Frankly the whole original point of H-1B was to bring in awesome people and encourage them to stay if they showed they brought enough value.
It should, as you said, be attached to the person with a fixed term (10 years?), then at the end of the term there should be a "job interview"-like process where it is determined if this person has brought enough value. If they succeed hand them a Green Card.
Employers should still help them get the initial H-1B to show they have a job and that their credentials are credible. But after that the employee alone should hold the H-1B and be allowed to jump ship if they're unfairly treated or poorly compensated (after all the point of H-1B was never to get CHEAP labour, it was to get GOOD labour).
The fixed term also gives them more personal security, without the threat of being kicked out with little notice.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/346...
> In many ways, the RAISE Act returns us to the dark ages of American immigration policy. If enacted by Congress, this new legislation would cut the number of immigrants entering the United States by half. It would do away with family-based immigration, which reunites thousands of families every year and introduces a points-based system for potential immigrants which is stacked in favor of wealthy, highly-educated, English-speaking applicants. In short, it is the most far-reaching remaking of American immigration policy in more than 50 years.
Now, if the RAISE Act applies to only the H1-B program then your claim would be accurate and I think the bill would have a lot of support.
Plus at least in the UK they don't immediately get permanent residence.
The ten years is a fixed term, it can currently take at least that long but you can be deported earlier if you get fired from your job and are unable to find alternative employment compatible with your H-1B visa.
It might be unnerving knowing you may have to leave in ten years time, but imagine how unnerving it would be to potentially be fired every single day and get deported that same year. That's what is currently going on.
It’s a perverse situation where people affected have no power to request any changes or improvements, and people who have power to do so, are not affected in the least, so there is no real incentive to improve anything.
There is a 2-3 year wait for 4th category Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans. Given the possible qualifications for this category, I suspect that these are mostly immigrants subject to child abuse, neglect or abandonment within the US.
Immediate relatives (spouses and minor children) of US citizens can always get a green card. I think that this process is fairly quick.
The family based process looks much more backlogged. If you're a brother, sister, or married (adult?) child of a US citizen, you will be stuck waiting for at least a decade. If you're an unmarried adult child of a US citizen or green card holder, you're looking at a 5-6 year wait unless you're Filipino (10+ year wait) or Mexican (20+ year wait). If you're the spouse of a green card holder, the wait is "only" 1-2 years.
https://www.uscis.gov/visabulletin-jan-18
https://www.uscis.gov/greencard/immediate-relative-us-citize...
As of the most recent visa bulletin, the (quota limited) family-based categories are 2-13 years behind (different in each category) globally, with some countries much worse, notably Mexico where one category is at the same 2 year backlog that the category has globally, and the rest are 20-22 years behind.
I find that to be naive. It's not because a politician says that something is for X that it's really for X.
Especially considering that if for some reason good labor was rare and in demand, it would mean higher wages for this good labor.
Follow the money...
"(...) then at the end of the term there should be a "job interview"-like process where it is determined if this person has brought enough value."
Why do you want to add citizenship to the deal? If the salary alone is not a good enough incentive, perhaps it needs to be higher. Otherwise you're just selling citizenship in exchange for lower wages.
Read the regulations. This idea of H1 as a path to a green card is just a fraudulent use of that visa. I am not opposed to people getting green cards — I am opposed to the idea that the H1B is some kind of back door to permanent residency.
If you want to immigrate, get the proper visa.
Is your point that immigrant visa takes however long it takes (>10 years for Indians), and if one is already here on H1b, they should not expect H1b to be indefinitely extended until immigration visa is approved?
For pretty much all countries other than India, there are no practical issues, since they get permanent residence well before their H1b expires.
The problem is magnified for Indians to the extent that their lives are basically in suspended animation for several years
It sounds like these people should be fast tracked for citizenship, given that they would be filling a gap in the country's skillsets.
If we invite them to move to the country, it seems fair to not kick them out for no good reason.
Wrong; it's explicitly, legally a dual-intent visa, unlike other non-immigrant visas in which immigration intent is prohibited and grounds for visa revocation. The idea of it as a path to permanent residency is explicitly part of its legal design, and so using it that way is not at all fraudulent.
After uprooting your family and bringing them to the States, you have zero bargaining power. It's a pretty dark system.
Changing jobs is actually relatively painless with an H1-B visa. The only risk is that you have to find a new job in relatively short amount of time if would get fired.
The choice is not to play this game and go back. Of course there are consequences, but its all about the mindset and staying away from building one's life/mindset around "h1b -> greencard -> citizenship". For me, it is one possible outcome in my life.
The number of lottery tickets one application gets should be proportional to the salary (for example, 1 ticket for every 10k salary after 80k/yr)
The bigger tech companies aren't using the program to suppress wages though, they're using it to bring in highly skilled employees. For example, there is a ton of hiring in the AI field and grabbing up foreign workers who are skilled in this area is a huge economic advantage for the US. The tech companies want these people, not some dude who took a three month course and is now "qualified" to work on a helpdesk.
It's in the best interest of these tech companies to reform the H1-B program to make it more viable for these highly skilled workers. Unfortunately the big fear right now is that any reform attempts will be used by the current administration to crack down on all H1-B holders instead of simply reforming the system so it fits the original purpose.
H1B is not an immigrant visa. It’s a temporary visa. Also pretty much everywhere in Asia has the same kind of visa and it’s always tied to the employer. This kind of visa isn’t some uniquely American outlier.
If the claim that there is no suitable American for the specific job then it shouldn't matter who the employee is. Either the skills are available in the existing market, and thus any employer can find someone, or those skills are in more demand than there is supply and all companies are likely to have a shortage.
Allowing H1-B's to transfer from one job to another easily would solve a lot of the issues that has come up with the program. It would make is to the wage suppression techniques would no longer apply, making the system more fair to both US citizens and highly skilled foreign workers.
That would help fix sooo many of the objections to this program. But perhaps most importantly it would mean people on this visa would not be indentured servants , with the possibility of visa revocation hanging over them.