then instead in top 5 there is some weird article about like "How I used my old CRT monitor to create a fish tracking app using radios" and some guy reply about some home project in 20 000 words no one really cares about

*I'm not sure how factual the algorithm claim is

I'm not saying you are wrong but I'm saying my confidence starts quite low with this kind of idea. (e.g. the cause could be something different like manual moderation; the effect may just be confirmation bias and not exist; etc.)

Qualifier: I haven't looked into the algo at all, for all I know it could be openly published by YC/HN. I'm mainly responding because I feel like it is important to TRY to be self-aware of our own biases. Emphasis on the TRYing and asymptotically approaching 100% confidence (Qualifier to the Qualifier: it is also important to be at peace with decisions based on <100% confidence lol)

but for some reason those almost autistic special interest posts few care about is getting quite some upvotes

The theory that HN is part of a vast conspiracy in the startup world related to H1-Bs is misguided.

Process A is a miserable dehumanizing process. Instead of pushing against the people who are unnecessarily making it a miserable dehumanizing process, your complaint seems to be that a similar process B isn’t a dehumanizing miserable process.

The system is a joke to make the US some money off people who have it and punish law abiding citizens. If you have gone through it you would be just as pissed off as i am.

Would love for the process to be changed. Let me know how since most people don’t care about legal immigration.

I'm an immigrant and the two processes are not substitutable.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/06/mexico-asylum-seekers-fa...

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2018/10/usa-...

Maybe you need to diversify your news diet? “They just ask to come in then get put on planes” is a pretty widely discredited talking point.

I’m not getting anything i said above from news it’s literally how it worked for 5 different people i personally know. All coming at different times.

Also didn’t say it wasn’t dehumanizing but guess how long a K1 or CR1 visa has to wait to bring the person they are married to into the country.

And photographs of people sitting in cages rather than being "flown to the destination of their choice" are of course fake.

I mean... they talk about the hell of the legal immigration process without mentioning the hell people who're coming to our Southern boarder seeking asylum are going through.

I do agree the legal H1B process is brutal though.

Here you go. There's a real position at FAANG for every petition they file (and if the petition doesn't get selected, there's a position at a subsidiary). Keep in mind that If I want to hire:

A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup 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 [0]

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 make any sense to anyone?

Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE).

[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...

USCIS merely follows the laws and rules. As with most things in the US, this is a Republican-created disaster.

In 2005 the Bush administration invented this system after the Omnibus Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005. Which was, to put it mildly, a shitshow. They gave members a few hours to read over 3000 pages of new laws and 9 new bills. No one had any idea what they were voting for and parts of the law weren't even properly drafted; only 2 bills had ever even been debated. It took nearly a week after voting for the actual text to come out.

Post 2016, they dramatically increased RFEs (Request for Evidence) and slowed down visa processing for H1B visas and employment authorization (EAD) cards from a few weeks or a month to years. Many, many women lost their jobs because of that.

This is also primarily why they operate on paper and refuse to modernize.

They wasted hundreds of thousands of employment based green cards every year simply because they didn't bother to process applications on time from people waiting decades.

I'll never understand why we don't just staple green cards to master's degrees. It's absolutely absurd that we're choosing to kick out talented, hardworking people who are already established here, who are disproportionately young and healthy. And they're at the very beginning of their careers - they're ready to pay a lifetime of taxes. They're the absolute opposite of drains on society.

Seems like an interesting idea. Why do you think it's not already being done? I haven't really explored the idea very carefully, but this would amount to giving universities the power to grant citizenship to foreigners, which seems like it has a lot of potential for abuse.

Just a note that green card holders are residents, not citizens. They don’t get to vote, they just get to pay taxes.

Still potential for abuse of course, but an important distinction.

The difference between H1B and permanent resident is massive. Residents aren't beholden on their employer to remain in the country.

While there are time and other requirements after getting lawful permanent resident status (“green card”), the main limitation on access to citizenship is getting status in an immigrant category and thereby becoming an LPR.

PhDs on the other hand, regardless of the field, you've contributed something unique to the collective knowledge of humanity. Instant green card, it's even dumber to kick them out.

Green cards, also aren't citizenship but are simply a step to getting there. There are many types of visas that let you work but have stipulations, especially around leaving the country. If there really is some kind of fear of people collecting citizenship after spending decades in the country and becoming highly educated, special visas with rules are always an option. But there should be a viable path to citizenship either way. We should not be kicking these people out.

Depends on the field. I've met PhDs that are fantastic, and I've also met PhDs whose defining contribution to human knowledge over their entire lifetime was "I made this algorithm 2.3% faster in a specific tiny edge case that no one will ever care about."

That's pretty much what most research or even startups are like. You bet that 5% will blow up, and hence you fund the other 95%.

They have to get accepted into a program and graduate and they have to have the funds to pay tuition. Then they'll work productively here and pay taxes. I can't think of any reason why this would be a bad thing except the bigoted "ugh, too many Indian people."

Absorbing educated people from other nations is an economic superpower.

More educated immigrants lead to more jobs and economic growth.

1. https://www.cato.org/blog/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-s...

2. https://www.aclu.org/other/immigrants-and-economy

3. https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/north-american-century/b...

4. https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/1/27/the-e...

5. https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/immigra...

But that said, you would make it more difficult for American citizens to attend American graduate degree programs that they subsidize with their taxes. There's a finite number of seats for students and I'm not sure if they're better filled with locals or people who want guaranteed permanent residency.

The parent poster did not say anything about stopping other avenues of immigration. Immigration is expensive. Do you think a lot of people who aren't privileged enough can easily immigrate?

As someone who has interviewed and worked with a number of international students with master's degrees, approximately 70% of them somehow manage to get a master's from a US college without actually knowing anything, so my cynical side says we definitely should not automatically add green cards to master's degrees.

The reason to give almost anyone working a tech job a green card quickly is so they don't depress the market wage by being indentured serfs.

The absolute worst thing the US could do to the Indian IT sweatshops is to give a "tech worker" a guaranteed green card in 18-24 months so that they can change employers. Those companies would quit applying for visas almost immediately.

Need a source for this. I'm sure there are a vast number of master's students who get their degree from shitty colleges to just be able to work here, but the vast majority of international co-workers I've had were amazing.

https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-eligibility/gree...

It can be easily gamed and would lead to a rise in education industry specifically for this.

I think the better would be to give a green card after getting a US degree in areas that matter to the economic growth, and the students have worked here, in those industries for 5 years.

USCIS has a conflict of interest as it is funded by the applicants. USCIS exists to fund USCIS, which means (applicants) x (fees). Everything that is wrong with immigration from the execution standpoint follows from that.