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Show HN: Explore 16 Years of Green Card Applications
- yitchelle 11y agoCan somebody explain to me why Americans need to have green card to work in the US? According the the data, there are 1659 applicants with a success rate of 68%.
- gt565k 11y agoCould be that they were Americans who denounced their citizenship and later wanted to work in the US. Or it could be malformed data :)
- DrJokepu 11y agoAlso, the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, how come there were 4 USSR nationals between 2001 and 2015 applying for permanent residency?
- negrit 11y agoAh, I should have made it more clear. It's the decision date, note the application date. So probably those applicants applied when the USSR was still a thing.
- gambiting 11y agoYeah, Czechoslovakia is also on the list, even though they split in 1993.
- tlrobinson 11y agoMight be interesting to somehow show the delta between application date and decision date, in particular by country.
- lazaroclapp 11y agoSo, in essence, the bureaucracy took so long that at some point during the process, their country ceased to exist. Kafka would be proud :)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- i_don_t_know 11y agoMaybe it refers to US nationals as opposed to US citizens. For example, the people of American Samoa and Guam are US nationals but not US citizens, at least not automatically. But I don't know what all the differences between the two categories are. Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CesHr99ezWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CesHr99ezWE
- negrit 11y agoHello everyone. I quickly built this little tool based on public records provided by the government. I did the same a couple weeks ago with H-1Bs and I just added over 1.1million green cards records. The data provided is not perfect so i'm still working on cleaning it but it should give you an idea of what is going on. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
- Jake232 11y agoI can't seem to find the H1B statistics page, maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place though. Got a link?
- roddit 11y agoKudos my friend.
- Oras 11y agoGreat work mate
- netheril96 11y agoAny way for us to run `select` queries ourselves?
- negrit 11y agoI haven't planned it but why not. I don't really know how to do it though.
- the_economist 11y agoThis is awesome Theo. When can I have data about Americans in France?
- SuperKlaus 11y agoGreat tool! There seems to be a bug though when I drill down to year plus country of citizenship and then try to filter by job description and state or city. The job description search term ends up in the state input field. Also, filter by company would be great!
- rb2k_ 11y agoThanks for the work to present that data in a nice and explorable way! It would be awesome to have another column next to "% of Greencards" that says "% of population". One of the reasons India has by far the most green cards is that they also are up there when it comes to total population.
- i_have_to_speak 11y agoThe site says India 40.1% and China 6.7%. According to the CIA factbook, the respective populations are 1.2 billion and 1.3 billion.
- Flammy 11y agoThe "% of Green Cards" refers to percent of Green Card applications in database, not against population of the country.
- rb2k_ 11y agoyes, and that's why I'd love to have another column to figure out if there are any countries that have statistically significant higher/lower Greencards per capita :) It's probably not a super useful metric, but it would be interesting to see
- npalli 11y agoIs there some filter on this data? Green Card for a certain type of job? India has 280K greencards and Mexico only 40K greencards in 16 years? That doesn't seem right.
- klipt 11y agoI assume this is only employment green cards. Most Mexican Americans probably come in on family based green cards, or just got citizenship by birth in the US.
- npalli 11y agoEven China has only 45K greencards. They seem to follow the same pattern as India for immigration, so what category are they coming in. Last I checked both countries (India, China) have similar number of immigrants in the US.
- klipt 11y agoI don't know, but the EB2 and EB3 backlogs for India are longer than for China so there must be some difference. Assuming those numbers are from PERM applications though, they don't correspond one-to-one to immigrants. For example Indians have a multi year wait to get a green card after their PERM is approved, and anytime they change employers while waiting they will likely apply for a new PERM, so by the time they get their green card one Indian could have gone through many PERM approvals (which this website will probably count separately).
- dataker 11y agoInterestingly: >Soviet Union 4 | 0.0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 100.0%
- mbellani 11y agoSo reading into India's stats, there was dip in 2013 followed by a rise to maximum GC applications by indians ever? Is there a way to tell how many of those were upgrades? that would be interesting because then you can tell how many might just be repetitions.
- demodifier 11y agoI also wonder what happened to Indian applicants in 2012[0]. A 0.03% success rate. [0] - http://data.jobsintech.io/green-cards/india/2012 http://data.jobsintech.io/green-cards/india/2012
- govindkabra31 11y agoThe dates in this dataset are "decision" date, not the application date. In that year, there was a fast forward movement in backlog of India's GC application... Green cards have a per country cap-- at the end of fiscal year, USCIS can use the "unused" GC quota of other countries for the backlogged countries. This is why you see that "priority date" for India stays at a fixed place (e.g., 2005 for EB2 India) for most of the year, and then suddenly moves forward at the end of fiscal year.
- TobbenTM 11y agoA staggering 500 applications from North Korea, wonder how they got out..
- vowelless 11y agoJust as an FYI, citizenship is not the same as country of chargeability (usually country of birth), which is what the USCIS looks at for placing you in EB-ROW/India/China/Mexico/Philippines. So you could have an Indian passport but if you are born in, let's say, Saudi Arabia, you are placed in EB-ROW.
- hpagey 11y agoThats correct. Also, if your spouse is born in a different country than you, you could charge your application to that country. For example, if your spouse if born in Kenya but you are born in India you can charge your GC app to Kenya which is ROW ( Rest of World).
- awjr 11y agoIf you ever get the chance I would consider redoing the graphs using https://dc-js.github.io/dc.js/ https://dc-js.github.io/dc.js/ Being able to interact with data by clicking on graphs can make a massive difference to the way you can interrogate data. Kudos though.
- negrit 11y agoThis is awesome! I'm def considering it.
- username3 11y agoWhat's the difference between salary and prevailing wage? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevailing_wage http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevailing_wage
- username3 11y agoIn a company view, can you add Browse LCAs by job title?
- negrit 11y agodefinitively
- bechampion 11y agohttp://data.jobsintech.io/green-cards/united%20states%20of%20america?refine%5Bexact%5D=0&refine%5Bjob_title%5D=system+administrator http://data.jobsintech.io/green-cards/united%20states%20of%2...
- vinay427 11y agoGetting an 'NaN' for the Success Rate in the table at the bottom of that page. May be something for OP to look into.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rvdm 11y agoExcellent way of drawing attention to the subject! Kudos. Might be interesting to explore the option of adding a beautiful data vis on the home page to capture the user's attention from the get-go. Looking at the sub pages you're obviously skilled enough at creating fascinating visualizations.
- thrwy10 11y agoWhat is this? This website indexes all available LCAs from 2001 to 2015. Where does the information come from? LCAs are public records and provided by the "Office of Foreign Labor Certification". IMHO, this is misleading. LCAs don't have a 1-1 corelation to 'Green Cards'. This data is based on the PERM process which is just 1 stage in the green card process. LCAs aren't green card applications, but a labour market test based on which green cards are applied for.
- bradleyjg 11y agoThe labor condition application has nothing to do with immigrant visas, maybe you are thinking of labor certification? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_certification#Differences_with_Labor_Condition_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_certification#Difference...
- negrit 11y agoYep, my bad, I forgot to update the FAQ. I do have 5.2 millions searchable LCAs as well as 1.1 millions perms
- klipt 11y agoLCAs (labor condition applications) are for H1Bs, not green cards. Did you mean LCs (labor certifications)?
- tricolon 11y agoI hope he did mean LCs. It's easy to confuse the two: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_certification#Differences_with_Labor_Condition_Application http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_certification#Differences...
- bradleyjg 11y agoAre these across all LPR categories—i.e. employment based, family based, DV, asylum, etc.? The numbers make me inclined to think not, but I can't find any explanation on the website of what it covers.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- klipt 11y agoSince it has salary data it must be based on PERMs, which only cover a subset of employment green cards.
- scrumper 11y agoSearch fields don't appear to work properly (Safari on OS X) - if you key in a full search (title, city, state) and hit 'refine' it puts the title in all three fields while showing you everything, not just search results. Interesting site though - I want to find me :)
- slater 11y agoAwesome! Nit-pick: Any chance you could right-align the columns with numbers, and add thousand delimiters?
- heliumcraft 11y agois there anything similar for canada?
- peter303 11y agoAlways interesting to look up your own company for activity. You may be surprised.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kitwalker12 11y agoVery interesting. Wonder what's the reason for the huge dip in Indian Software Applications 2013 onwards? http://data.jobsintech.io/green-cards/india?utf8=%E2%9C%93&refine%5Bjob_title%5D=Software+Engineer&refine%5Bcity%5D=&refine%5Bstate%5D=&refine%5Bexact%5D=0&commit=Refine http://data.jobsintech.io/green-cards/india?utf8=%E2%9C%93&r...
- dalek2point3 11y agocould be a reporting issue -- these things take time to show up in the data?
- chrissnell 11y agoThe 'salary' feature is pretty telling. I just looked up a former coworker by searching for the company and narrowing down by the hire year. I knew what country he was from so I was able to see his (starting) salary.
- parennoob 11y agoWow, I would really like to see my American coworkers' starting salaries the same way they are able to look mine up in this table :) Don't think that would ever happen though, it would be labeled as a shocking breach of privacy.
- bruceb 11y agoYou can look any most US citizens' salary if they work for a gov't agency.
- parennoob 11y agoI know that. But I work for a private company, and I would bet the majority of HN readers do too. Imagine if your starting salary was known to your coworkers on the day you started, but not vice versa.
- slipjack 11y agoAs mentioned in one of the other comments, you're getting NaN% for some success rates. I'm guessing it's because you're using the number of certified as the denominator, which will return NaN if it's 0. Also, maybe this is a dumb question, but is this all green cards? For example, your site says there were 261 green card recipients from Nigeria, which seems quite low. (Goes without saying - really cool!)
- markdown 11y ago> Also, maybe this is a dumb question, but is this all green cards? For example, your site says there were 261 green card recipients from Nigeria, which seems quite low. I wondered the same thing. Fiji is listed with 2 recipients (last I checked Fiji's annual quota was 600).
- maximedev 11y agoThis is a really great tool. Kudos to negrit.
- serge2k 11y agoCanada 0 in 2012 is weird.
- ausjke 11y agothis is roughly consistent with what I know, that India engineers took nearly half of all H1Bs, while its major peer China is taking less than 10%. I could never figure out what's going on to make such a big gap, I would think each takes roughly 15~20% makes more sense. One theory is that India IT giants are applying for lots of H1Bs then filling them when they're approved, they know the system too well. Meanwhile the Chinese IT workers/students don't have those group-effort. Also India managers like to hire Indians, while Chinese does the opposite, over time that also make a big difference. No bias, just curious here. Nice work indeed.
- cesarbs 11y ago> while Chinese does the opposite Can you elaborate on that? I'd never heard of such a thing.
- ausjke 11y agoIn general the culture in China encourages individuals to be its best and care less on teamwork/group-leadership. It's slowly changing but this will take some time.
- cesarbs 11y agoI work at Microsoft and the number of Indians there seems disproportionate to me. I too wonder why so many of them come to the US. Maybe IT education in India is really strong? Two funny things I observe regularly: 1) Sometimes I take an MS shuttle to work. The shuttle is full, and I'm the only non-Indian in it. 2) Sometimes I'm in my building's lobby and when I look around, I'm the only (or one of 2-3 people) non-Indian there. I pity those guys because they have to wait for 10+ years to get their Green Cards, even if they're EB-2.
- a8da6b0c91d 11y ago> Maybe IT education in India is really strong? More like systemic visa sponsorship fraud for reasons of cost saving. The visa candidates are often as not frauds as well: http://www.dawn.com/news/1080040 http://www.dawn.com/news/1080040
- ighost 11y agoOh man Palau has NaN% software engineers accepted :(
- catshirt 11y agodon't despair, maybe they have infinite engineers.
- chdir 11y agoIt'll be fun to map the stock price with the hiring graph. Does a big jump in hiring signal an oncoming price surge in the next year or so?