After you apply for a green card and cross the first step (takes about a year or two), then your H1B visa can be extended indefinitely. So the applicant can continue working. The company doesn't care because in this scenario they have an employee who'll think 10 times about leaving even if they are not being treated well. That's not to say the employee can't leave and join another company who's willing to make the necessary adjustments to the green card process. But it does mean that the applicant is forever in this limbo without freedom, can't plan long term, and has to leave the country in a week or so if he/she loses their job.

>then your H1B visa can be extended indefinitely

This used to be the case. But not any more. A lot of people I know are getting RFEs and rejections for their extensions after i-140. I am actually one of them. Got my I-140, then got RFE. I am in a state that gives license based on your visa and won't renew license unless I have an approved work permit. So, I cannot renew my license, and has been using ride sharing for the last 1 month. Its going to be another 1-2 months before I get a decision on whether I can stay. Fun times. They always find creative ways to make your life difficult. Its amusing they refuse to give me license, but the state has no problem taxing me, even for the income I get in India.

Trump talked about self deportation. He succeeded at least in my case. I am done with all this immigration bull. I hope I can find a job in India soon so that I can escape from here.

They have 60 days to leave, not a week, as of January 2017. Definitely not ideal, but at least gives them a chance to find a new job.

You can work until your priority date is current and you can even change employer.

The caveat is that your employer keeps you on a very short leash. If you are fired you must have a new job within 30 days, else must leave the country. Not everyone has the stomach for this, especially if you have a family.

This kind of visa is very bad for the employees and virtually every country I've looked has a similar policy. A work visa should not be tied to a certain employer and the period to find a new job before having to leave the country should be at least a few months, not 30 days. It's incredibly hostile but hey, they can't vote, so nobody is going to fight for them.

I wouldn't surprised if years from now, people will look at the current visa system the same way we look at slavery and indentured servitude now.

In my experience companies do not lay off people, it's a huge legal headache, usually people change jobs on their own. I agree about short leash though, it's really bad, although manageable on H1B. The people on L1 are who are trully screwed up.

Are you high? Layoffs - and individual firings - happen all the time. The dirty secret of corporate America is that performance reviews (and even supposedly innocent constructs such as JIRA and other project management software) are really a pretext to firing someone. A firing for poor performance isn’t a significant legal risk if the alleged transgressions are documented in detail.

I specially mentioned "in my experience".

I personally know a lot of lazy or borderline incompetent engineers, (some of them even went through PIP) who do thrive in corporate environment and it is much easy for corporate just to keep them on payroll. This is especially typical for software industry. This is anecdotal experience and may vary from company to company or even from team to team.