1. The focuses on family reunification visas instead of skills which differs from other countries such as Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand.

2. Visa applicants are tied to their employer and require their employer to sponsor their Green Cards.

3. Green Cards being issued based on country of birth. I think we can park the idea of "diversity" being a quality of an immigration system.

If you are referring to national immigration quotas then I agree that yes, it was quite unfair for awhile now.

It's just a bit odd. There wasn't even a hard physical border with Mexico until the 1920's. There used to be a rather active workable "temporary farm worker visa" program that got sacrificed on the altar of pleasing xenophobic morons somewhere in the 70's or 80's I guess...

As a person that lived thru it, it was not xenophobia, it was NAFTA that sent everyone scrambling to survive. Our farm lost viability due to it, as did most small family farms. You either conglomerated with the emerging mega-farms if you where big enough or you died. Organic was nowhere on the horizon at that time and was the only thing that brought back the viability of small plot farming. Xenophobia is an easy answer to reach for, but the reality is people where scrambling to save their livelihoods and kicking the legs out from under the big conglomerates via removing the migrant workforce they relied on was one of the efforts. It has more to do with surviving than a disdain for other people. Also there was no love loss for the big conglomerates as they where the very entities that pushed for NAFTA, so trying to remove their workforce was fair game.

In the end I miss the family homestead but it worked out for me. I was a crappy citrus farmer (due to lack of passion) and while I appreciate my youth, I don't ever want to own a farm so I am glad my family got to reap the rewards of selling it, rather than me inheriting a farm that I would have to figure out what to do with.

The visas in question made it easy to legally hire foreign (mostly Mexican, I’d guess) agricultural workers. That would have reduced the cost of farming your family homestead.

Canceling the visas presumably encouraged many of those workers to accept lower wages to work farms in Mexico. The old visa program was effectively a subsidy for US farms; ending it created more competition for US farms. Arguably, it also made NAFTA more likely to happen, since it moved agricultural production from the US to Mexico, and people have to eat.

Suspending the H-1B and green card programs will have the same long term effect on the US tech industry.

In the US, basically everything is tied to employer: healthcare, retirement (though at least with 401ks they now float from employer to employer), etc.

I think this is primarily because there is now so much money in politics that only large corporations (or the rich in charge of same) have enough to participate in the political system.

fwiw, this is not required. people can apply for GC themselves if they want.

The US switched to acting stingy, mean, xenophobic, etc. a few decades ago. I'm not sure why, as it has about 1/9th the population density of an India.

One could wax philosophical about "the end of the west" and how the influx of immigrants was needed to colonize the land up to the Pacific Ocean and feed the factories of our vast manufacturing sector, and clearly those motives both dried up.

I'm not sure where the whole "punish immigrants and treat them like garbage" concept came from.

I may sound extreme to some folks, but having some experience as an immigrant FROM the USA moving TO Europe after significant time lived abroad (50+ countries in a decade) I can honestly say that no country on earth is currently more xenophobic and snobby.

Someone will probably flag me for promulgating such views but it's the inexorable conclusion I've come to given my experiences.

I’m not sure why either, but I’d definitely like to maintain or even decrease that population density. I’m not sure why people focus on increasing population density as a good thing. It’s not like we have some sort of shortage of people.

  stingy, mean, xenophobic, etc. a few decades ago

I am engaged to a Chinese citizen, who is an active H-1B visa holder working for a U.S. technology company. We were visiting China in January to both see her family and friends and to do the yearly renewal of her re-entry visa. This latter point is important because it is a mind bogglingly inefficient process that forces people to travel back to their home country to renew a visa they already have and are using to live and work in the U.S. just so they can be able to leave and re-enter. This is just so the U.S. can have the possibility of keeping them out when they want for whatever reason, just as they have in this case.

Anyway, the U.S. Consulates shutdown during the outbreak in mid-January, halting her visa processing, needlessly in my mind because she had already accomplished her in-person interview. Then, the U.S. Consulate held her Chinese passport, which had valid visas to other countries, for over a month. This prevented her from going to another country and doing the visa processing there. (It is normally recommended to do the renewal in your home country, for reasons of being stranded wherever you're doing the renewal.) So the U.S. stopped processing her basically finished visa renewal, then held on to her non-U.S. passport preventing her to travel between two countries that aren't the U.S., and now they have kept her out of the country on the point of helping unemployed workers when she already has a job because she was the qualified candidate. This was all in January and February and some of March, long before the "official" bans on visas.

I have not seen my fiancee in over five months. It is unlikely I am to see her in 2020 and even 2021. I may eventually be able to travel to China to see her, but it is looking more and more that she will be unable to return to the U.S. any time soon. This is all complicated by the fact that her H-1B is time bound and the Green Card is a lost cause because it takes multiple years to be issued.

This is a person who already has a U.S. job that she was more qualified for than U.S. citizens. Just because people are unemployed doesn't magically make them qualified for jobs they already lost out on. It also is unclear what companies who already employ H-1B holders are supposed to do. There is no policy or method to get the fiancee of a U.S. citizen who already holds a valid H-1B back into the U.S. right now, and it's not clear when one will open up. It also makes no sense, from the very beginning, why the U.S. prevented her from returning at any point unless you understand that the U.S. is literally at war with China, immigrants, and non-immigrant workers.

All of this is vastly compounded by the inefficiencies, directed by our miserable administration, of the USCIS, because applying for a K-1 visa is not as straightforward as you would think. Even though the H-1B is a dual intent visa, applying for the K-1 visa could see the H-1B process incur delays or even denial. The U.S. government holds immigrants and non-immigrant workers hostage, and this is affecting U.S. business and citizens' personal lives. Right now, it is literally impossible to get someone who has a job in the U.S., has a current H-1B visa, a home, cars, and other assets in the U.S., is engaged to a U.S. citizen, and planned on immediately marrying a U.S. citizen after a "routine" vacation back into the U.S. any sooner than years. This is a pathetic situation.

I am a tech worker who has worked for technology companies and national security labs. I am now being forced to think about leaving my parents and brother behind in the U.S. to consider moving outside of the U.S. so that I can continue my life with my fiancee and build my own family.

People in this country wax on (whine) about freedoms, but what they are really wanting is to do whatever they want when they want it at the expense of literally anyone else but themselves, including their neighbor. It's nothing but extreme narcissism, and I cannot help but feel this country is a lost cause. The U.S. is an extremist state now, taken over by charlatans and textbook traitors.

Even worse, the priority date for EB-1 India, where I am from, jumped nearly 11 months forward in 1 month, and my priority date is just 7 months behind. If I end up getting a GC before she is able to come back, we'll have to go through an entirely separate process to get her GC, which will take at least 1-2 more years.

The only option seems to be to wait for the GC for a few more months, and then move to a different country so we can be together and start anew. We will then have to start the process of getting her GC and deal with all the paperwork that entails, assuming laws don't change again. Who knows, in this time maybe we'll just end up living in the new place for good.

Both of us have PhDs from a top engineering school, own a house, and have lived in the Bay Area for the past 15 years. The chaos this is creating is mind boggling.

You must renew your visa in your home country. There is a possibility of doing it in another country, such as Canada, but this is not usually recommended and has a higher probability of failing.

Mind you, these are people that already have visas. They are simply being renewed. The secondary effect of this is that it slows down processing of visas, which lowers how many are given out and increases the cost of the USCIS. Although I think this particular thing has existed for a while now, the Trump administration has made it a point to needlessly increase the processing time by making policies to delay the processing. This is a tactic that further slows down the USCIS, making it much more costly, just so that they can point out how costly and inefficient the USCIS is when it is their policies that make those things worse.

For example, if you make an application for an H-1B, extension, or renewal, it takes months to prepare the paperwork. Once submitted, the USCIS can send it back, requesting more information. This has become much more common under the Trump administration, because it basically adds a minimum three to six month delay to the process. It gets sent back to the applicant, one must extremely carefully understand the confusing request for more information, provide the information, and resubmit. The USCIS then starts the whole evaluation process back over again.

I don’t think that’s correct. Although often it’s considered advisable to do it that way (consular processing), there is an alternative process (change of status) where you apply while remaining in the US.

(source: renewed an L-1A visa a few years ago; advice received from my firm’a immigration attorneys)

The process is so overly complicated, it's hard to track. I am not aware of any process in which you can re-stamp an H-1B inside the U.S. You meed to do an in-person interview, and these are done at U.S. Consulates and Embassies, none of which are inside the U.S.

Of course, it's difficult to quickly find the information on the official U.S. websites, but here are sites that explain it.

http://www.greencardapply.com/question/question17/H1B_Visa_S...

https://www.h1base.com/visa/work/h1b%20visa%20stamping/ref/1...

Upon renewal even the most trivial thing can be used with no transparency or accountability or review and keep you out of the country for life. Bam. Can't get back home, stuck in India, everything left behind. That's it. I know because I've had several clients lives ruined by thus lunacy.

Initial visa issuance (for three years) will be at a consulate abroad by definition, and then one more visit to get the extension stamped (for the next three years).

My experience of the whole process was much less dramatic than many here. I was advised to budget for a week out of the country (for consular processing of an L-1A extension), and it ended up taking rather less.

Is the real problem after the six year term when extensions are done on a year-by-year basis for those with pending labor certification or backlogged priority date for an immigrant visa?

Having said that, the story from the OP does not add up: you don't need to renew the visa stamp to stay in the country. The stamp is for crossing the border. I, for one, never renewed my H1B stamp since I did not have a need to leave the country. If I were to leave, I'd just go to a consulate and get a new stamp to get back so having visas stamped only outside of the country does not appear as such a hurdle - you only need the stamp if you are already abroad.

My story does add up. We needed to leave the U.S. to visit China, and we also visit Canada sometimes, hence necessitating the stamping process to take place at a U.S. Consulate in China. And it was this process that ended up being indeed a massive hurdle. In fact, so massive it is a major part of what kept my fiancee from returning. This is one of the cruxes of the story.

>We were visiting China in January to both see her family and friends and to do the yearly renewal of her re-entry visa.

sounds like the renewal per se was a goal of your visit. If you are saying that you went to visit China and had to get a new visa stamp because the current one expired then it indeed adds up.

No. At least for Chinese citizens, it is either every year or every two years that you must renew the stamp to be able to leave the U.S. and return.

I would advise not trying to dilute the impact of the rules just because you don't know or didn't experience them yourself. You aren't mentioning the country you are from, which also confuses the matter. These things change depending upon the origin country.

Majority of talented people are doing that already for several years now. Besides US is not as attractive anymore.

Another friend got fired from Uber a few weeks ago on an H1B. Does it mean she have to leave now?

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...

Even with all the hassle, it is still worth it working for big tech. People won't make nearly as much elsewhere.

You will have a ridiculously high salary rather than a garangutan SV salary, but it's worth not getting stuck in a Bay Area traffic gridlock every day while worrying about whether you'll be allowed to go back to the country after renewing your H1-B.

Years ago made the decision to stay permanently the European Big Tech office which I was going to stay temporarily, and I'm much happier for it.

Getting treated like a second class human being by even "liberal minded" folk simply due to an accent and the lack of hip phrasology "like, I KNOW! I CAN'T EVEN, OMG"

Being kept at arms length for decades even after putting enormous amounts of money in escrow and submitting piles of paperwork just to get the slightest hope of a visa appointment at your local US consulate, let alone entering the Green Card Lottery?

It's over-rated, over-ripe, and the "Land of Opportunity" is now the "Go away, we have self-inflicted problems we will likely blame you for" land.

Flag this if you want, but I have direct personal experience in many many countries and I come from the states, so I'm not talking out of my behind. We are the meanest country on earth right now. That's why I left. (well, actually it was the Iraqi invasion, Guantanamo Bay, and the ongoing activities in central Asia coupled with the new-speak that even the Dem-aligned rags were pushing, NYT, WaPo "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and wars on emotions and such... but see, this is related: it's about being mean and making others pay with their lives for ones ideological comfort zone, etc.)

I was just pointing that the reason a lot of skilled h-1bs still come and stay despite the issues is because the salaries at some companies are just really damn good compared to what they'd make at their home countries.

The only way this nonsense will change is when more people who do have other options take them. This is mainly an image issue; in the Obama years, even though it was probably as bad as this today (just not overt), the risk-reward ratio of surviving all this was viewed as better than going somewhere else. All this changed with Trump being this transparent. There is going to be a lot of hesitation now for anyone who wants to immigrate. Anywhere except the US, and only if necessary.

Since getting them to do that is literally the purpose of the nonsense currently being executed, and which has been executed against immigrant and nobimmigrant aliens for the last several years, I think you are mistaken. It's not like that's been at all a secret.

This image now is a lot nearer to reality than it previously was. When this leads to people not having US-citizen children, or not buying houses, or just not jumping on the boat to reach the US come what may, or just not being too optimistic in general (essentially not tying yourself to a country when the country hasn't done the same with you in terms of citizenship), things will maybe get a bit more sane.

> has to be based on the employer's decision to continue their employment and not some politician's whim

While everyone here would love for this to happen, clearly nothing's working as it should be, or how we want it to be. It hasn't been, for quite a while. This is realpolitik.

U.S. workers in the engineering and technical disciplines cannot compete with H1B visa applicants who are submitted at probably 30% market rates and wages, and openly discriminate in the work place if you're the token white dude U.S. citizen working in the same office. H1B is miserable, corporate welfare for Zuckerberg and Bezos.

I would def hire an H1B even it costs me upfront premium for those reasons.

2. Yes FAANG's might be ethical h1b users that pay 300k+ but that doesn't automatically imply everyone else is.

3. I have personal experience with this have encountered higher manager wanting to hire h1b for the reasons i've described above.

4. X is conspiracy theory because there are exceptions to X is a basic logic fail. 'real conspiracy' is an oxymoron.

No they cannot, this causes issues with their perm processing. You need to find an employer that can sponser your greencard otherwise you are out of country in 6 yrs. So you not just have find an employer that will transfer your h1b but also pick up perm processing from your previous employer.

More info here,

https://www.murthy.com/2019/12/26/how-a-job-changes-may-impa...

This is just one example.

It is far far far away from 'freely'. Given the arbitrary nature of uscis processing people try to minimize their iteraction with the agency. No visa employee will attempt this risky move for a 10k salary bump.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

My post again, and stop flagging it you angry H1B workers that leave 20 pairs of shoes outside of your hovel:

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There is no question H1B visa holders can escalate through the ranks and make a bunch of cash in the United States.

And that's exactly what is wrong with the entire thing. That entire teams of Indian H1B visa holders will immediately get whitey off the project, every single time, while making sure that the hiring manager and technical team leads are always Indian. This is the caste system, re-invented here the U.S. And you cannot get shit done if you are a competent engineer dealing with an offshore team or onshore H1B team. They will not do what you tell them to do. They will argue about every single point. They will trash your credibility and refuse to implement anything, using groupthink that controls the entire project. Managing a team of onshore H1B workers is nothing but interoffice politics that they completely control in all aspects. It's blatantly racist and has destroyed U.S. worker opportunity in the engineering fields, all of them.

H1B is a complete scam, especially in the Beltway / Northern Virginia area where everything is a billable contract. Headhunters get their fee and/or a large chunk of the first year's hourly revenue. The company hiring the H1B worker is on some federal project or grant and is making the spread between what the headhunter charges and the hourly rate on the contract. The hiring company couldn't give a shit less about the quality of work provided by Indian H1B workers, nor is a college degree granted from an Indian university anywhere near what is required in the U.S. from an engineering perspective - there is no comparison in the quality of education, nor have I ever met a single H1B engineer that was better than anything but a limited segment of technology that they specialize in, by design, because that requires their team in order to complete the project.

Makes total sense if you're the headhunter and hiring company, both of whom only care about having a warm body in a seat that is billable, and you can get three warm bodies in the seat for the price of one market rate position using H1B. It's complete bullshit, a scam on the taxpayer and attack on U.S. workers. Worthless 99% of the time, and the 1% of H1B engineers that actually do know what they are doing are not worth the damage the H1B program has done to the entire U.S. technical space.