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Typically HN seems to down weight any discussions on visas or immigration to keep it off the front page, but for what it's worth it's important to point out tha

Typically HN seems to down weight any discussions on visas or immigration to keep it off the front page, but for what it's worth it's important to point out that this lottery system was designed by USCIS and recently changed post 2016 in a way that aids staffing companies and IT consultants. Previously you have to file a full petition with a serious job offer which costs thousands of dollars but now you just pay some entry fee and you're in. Obviously this was ripe to be gamed by shady staffing companies taking money from applicants for filing a petition and THEN finding a job later based on whichever staffing agency gets picked. It's not even illegal for multiple companies to submit a petition for the same person. USCIS can fix this by just selecting the lottery based on passport numbers and making sure the full paperwork is filed before the lottery like a few years ago, but of course they'll just lazily blame others for taking advantage of something that is so easily gamed. The real losers here are the students who studied in the US, worked hard to find a job and only submit a single petition through their employers. It's now way less likely they will get picked in the lottery. My opinion - USCIS can't legally reduce H1B visas so they intentionally wreck the lottery system to invite bogus applications, who they can later reject, or they simply won't file a full petition, and they don't have to issue all the 85K H1B visas Congress has allowed.

medellin 3y ago
[flagged]
- granshaw 3y ago
  Wait what do you have more info/links on that method of entry?
  - codyb 3y ago
    Might be talking about asylum seekers? Who I believe are allowed to stay until their asylum hearings? I mean... they talk about the hell of the legal immigration process without mentioning the hell people who're coming to our Southern boarder seeking asylum are going through. I do agree the legal H1B process is brutal though.
    - medellin 3y ago
      I know several people who can gone through the “asylum” process. It’s not the hell fox news tells you about in 99% of cases. But you won’t see how easy the real process is on the news because it would really piss off both sides. Additionally it’s just a funnel of government money into private businesses that provide temporary housing and holding locations.
- afavour 3y ago
  Yes, you’re absolutely correct, the people arriving on the southern border seeking asylum definitely haven’t been through any kind of dehumanizing treatment along the way. Solid take. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/06/mexico-asylum-seekers-face-abuses-southern-border https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/06/mexico-asylum-seekers-fa... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2018/10/usa-treatment-of-asylum-seekers-southern-border/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2018/10/usa-... Maybe you need to diversify your news diet? “They just ask to come in then get put on planes” is a pretty widely discredited talking point.
  - medellin 3y ago
    Great links. I can tell you what actual happens though outside of the small amount of bad cases that end up in the news. I’m not getting anything i said above from news it’s literally how it worked for 5 different people i personally know. All coming at different times. Also didn’t say it wasn’t dehumanizing but guess how long a K1 or CR1 visa has to wait to bring the person they are married to into the country.
    - rhaway84773 3y ago
      These aren’t news articles. And they’re not individual sensationalized cases. For example, the amnesty link mentions 8000 families being separated.
      - kevviiinn 3y ago
        But this commenter has an n of 5! That's better than 80,000
    - afavour 3y ago
      So because five people you know weren't harmed you're saying things like family separation aren't a big deal? As stated in the links, CBP themselves admitted to splitting up over 6,000 families. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the wait times for marriage visas but at least those waiting aren't forcibly separated from children and kept in detention facilities.
- rhaway84773 3y ago
  I don’t understand this attitude. Process A is a miserable dehumanizing process. Instead of pushing against the people who are unnecessarily making it a miserable dehumanizing process, your complaint seems to be that a similar process B isn’t a dehumanizing miserable process.
  - medellin 3y ago
    No it’s that for all the bullshit happening when you go through the legal process such as background checks, interviews, medical exams, expensive filling fees, interviews in other countries in some cases. You can just walk up the border skip all that and be in the US in a week. The system is a joke to make the US some money off people who have it and punish law abiding citizens. If you have gone through it you would be just as pissed off as i am. Would love for the process to be changed. Let me know how since most people don’t care about legal immigration.
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      Can you, though? You'll fail e-verify and won't have an SSN so you'll have to live like the people who cross the Southern border. You'll be picking strawberries instead of writing code. I'm an immigrant and the two processes are not substitutable.
FrankLicea 3y ago
Sincere question, why do you think HN tends to down weight discussion on Visas or immigration?
- afavour 3y ago
  HN downranks any topic that attracts a high level of activity in a short space of time. Immigration is one topic that definitely does that.
  - pwb25 3y ago
    it's funny because that's obviously what people want then instead in top 5 there is some weird article about like "How I used my old CRT monitor to create a fish tracking app using radios" and some guy reply about some home project in 20 000 words no one really cares about
    - misnome 3y ago
      I personally prefer those sorts of topics to yet another entirely-predictable immigration "discussion"
      - pwb25 3y ago
        I don't even mean about immigration. Layoff threads or economy threads also get a lot of comments fast but for some reason those almost autistic special interest posts few care about is getting quite some upvotes
    - DigiDigiorno 3y ago
      I did not really care about this before, but you just made the strongest case for the algorithm and now I'm glad it possibly* exists. *I'm not sure how factual the algorithm claim is
      - noarchy 3y ago
        You can watch it in action sometimes, with amusing results. Some very active posts do, in fact, vanish from the front page with surprising speed, whereas less-active posts can literally linger for days.
NotACop182 3y ago
But is uscis depending on the extra revenue flow to fund other sections. Since uscis is not tax payer funded it’s fee funded. Just wondering
- vsskanth 3y ago
  Yes but not just though the lottery. USCIS has massively increased visa filing fees, especially for employment, to fund application processing for other areas like asylum etc. which don't have any fees.
Always42 3y ago
This is so sad to hear. During college and up to the present I have spoken with hardworking international students who are struggling to get H1B visa...
908B64B197 3y ago
> Obviously this was ripe to be gamed by shady staffing companies taking money from applicants for filing a petition and THEN finding a job later based on whichever staffing agency gets picked. It's not even illegal for multiple companies to submit a petition for the same person. Here you go. There's a real position at FAANG for every petition they file (and if the petition doesn't get selected, there's a position at a subsidiary). Keep in mind that If I want to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup OR A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop [0] my only path forward is H1! They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that make any sense to anyone? Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE). [0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-shop-secret/78781/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...
light_hue_1 3y ago
> My opinion - USCIS can't legally reduce H1B visas so they intentionally wreck the lottery system to invite bogus applications, who they can later reject, or they simply won't file a full petition, and they don't have to issue all the 85K H1B visas Congress has allowed. USCIS merely follows the laws and rules. As with most things in the US, this is a Republican-created disaster. In 2005 the Bush administration invented this system after the Omnibus Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005. Which was, to put it mildly, a shitshow. They gave members a few hours to read over 3000 pages of new laws and 9 new bills. No one had any idea what they were voting for and parts of the law weren't even properly drafted; only 2 bills had ever even been debated. It took nearly a week after voting for the actual text to come out.
- vsskanth 3y ago
  USCIS still has a lot of leeway over how they adjudicate visa applications (both standards and the time duration) and this is used by the administration through political appointees to shape who and how many people they admit. Post 2016, they dramatically increased RFEs (Request for Evidence) and slowed down visa processing for H1B visas and employment authorization (EAD) cards from a few weeks or a month to years. Many, many women lost their jobs because of that. This is also primarily why they operate on paper and refuse to modernize. They wasted hundreds of thousands of employment based green cards every year simply because they didn't bother to process applications on time from people waiting decades.
- mataug 3y ago
  I’m not familiar with the 2005 bill, What part of the bill is bad in this context ?
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
> The real losers here are the students who studied in the US, worked hard to find a job and only submit a single petition through their employers. It's now way less likely they will get picked in the lottery. I'll never understand why we don't just staple green cards to master's degrees. It's absolutely absurd that we're choosing to kick out talented, hardworking people who are already established here, who are disproportionately young and healthy. And they're at the very beginning of their careers - they're ready to pay a lifetime of taxes. They're the absolute opposite of drains on society.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
  > Providing a green card upon completion of your master's degree. Seems like an interesting idea. Why do you think it's not already being done? I haven't really explored the idea very carefully, but this would amount to giving universities the power to grant citizenship to foreigners, which seems like it has a lot of potential for abuse.
  - okr 3y ago
    But i would have applied for trump university right away!
  - LawTalkingGuy 3y ago
    Remove the potential for abuse by still requiring the application to be approved.
  - jaredklewis 3y ago
    > this would amount to giving universities the power to grant citizenship to foreigners Just a note that green card holders are residents, not citizens. They don’t get to vote, they just get to pay taxes. Still potential for abuse of course, but an important distinction.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Just a note that green card holders are residents, not citizens. While there are time and other requirements after getting lawful permanent resident status (“green card”), the main limitation on access to citizenship is getting status in an immigrant category and thereby becoming an LPR.
bubblethink 3y ago
>so they intentionally wreck the lottery system to invite bogus applications USCIS has a conflict of interest as it is funded by the applicants. USCIS exists to fund USCIS, which means (applicants) x (fees). Everything that is wrong with immigration from the execution standpoint follows from that.

medellin 3y ago

[flagged]

granshaw 3y ago
Wait what do you have more info/links on that method of entry?
- codyb 3y ago
  Might be talking about asylum seekers? Who I believe are allowed to stay until their asylum hearings? I mean... they talk about the hell of the legal immigration process without mentioning the hell people who're coming to our Southern boarder seeking asylum are going through. I do agree the legal H1B process is brutal though.
  - medellin 3y ago
    I know several people who can gone through the “asylum” process. It’s not the hell fox news tells you about in 99% of cases. But you won’t see how easy the real process is on the news because it would really piss off both sides. Additionally it’s just a funnel of government money into private businesses that provide temporary housing and holding locations.
afavour 3y ago
Yes, you’re absolutely correct, the people arriving on the southern border seeking asylum definitely haven’t been through any kind of dehumanizing treatment along the way. Solid take. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/06/mexico-asylum-seekers-face-abuses-southern-border https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/06/mexico-asylum-seekers-fa... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2018/10/usa-treatment-of-asylum-seekers-southern-border/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2018/10/usa-... Maybe you need to diversify your news diet? “They just ask to come in then get put on planes” is a pretty widely discredited talking point.
- medellin 3y ago
  Great links. I can tell you what actual happens though outside of the small amount of bad cases that end up in the news. I’m not getting anything i said above from news it’s literally how it worked for 5 different people i personally know. All coming at different times. Also didn’t say it wasn’t dehumanizing but guess how long a K1 or CR1 visa has to wait to bring the person they are married to into the country.
  - rhaway84773 3y ago
    These aren’t news articles. And they’re not individual sensationalized cases. For example, the amnesty link mentions 8000 families being separated.
    - kevviiinn 3y ago
      But this commenter has an n of 5! That's better than 80,000
  - afavour 3y ago
    So because five people you know weren't harmed you're saying things like family separation aren't a big deal? As stated in the links, CBP themselves admitted to splitting up over 6,000 families. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the wait times for marriage visas but at least those waiting aren't forcibly separated from children and kept in detention facilities.
rhaway84773 3y ago
I don’t understand this attitude. Process A is a miserable dehumanizing process. Instead of pushing against the people who are unnecessarily making it a miserable dehumanizing process, your complaint seems to be that a similar process B isn’t a dehumanizing miserable process.
- medellin 3y ago
  No it’s that for all the bullshit happening when you go through the legal process such as background checks, interviews, medical exams, expensive filling fees, interviews in other countries in some cases. You can just walk up the border skip all that and be in the US in a week. The system is a joke to make the US some money off people who have it and punish law abiding citizens. If you have gone through it you would be just as pissed off as i am. Would love for the process to be changed. Let me know how since most people don’t care about legal immigration.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Can you, though? You'll fail e-verify and won't have an SSN so you'll have to live like the people who cross the Southern border. You'll be picking strawberries instead of writing code. I'm an immigrant and the two processes are not substitutable.

FrankLicea 3y ago

Sincere question, why do you think HN tends to down weight discussion on Visas or immigration?

afavour 3y ago
HN downranks any topic that attracts a high level of activity in a short space of time. Immigration is one topic that definitely does that.
- pwb25 3y ago
  it's funny because that's obviously what people want then instead in top 5 there is some weird article about like "How I used my old CRT monitor to create a fish tracking app using radios" and some guy reply about some home project in 20 000 words no one really cares about
  - misnome 3y ago
    I personally prefer those sorts of topics to yet another entirely-predictable immigration "discussion"
    - pwb25 3y ago
      I don't even mean about immigration. Layoff threads or economy threads also get a lot of comments fast but for some reason those almost autistic special interest posts few care about is getting quite some upvotes
  - DigiDigiorno 3y ago
    I did not really care about this before, but you just made the strongest case for the algorithm and now I'm glad it possibly* exists. *I'm not sure how factual the algorithm claim is
    - noarchy 3y ago
      You can watch it in action sometimes, with amusing results. Some very active posts do, in fact, vanish from the front page with surprising speed, whereas less-active posts can literally linger for days.

NotACop182 3y ago

But is uscis depending on the extra revenue flow to fund other sections. Since uscis is not tax payer funded it’s fee funded. Just wondering

vsskanth 3y ago
Yes but not just though the lottery. USCIS has massively increased visa filing fees, especially for employment, to fund application processing for other areas like asylum etc. which don't have any fees.

Always42 3y ago

This is so sad to hear. During college and up to the present I have spoken with hardworking international students who are struggling to get H1B visa...

908B64B197 3y ago

> Obviously this was ripe to be gamed by shady staffing companies taking money from applicants for filing a petition and THEN finding a job later based on whichever staffing agency gets picked. It's not even illegal for multiple companies to submit a petition for the same person. Here you go. There's a real position at FAANG for every petition they file (and if the petition doesn't get selected, there's a position at a subsidiary). Keep in mind that If I want to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup OR A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop [0] my only path forward is H1! They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that make any sense to anyone? Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE). [0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-shop-secret/78781/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...

light_hue_1 3y ago

> My opinion - USCIS can't legally reduce H1B visas so they intentionally wreck the lottery system to invite bogus applications, who they can later reject, or they simply won't file a full petition, and they don't have to issue all the 85K H1B visas Congress has allowed. USCIS merely follows the laws and rules. As with most things in the US, this is a Republican-created disaster. In 2005 the Bush administration invented this system after the Omnibus Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005. Which was, to put it mildly, a shitshow. They gave members a few hours to read over 3000 pages of new laws and 9 new bills. No one had any idea what they were voting for and parts of the law weren't even properly drafted; only 2 bills had ever even been debated. It took nearly a week after voting for the actual text to come out.

vsskanth 3y ago
USCIS still has a lot of leeway over how they adjudicate visa applications (both standards and the time duration) and this is used by the administration through political appointees to shape who and how many people they admit. Post 2016, they dramatically increased RFEs (Request for Evidence) and slowed down visa processing for H1B visas and employment authorization (EAD) cards from a few weeks or a month to years. Many, many women lost their jobs because of that. This is also primarily why they operate on paper and refuse to modernize. They wasted hundreds of thousands of employment based green cards every year simply because they didn't bother to process applications on time from people waiting decades.
mataug 3y ago
I’m not familiar with the 2005 bill, What part of the bill is bad in this context ?

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago

> The real losers here are the students who studied in the US, worked hard to find a job and only submit a single petition through their employers. It's now way less likely they will get picked in the lottery. I'll never understand why we don't just staple green cards to master's degrees. It's absolutely absurd that we're choosing to kick out talented, hardworking people who are already established here, who are disproportionately young and healthy. And they're at the very beginning of their careers - they're ready to pay a lifetime of taxes. They're the absolute opposite of drains on society.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
> Providing a green card upon completion of your master's degree. Seems like an interesting idea. Why do you think it's not already being done? I haven't really explored the idea very carefully, but this would amount to giving universities the power to grant citizenship to foreigners, which seems like it has a lot of potential for abuse.
- okr 3y ago
  But i would have applied for trump university right away!
- LawTalkingGuy 3y ago
  Remove the potential for abuse by still requiring the application to be approved.
- jaredklewis 3y ago
  > this would amount to giving universities the power to grant citizenship to foreigners Just a note that green card holders are residents, not citizens. They don’t get to vote, they just get to pay taxes. Still potential for abuse of course, but an important distinction.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Just a note that green card holders are residents, not citizens. While there are time and other requirements after getting lawful permanent resident status (“green card”), the main limitation on access to citizenship is getting status in an immigrant category and thereby becoming an LPR.

bubblethink 3y ago

>so they intentionally wreck the lottery system to invite bogus applications USCIS has a conflict of interest as it is funded by the applicants. USCIS exists to fund USCIS, which means (applicants) x (fees). Everything that is wrong with immigration from the execution standpoint follows from that.