They should just repeal the law and design a real point-based permanent immigration system from scratch.
Here in Germany, you basically need a job offer which matches certain criteria, to be get a temporary residency. This can be prolonged as long as you stay employed in Germany. Similar rules exist for students. I have an Indian colleague who studied in Germany and now is working here. If you stay in the country for 5 years, it is pretty much just a formality to apply for unlimited residency and it is also reasonably straight-forward to even get German nationality, though this is less common.
But otherwise I agree with rest of your points.
There is. It doesn't matter in practice, because it's a legal fiction anyway, but here's the legal logic:
For all visa applicants, including H1B, there is a presumption that the person is an immigrant, and they cannot obtain non-immigrant visas until they convince the admission officer of their non-immigrant intent, see section 214(b) of INA. Crucially, you need to argue that you have no intention to abandon your foreign residence. Dual intent have nothing to do with it, this is true for all kinds of visas.
The immigration law says that, as a rule, applying for permanent residency in the US (a green card) constitutes evidence of your intent to abandon foreign residence. Where dual intent policy enters the picture is that the above does not apply to holders of dual intent visas. For them, applying for green card "does not constitute evidence" of their intent to abandon foreign residence: this is the exact language used in section 205b of Immigration Act of 1990, which is the legal basis for "dual intent" policy. Note that they do not say that the rule of abandoning foreign does not apply to dual-intent visa holders, only that applying for green card no longer constitutes evidence of their intent to abandon foreign residence.
Of course, none of it matters in practice, since it's all legal fiction, and in practice things works exactly as you believe they are. The point here is that the practice is based on the legal fiction, on the wink which requires immigration officials to pretend you do not intend to abandon your foreign residence, when everyone knows that this is exactly your goal.
I don't think this is right. Section 214(b) indeed says that there is a presumption of immigrant intent, but for dual intent visas, such as the H1-B, it's not necessary to demonstrate that you don't have immigrant intent.
It also seems wrong that applying for a green card could ever not constitute evidence of immigrant intent. Do you have a citation for that?
In practice, no, but that's not what "dual intent" legally means.
> It also seems wrong that applying for a green card could ever not constitute evidence of immigrant intent. Do you have a citation for that?
I did not say anything about "could not ever". I guess you could maybe interpret it this way, but if you actually followed the citation I gave, it would have been clear to you. What I meant was that the section 205b of Immigration Act of 1990, which is the legal basis of "dual intent" policy, explicitly amends section 214b of INA, to remove permanent residency application as acceptable evidence for the purpose of establishing immigration intent in context of section 214b.
The secondary information is more useful in practice, because it represents the actual practice, not legal theory.
> I said "could ever not", not "could not ever", but that's a moot point now.
Ah, sorry, I misread, it's my bad.
I’m guessing you don’t know very many Indians?
This is not true. Your description is accurate for the F1 student visa and TN work visa for Canadians - applicants for those visas are not allowed to have immigration intent. There is no such requirement for the H1B visa.
The poster you replied to is spot-on about the ridiculous wait times for green cards, and this delay has nothing to do with the H1B program itself. The government really needs to speed this up, so that immigrants and their families aren't living in fear of the next arbitrary Trump executive order.
(Not sure why doingmyting's comment saying the same thing is flagged. Virtually all of this user's comments seem to be flagged for some reason.)
This is the remnant of the pre-1965 racist immigration country quota system which allowed only European whites into US.
If there were more people from New Zealand than India trying to apply, it would be harder for New Zealanders.
I've lived aboard and had residency in two other nations. The overall amount of people applying is outrageous. That's the real problem. 22,000,000 apply for 50,000 green cards.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/23/application...
India, China, Mexico, Philippines etc have backlogs because more people try to get in from these.
when the basis is country-specific, and all countries are treated equally, it is purely supply/demand.
No one applies from Afghanistan, so it is easier to get a GC -- so is US biased towards Afghanistan?
Not adjusting for population when the brunt of this policy is not borne by a country but a person, suggests malicious intent. All countries are treated equal, but all immigrants are not.
But in practice, is the US supposed to track down census numbers for the countries around the globe? So many countries, dont even have much of a process
and the main point is : the govt exists for the well-bein of its current citizens, not potential ones.
https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/historic-pt
I believe the I-140 is for employment-based green cards.
The long wait times are due to annual quotas by country, not slow handling of paperwork.
what you say is correct.
as a green card holder myself i can attest to both my initial approval period (3.5 years) and also the renewal period (2 years) being onerously long, and at times, having a particularly deleterious effect on my life.
look, i can understand the initial approval taking a long time. they have a lot of stuff to check.
but i applied for the renewal a full 18 months before my GC's expiration date (because i knew they took a looong time) and i received the card a full 2 years after my renewal + bio was accepted in the system, i.e. six months after my GC expired.
The tall nail gets the hammer.
The inconvenient facts get the gray text.
Or they don’t want other people to see what a comment is saying.
The backlog is due to: 1) the limited number of immigrant visa defined in the law and 2) country based diversity quotas.
Pretty quick would be a month.
My first work authorization in US was the simplest L1b internal company transfer. That took from mid October 2016 to issue of the visa on 21 Feb 2017. That's considerably longer for the simple document.
My blanket work authorization took 2.5 years... and 4 years for the LPR.
7 days for PR in Singapore? That's not the experience I've hear from friends. In fact, you're at the mercy of the gov't as it's entirely discretional for PR. You often have to apply multiple times if you don't have the "right" profile.
An equivalent of what you get in Singapore in 7 days is H1. H1B takes at absolute best - 6 months at 33% success rate.(If you miraculously get to file on March 31st and get to start October 1st.)
Permanent residency in US takes years. Even Diversity Lottery takes at least 18 months.
Make that process faster. Give people a thumbs-up or thumbs-down like 10x faster. Months not years.