side-effects than they would have had if they were easier to predict. Rules surrounding masks, distancing, indoor and outdoor dining, and so on, all seemed to change a lot more frequently and arbitrarily than necessary in most places. To change the rules when the evidence and situation changes is one thing; changing them in seemingly random ways for dubious reasons is another. Even if the reasoning behind the decisions were consistent and well-thought-out, which is doubtful, there are advantages to having a predictable but sub-optimal policy rather than jerking everyone around in pursuit of perfection. 3. There are some federal student loan debt forgiveness proposals currently being considered in the US. I don't know how much, if any, will pass. If I were still in college, this would make me wonder: should I use money from a job to help pay my tuition, or just keep it? If I just take out more loans instead, and those loans get forgiven through a stroke of political luck a few years later, that's free money in my pocket -- but if that doesn't pan out, I'd end up paying a lot more interest. Whichever way Congress decides, I'd be better off knowing in advance -- but probably won't have that option, since the proposals seem to be (mostly?) retroactive in their design. 4. Finally, today's topic. If you apply for a green card, what are the odds that the paperwork just doesn't get processed? This is the kind of thing that would be really nice to know in advance, one way or the other. Without expressing an opinion on what the decisions should be in any of these cases, I'll say: there's no decision so bad that unpredictability can't make it worse.

rswail 5y ago
On 1) they refused to "give up" when it was blocked by the Obama administration. It was a dumb idea then and it's even dumber now. That's on the company, not the administration. On 2) agreed, except we're working through a 1-in-100 year pandemic with idiots denying reality on one "side" of the debate about rules. The science advances, so that the advice changes, but it hasn't changed much. Get vaccinated, wear a mask, socially distance, wash your hands. On 3) student debt is the dumbest own goal in US history. Provide funding for college, but do it as a loan, charge exorbitant interest rates and perverse incentives for colleges to charge more. The Federal government could start by reducing the interest rate to zero. Then reduce outstanding balances by a fixed percentage per year. People would redirect their available money into housing and consumables instead of paying back stupid loans. On 4) the US immigration bureaucracy has been stupid for years. When I was doing some work in the US back in 99/00, we were on 90 day business visas. Each time we applied, it took more than 90 days to get approval. The last time, I received a letter saying that it would be a year before they would approve the visa. I received the letter 6 months after I had left the US.

geebee 5y ago

I weigh in on this now and then. The H1B visa is a visa created by tech companies that allows them to run a shadow, parallel immigration system where they get to decide who is allowed to live and work in the US, what they are allowed to have studied, what jobs they are allowed to work, and the circumstances under which they are allowed to remain. They have been partially successful in convincing people that opposition to this is xenophobic. I'm not sure how much support there has been for a points based system like Australia or Canada has, where tech is one of many fields of study and work that is considered worthy of skilled immigration, and each field gets a determined number of points (plumbers get top points, as do many high educated fields outside tech). I do recall a debate where a spokesman from Oracle called a system like this "communistic" because it would allow the government - not business - to decide who to hire. That's the kind of toxic bullshit we've gotten in this debate in roughly forever. I don't hold participation in the H1B against anyone (really, truly, I absolutely do. not). The US immigration system is bizarre, and if you don't have relatives in the US, it's hard to immigrate. Tech immigration is one of the ways you can get access to one of the most lucrative job markets in existence. And the US closes off many other avenues - I've had international students explain to me how much harder it is to get into a US law or medical school and remain here, or what it means to graduate from a program with a STEM designation vs one without. But I do hold it against the tech firms, the people who claimed that there was a labor shortage while conspiring to fix and suppress wages. I think tech firms' real nightmare is a workforce, immigrant and otherwise, that is free to choose a career path according to how their own life interests align with market signals.

prpl 5y ago

According to VisaJourney, SF, Seattle, San Jose, Sacramento, etc… times are averaging more than 500 days between filing and decision, with Seattle over 700. My family-based AOS is at 385 days with no scheduled interview yet (SF field office, Biometrics were done in December)

joelbondurant 5y ago

Without green card slavery, California is over.

kylehotchkiss 5y ago

As somebody with an immediate relative in the immigration pipeline, it’s not much better for us either. Biden admin cancelled all the Trump green card bans yet added no capacity above what was running in the peaks of the pandemic so now things move at a glacial pace for everybody from spouses to parents too.

mdrzn 5y ago

Quick point about the formatting and not the content: I love this style of news and journalism. Quick bullet points with a bold title so one can choose to skim or read the whole of it. Love it