My worst situation dealing with this was a TN status rather than an H1B, where I was told at a border that I could be ineligible for admission to the US because I had no left the day that I was laid off from a previous position.
I had to tell the CBP officer that there was a 60 day grace period, be told that the internet isn't a reliable source of information, and wait while he discovered this information on their own. Sitting and waiting I literally overheard this person, after learning of this grace period, ask a colleague if they had ever heard of it before. This was at a major Canada/US border crossing.
It is apparently not just people on HN who are unaware of this, but also individuals charged with making US admission decisions.
Many CBP works simply do not know the rules as you said. I've been pulled aside for 3+ hours. I've almost missed flights even though it's 110% legal for me to be here and work. I was pulled aside for not having an I-94 paper in my passport even though they had switched to a digital system for Canada and Mexico 5+ years ago (aka NO ONE has the paper). I've had border officers give me off hand remarks like "It's a shame an American wasn't given this job" looking at my TN application. All you can say is yes/no sir/ma'am and hope they're not having a bad day and send you back.
Then other days I'm waiting in the line at LAX getting back into the country, they ask where I had been, give me a stamp in two seconds and wave me through. I never know exactly how they're going to react.
It's gotten to the point where I'm treating getting a green card at this point the same way someone treats buying a lottery ticket. If it happens that's great. But if it doesn't I already have a backup plan of banking up all my USD and moving to Europe (my immediate family all live there and I have a British passport from my parents).
The immigration game is all fine and good for me now (29 years old, single, no mortgage and no kids). But even if I make half the amount of money in Europe at 33-35 when I want to start a family would be worth it to know that I don't have to worry about being kicked out the country. I especially feel for my close Chinese friend who can't even re-enter the USA right now if he goes back to China.
Yes, Non-white people are more likely to suffer from abuse from authority. But if the law doesn't offer strong protections for a non-white person, then no one is safe. And you can be abused by authority no matter how white you are. All it takes is a bad officer having a bad day. I have also spent a few hours in CBP because the officer didn't understand how I changed my visa status. You become an criminal until things are cleared out if you are lucky.
Not sure at all why I was flagged. White, middle aged male, returning to the US after arriving in Canada that morning.
It was a very uncomfortable situation.
If you want to do thing legally and immigrate to the US then you'd better have a decade of your life and tens of thousands of dollars to throw at lawyers to guide you through the process.
I'm now a Canadian and I think the process in total (including the marriage certificate since I came over on a Fiancee visa) might have put me back about 1.5k. The process was reasonable, there were certainly requirements but people were available to guide you through it in English & French and, wonderfully, Canadians are quite nice to new Canadians so I didn't get much flack from my new coworkers.
America just doesn't want people to immigrate.
You can take this marriage to the US government to make an application for a green card for the international spouse, which will be received in less than 18 months typically.
Short answer, find an American (or even just an existing green card holder) that you love, marry them, and now you are able to stay in the country permanently and work in pretty much any tech job you like :)
However American citizenship is of extremely dubious worth, even if you really like to travel like my wife and are limited by travel visa paperwork like with a Chinese passport for example.
Voting is not a particularly useful feature of American citizenship unless you live in a swing state and believe your vote to be important in deciding the fate of our country.
And most jobs that require citizenship like in government pay extremely poorly and have ridiculous arbitrary barriers to entry, namely a security clearance.
E.g. I've heard of CBP officers not knowing that Canadians don't need to get a visa to enter the US. Also heard of CBP officers not knowing what "Massachusetts Institute of Technology" was on a student's F-1, and had to ask around to confirm that it was a legitimate school. And many more.
Did you tell the agent you didn't leave after you were laid off? Or did you just ask for a new TN once you had a new offer?
It seemed to me like being too truthful could hurt your chances more than to just ask for a new visa and let them process the TN as needed.
Some employers wouldn't even report your termination date until some time in the future to give you time to find a new job.
In my situation it felt as if the officer was going to every possible length to find a reason to reject my application.
I was explicitly asked why I was no longer with my former employer, what my last day of work was, and what date I had previously left the US to return to Canada. Being untruthful about any of these easily-verifiable points would have been much worse in the long run (since this officer definitely seemed intent on running down every possibility). Honestly I am lucky that I had a proof of my severance agreement, which showed it was not a voluntary departure.
And these actions are taken outside the US (at the home country airport) so realistically speaking you can't even sue them or anything.
You can later cancel the return ticket and apply the credit (minus a fee) to a later trip.
In that case the airline is required to fly the person back.
This is more common now with various Covid-19 travel restrictions so airlines are also asking for all testing paperwork that is required for the destination countries.
It’s just didn’t make sense so we stayed here.
Wait, what? Tech unions? I've never seen a single union in my entire 20 year career. I was sympathetic up until you complained about that. What unions?
The H1B stuff goes back and forth politically. If you ask me, if the economy is poor then there's no excuse for encouraging immigration, especially of high paid labor. If unemployment is high, that is (and that's the part that fluctuates). Not to mention H1B is used to reduce wages and dump tech workers when they get old or expensive. However, the uncertainty you describe is intolerable, it should be a clear path and if someone is laying down roots and family, they shouldn't be living in fear. It's obviously a very mixed bag.
You literally have 1 side that demonizes a situation, and the other side doing pretty much all the can within the legal powers they have to improve the situation, but “both sides don’t really care”.
Democratic immigration policies always prioritize family based and undocumented immigration. They have clear electoral benefits from this (see AZ and TX). Reforming H1B and the high skilled immigration system is only an afterthought.
Republican policies have at least put forward some kind of points-based system. They however want to reduce family based immigration which is an absolute no-go for Democrats.
DACA kids go to school. They graduate from schools here. They serve in military. They pay taxes when they join the workforce.
The majority of Indians/Asians also vote for Democratic candidates. 80+% of Asians voted for Clinton in 2016.
Except they aren't. There is a clear 'caste' system when it comes to the immigration Democrats care about. Their primary focus is on immigration across the Mexican border (a lot of which is often technically or borderline 'illegal') which they want to make as legitimized as possible as the Hispanic community is a massive votebank for them. So we have all this noise about DACA and the like.
On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of legal H1B pool is largely an afterthought for them because the Indian and Chinese community in America is not that politically assertive, plus the H1B types can't vote anyway, and are mostly concentrated in places like California / Washington so their friends etc would anyway vote Democrat so who cares.
By and large Democrats prioritize the most disadvantaged first, and that's poor immigrants, many of whom happen to be coming across from Mexico.
How about prioritizing the most disadvantaged _US citizens_ first instead of kicking the stool from underneath them by importing cheap labor?
I'm less worried about Mexicans spilling over into California than I am about jobs being off shored to the far east. Clinton lost in 2016 because she and Bill Clinton are poster childs for NAFTA and letting China into the world trade organization.
No, but the mega-corps that hire a lot of them are. Very much. And usually lean more towards supporting Democratic politicians to ensure their labor pipeline is kept in place.
Additionally, the focus on DACA and Hispanic immigration may be because of size: Indian and Chinese immigrants aren’t even 5% of the USA out together, while immigrants just from Mexico are a whopping 11% of the USA.
Silicon Valley itself wouldn't exist had it not been openly attracting talent from all over the world, and the difficulty in getting visas and residency over the last few years is already showing its effects as more and more major software companies are popping up outside the US.
Another problem with the study. "...the program enables employers to hire foreign workers when they cannot hire U.S. workers"
This is such a lie. My brother has looking for around a year and cannot get his first position. Past few months, looked like I might lose my job do to Covid. I spent a few months looking for a job, but couldn't find one. At the same time 70% of my coworkers are on h1b, often in their early/mid 20s. Absolutely no reason they couldn't hire a domestic worker to do the job. H1B is a scam.
I mean they have desperately tried to get more people into CS, but even that has had little results. Biggest bang for the buck is lobbying and marketing for more H1Bs. What's a couple hundred million here and there
What you're not taking into account is the relative efficiencies of scale. When there's more talent in a particular geography than somewhere else, high value global companies can grow in a way they can't elsewhere. A precondition of that is lots of raw material - people - who can be repurposed by the highest bidder. Limit the raw material, and the industry might not even be located on the West Coast.
If supply was enough to depress wages, the US would have the world's lowest cost developers. In fact, it has the most expensive, because of the valuable companies that are able to grow in SV, which each bid up wages.
Economics teaches us about winner effects. The best attract outsize rewards, far larger than their proportional increment in ability or effort. SV attracts the best of the best because it's the best place for such people to be rewarded. It's a virtuous circle in multiple, compounding dimensions.
People are a fixed cost in the economics of software development. That means scale is king; it's the divisor on those costs. Scale isn't just on the sales side, though; it's on the talent side too.
Reducing skilled immigration is the kind of shortsighted approach that kills the golden goose in the long term.
These "best and brightest" are unencumbered by student loans and voluntarily put themselves in a very bad position at the negotiating table for the salary. If that doesn't depress wages it's hard to say what would.
I can introduce you to someone who sells Eiffel towers and used bridges. You can trust him. He is my cousin.
In spite of their best efforts, most of the software development still occurs in the US. Think Microsoft hasn't tried to offshore as much as possible to India and China, building dev centers there? Or Google and FB?
Even then, just look at what kind of workers end up being imported through this programs. Not always the best and brightest. Many do entry level jobs not even in software development, for outsourcing companies.
I'm not saying outright ban immigration but better control is needed. (And saying this as a non-American living in the US). Something that struck me as particularly interesting and President Trump recently commented, is how about making companies bid for a fixed number of visa slots. Whoever pays the highest salary, gets the visa. This would certainly make companies be able to bring the brightest, while raising wages in general.
Anecdotes are not evidence. Maybe your brother is bad at interviewing. Getting the first position is always the hardest.
"An increase in the share of workers with an H-1B visa within an occupation, on average, reduces the unemployment rate in that occupation. The results indicate that a 1 percentage point increase in the share of workers with an H-1B visa in an occupation reduces the unemployment rate by about 0.2 percentage points. The findings suggest the presence of H-1B visa holders boosts employment among other workers in an occupation. The results provide no evidence that the H-1B program has an adverse impact on labor market opportunities for U.S. workers"
There is nothing scientific about this. No experiment was performed. They simply looked at the data, saw there was lower unemployment in occupations with higher percentage of h1b, and then asserted that means there is no evidence that the program has an adverse impact on us workers. They are reversing cause and effect.
Do you have a study that shows the adverse impact of H1-B visas on American workers?
Soft sciences are harder than hard sciences to do.
> No experiment was performed. > This is not a double blind experiment
Do you really think experiments are a reasonable approach to political questions?
I too dislike wish-washy science, but there really isn’t much other choice for many real world situations.
For example, a few years Disney theme parks laid off all of their IT staff and immediately replaced them with HCL H1B workers for lower cost. Clearly in this case H1Bs were abused to lower salaries of American workers by bringing in low skill (defined by salary) labor.
Immigration isn't inherently bad but the H1B program is deeply flawed (allocations by country, dominance by outsourcing companies, workers being tied to employers)
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
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 makes any sense to anyone?
Exactly why it should be easy, frictionless, and risk-free to tell on your employer for any labor violation as an H1-B. Make it abundantly clear to the visa holder that if their employer wrongs them in any way, they will pay big time and the visa holder will a. not face any punishment b. will be handsomely rewarded for coming forward.
This is what the unions should advocate for...
I don't know what makes something 'officially' a labor union but at least they call themselves that. There was also Washington state Tech Workers Union.
I am truly confused. How did you get the impression they have anything to do with being a union? I don't see the union part, or the members part, or the collective bargaining part; seems to me a union ought to have those components.
This is what happens when the people making the laws for unique experiences have never been even in the proximity of those experiences. (Well, in this case it's more likely just cruelty.) You get lawmakers who lived a standard life of an upper-class person and don't realize that finding a job isn't as easy as it may seem or as easy as it was 60 years ago. All that talk about "just go in, do a firm handshake and talk to the owner" might seem funny when it's loons on Facebook saying it but when it's what people base their perception of the world and their lawmaking on... that gets disturbing.
I know I'll probably be flagged for this question, but still: why do this? Why not help your origin country with your knowledge?
Genuine question, since I had the same decision to make and chose to return, in order to help locally.
That's not guaranteed to be true. Take finance - if you want a career in this field there's only a handful of cities where it makes sense to live and work: London, Singapore, New York, maybe Tokyo.
An exotic derivatives quant won't find much demand for their skills in, say, Almaty.
Similarly, tech workers benefit from being in tech hubs (SV being one example). Oil engineers need to be around oil rigs and so on.
Moreover, standards of living are different in different parts of the world. Levels of corruption, infrastructure development, civic engagement etc are much worse in some places than others. You may have had the foresight of choosing to be born in a well developed country, but many have not.
If a country offers better work conditions, a better salary, less risk of economic turmoil, better health care, etc. then I'll take the opportunity if it presents itself. I've done it twice and would do it again.
It's not any different to taking a better job offer, whatever that means to you.
I moved from Canada to the US in 2007. Things were different then, and the opportunities in the US were unique (I joined Amazon). The longer you stay, the harder it is to return: your network changes, you get used to life in the new place, etc.
I will say that I’ve pondered the question of moving home nearly continuously since moving here and there always seems to be a compromise that we’re not ready to make yet. In the case of Canada, it was often the housing prices in the places where we’d like to live.
Here are a few others:
- being in a persecuted group that is at-risk or discriminated against in their country of origin (due to religion, race, sexuality, gender, etc.)
- being from a country with a high homicide rate, or some other high risk of violence or danger
- wanting to provide a better education and quality of life for their family
- escaping abusive family or relationships
- Wanting to access companies or institutions where the skilled worker feels they can have a much larger impact through their work
This list is just scratching the surface...
Because some people are queer or from other minority communities within their home country (e.g. Dalit in India), and would be subject to discrimination, including and up to murder, in their home countries. Asylum only covers the most extreme cases and not the day-to-day discrimination that minorities face worldwide.
Because freedom of movement is an inalienable right that comes with being a human, and borders are inherently oppressive.
Because most of the world is a harsh, dangerous place, and supporting the decisions individuals have made to stay or get out, given the circumstances they're in, is inherently a moral good.
For many of them it's been too long since they've had normal people problems. For immigrant experiences the gulf is even wider.
On the other hand, the H1B system isn’t supposed to import fungible labor. These visa are supposed to be for highly specialized labor — highly specialized to the point that the openings are rare. It’s hard to fault an abused program for being inconsiderate of a problem it wasn’t supposed to solve.
Once an H1B is offered it should remain in place for some set time period, with procedures in place to address fraud either in the case of the company or employee.
Give us a general work visa that let's us work for N years instead of making us puppets of the company we are currently working for.
H1Bs are just skilled worker visas, let's stop with the charade that they're anything else.
100% agree, which is why I'm saying they shouldn't be tied to a single employer, which just helps employers in general acquire a more compliant, docile work force.
I also favor dutch auction allocation.
That, and ban all of the body shops using them.
BTW, I have worked somewhere where H1b was knowingly abused and used to reduce the average wage.
Do you know there is no general work visa at all in America, whereby a skilled person can come based on their merit and work in the US?
There are a whole lot of (both immigrant and non-immigrant) work-related skill-based visas in the US immigration system. It's true there is no one generic such visa, but that's because the US immigration systems doesn't use a small number of broad visa types but a large number of hyperspecific ones.
Yeah, but it's great for the large companies hiring them.
This is not true. The H1B program is intended to "allow U.S. employers to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. A specialty occupation requires the application of specialized knowledge and a bachelor's degree or the equivalent of work experience". Ie, it is intended to boost the economy by allowing in skilled college-educated immigrants. There's no requirement that they have to possess unique/extraordinary talent, or work in jobs where "openings are rare".
You're probably mixing up the H1B program with the EB1 program, which is indeed intended for immigrants possessing "extraordinary ability". The intent and requirements for H1B are far simpler
In order to renew an H1b visa [1], immigrants have to go to a US consulate, which do not exist within the borders of the United States so leaving the country is required. For the vast majority, this is a day trip to Canada or Mexico or a small vacation to visit family in their home country so it's not really an issue. However, sometimes, the consulate will pull shit like a "State Department Security Check" because the subjects worked in an institute that happens to have a research nuclear reactor - nevermind that it's one of the largest scientific institutes in the world or that their fields of expertise have nothing to do with nuclear.
The immigrants, if they chose to go to Canada or Mexico (as most do due to cost), are likely at this point stuck for months as undocumented immigrants in their new host country - unable to work with existing mortgages/apartments/cars/obligations to pay for in their old life, hotels and living expenses to pay for in their new life, and barely a month worth of sick time and vacation. Bonus: most of the things they could do to mitigate the disaster could jeopardize their permanent residency application. As far as I know, these standoffs usually end when the employers sue over the renewal or dump the employee completely in which case their entire lives have to be packed up and moved but they can't enter the United States to do so. Bonus #2: if both parents are working, they likely have separate H1b visas that won't clear together - family separation time!
As you can imagine, going through this series of events is devastating, especially for children who have zero insight or control into the process. Cruel is an understatement.
Edit: [1] See comment below, this applies to applications going through consular processing, which is a crucial detail
I think you may be confusing 2 things. H1 Validity and H1 Visa. You can extend your H1 from within US and most people do. No one is forced to go out and come back.
However, to extend H1 Visa, what you say is true. The difference is that visa allows you to go out of US, and then come back in, and for you to come back in, you need a visa that is valid at the time of entry.
However, if you wanted to stay in US without going out and keep on extending H1 (to the extent allowed by law), you can.
H1b applications processed by consulates don't receive an I-94 which means that the application is "approved pending a visa stamping". The new work authorization isn't active regardless of whether they are already in the United States legally or not, until the person leaves the US and goes to a visa stamping at a consulate.
You are describing the happy path for tech workers, but in my experience (90s Soviet block exodus) most families had to go through consular processing because it places a smaller burden of proof on the applicant vis a vis things like legal status in the United States and their home country. Lots of families from the Soviet block had a hard time assembling the required documentation in the chaos of the 90s and anyone who overstayed a H1b or student visa even a day because they wouldn't or couldn't uproot their families has to go through this process.
What I am describing about H1 is standard (majority) operating procedure. Yes extending H1 visa outside of the country is a pain, but extending H1 while being in US is not such a big pain, and most of my colleagues do that. Of course there does come a need for people to visit to their origin country once in a while, and yes that's when it becomes a lottery.
Working as a grad student is really a quite poor economic trade off unless you have the unspoken side benefit of qualifying for a visa.
It's basically a form of academic wage suppression.
H1b, for example, is well studied to result in wage suppression.[1]
[1] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pd...
However... The system is arbitrary and can punish people short term. It seems strange to buy a house in a country that can kick you out on no notice through no fault of your own.
OK, it's strange to buy a house. What about marrying and having a kid? Many H1B workers here have lived there for decades (with no realistic hope of a green card in sight). Must we stay childless because we can be kicked out on no notice?
I know your statement is well-intentioned but it comes off as one of those things that's easy to say in 'abstract' but it demonstrates a lack of understanding of actual life situations of people.
If you marry a citizen, that accelerated the Green Card. If you marry a non-citizen, your situation is precarious, so why not rent rather than buy?
I’m not arguing that the rules are right. (They are clearly wrong) Just that if you’re ina precarious situation, avoid doing things that make it worse. When I lived abroad, the expats were all aware of being on borrowed time.
I think the world would be a better place in terms of peace and prosperity if people could circulate as easily as money. Unfortunately that’s not our world.
If my posts are wrong or offend I’m happy to delete them.
Renting vs buying is fine. We can choose to rent all our lives and frankly in the Bay Area buying isn't even that slam dunk of a decision anyway.
My point was a bit more general. It's very common for people to argue 'technically' about how others should live their lives while missing their ground reality. For instance, it's easy to say "Well technically H1B is not an immigration visa, it's a temporary workers visa so why are you making long-term life decisions while on it". But the ground reality for most Indians and Chinese on H1Bs in the US is that they will never get a green card (permanent residence), and they will spend their whole lives here under H1B, so while the question is well-meaning and genuine, it translates to "don't buy a house, don't get too many possessions, don't marry[1], don't have kids".
[1] Unless you marry a citizen, in which case you are sometimes accused of entering into a 'green-card marriage' and seen with suspicion.
He's since married and has a kid, used to live in an apartment but now has a house, although he might be renting, I'm not sure.
I started dating and eventually married my wife, got two dogs, and bought a house in just the five years I've been working at the company myself, so a lot of life events can happen in that time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_the_United_Stat...
[2] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...
Here's the current queue size: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v.... For immigrants born in mainland China, E2's current queue is 4.5 years, for immigrants born in India E2's current queue is 11 years.
[1] https://www.cbp.gov/travel/international-visitors/visa-waive...
Have you ever tried to break a lease on accommodation in the US?
A house is an asset you can continue to own if you leave the country, by renting it. There is no requirement to be US resident or even eligible to visit the US to own property in the US.
Breaking a lease can cost tens of thousands of dollars which is just waste - and if you ever intend on coming back to the country at some point, simply abandoning the lease is not advisable since the impact on credit reporting can be substantial.
So I'd suggest that it's actually cheaper to own a house, and simply _not_ unwind it.
When I was in real estate, the banks would only credit your income at a 75% occupancy rate. It’s hard to break even on an income basis with rental real estate.
When your property is vacant, you’re still on the hook for the mortgage. More than likely, your income is going to be lower when you’re forced to leave the country.
This straight path you speak of they have been filing paperwork for and fighting for, for 3 years now. I believe he is just in the path to permanently moving to China and revoking his US citizenship status.
Everything about this process sucks. :(
So let's rein in those companies by giving them a talent pool of people who can't rock the boat too hard without fear of having to leave the country?
That’s a new one. What are these American tech unions you are speaking of? Googling only brings up a few obscure organizations that I’m sure don’t have much influence with the Democrats.
If someone thinks that some country is composed only from good will and good people, it will be disappointing. There is price to pay for moving, it is not always obvious. I moved to another country and I earn more money than if I would not move, but opportunities that I left back in my country are somewhat biting me back after all those years.
Actually its business tycoons who want cheap, abundant labor. Getting the media to frame it as a social issue was genius.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Amer...
Interestingly enough, there's a very similar system in place in the United Kingdom (Tier 2 General). Not only you have to leave within 60 days after being laid off, but there's also a "cooling-off period" of 1 year, which means that you can't get a new visa during this period and effectively it resets your time until permanent residence, so you have no option but to start over.
Their PR system is also time based, which means you don't have to live in uncertainty forever, unlike the H1B which is lifelong temporary immigrant for certain nationalities.
How would you buy a house on a H1B? No banks would issue a mortgage to a non-immigrant visa holder.
Two things can be true at the same time. Starting a "resident life" while on a temporary, non-immigrant visa doesn't sound like a great plan; and yes, this visa is horrendous and should be deeply reformed.
I lived in the US on a temporary, non-immigrant visa similar to the H-1B for six years.
Buying a house and starting a family while on such a visa always struck me as deeply irresponsible. I was reticent to even get a pet. The US immigration process sucks, but it's sucked for a long time, and the extent to which it's going to suck for you in particular is knowable ahead of time. Simply reading the language on the forms you fill out while applying for such a visa makes it clear how the US government regards you[0]. To ignore that and live your life as though you have permanent residency already is to carelessly put yourself (and your family, if you have one) in a risky situation.
I have sympathy for people who find themselves in this position. Leaving the US as a single person with no significant assets was tough enough for me, I can't imagine what it's like for someone who's really put down roots there. That said, if you were living like a "temporary worker in a speciality occupation" you wouldn't have put down roots.
[0] I know a lot of people listen to their employers pie-in-the-sky promises of Green Cards and how layoffs "never happen" and so forth. You're an adult, though. Understand your legal situation for yourself.
What the heck is a “tech union”? Who are in one?
There isn't really such a thing as a "tech union" in the USA. I don't think very many tech H1B holders are working in areas with any unions. (And if they were wouldn't many union members be H1B holders themselves?)
Actually, I suspect Democrats get more money from tech companies that benefit from H1B hires than Republicans do. Tech companies in the past tend to donate to Dem more than Republican. Of course, the biggest companies, in nearly every industry, donate to both parties hoping to influence whoever is in office.
Perhaps that's what led to the bare improvement to a 60 day period under Obama, who was of course the last Democratic president. The Dems definitely haven't done any more for lower wage or less skilled immigrants, if you think they are somehow helping them but not H1B-type immigration, you are unfortunately mistaken.
Before that, you technically had to leave the country the day you were laid off. Never mind that you might have a house a family and might have been living here for more than a decade. You would officially be staying illegally if you didn't leave right away and it would jeopardize your chances of getting a visa in the future.
It's only through an historic odd mix of good pay and relatively laxer immigration rules that the US managed to attract a large pool of talent in the 80s, 90s and 00s. Students from my college who are about 5-10 years junior to me no longer consider it a viable place to plan a long-term career in due to the extreme precariousness of visa holders' life situations in the US.
Politically speaking we have little to no power in numbers so neither politically party really cares. Typically it's the Democrats who are pro-immigration, but in reality they don't care much about H1B style immigration and are in fact likely against it due to American tech unions hating H1Bs, while we have unlikely allies in some Republicans because our presence benefits big companies. Common sense solutions standard across the world (such as skill-based / point-based systems) are looked down upon, while we keep getting kicked around on the political playground.