Annually renewable would be borderline evil.

For some reason, the US is incapable of renewing visas for people who are already in the country. You can renew status, but not visa. If you renew your status and want to travel internationally, you must get a new visa if you want to return. And, for unknown reasons, that can take a lot of time even in trivial cases. Such as when the applicant is already living and working legally in the US.

> For some reason, the US is incapable of renewing visas for people who are already in the country.

We choose not to prioritize and allocate resources to it (or choose to bureaucratically overcomplicate it given the resources allocated to it).

It’s not fundamentally hard, failure is a choice. And its a choice we shouldn’t make.

> If you renew your status and want to travel internationally, you must get a new visa if you want to return. And, for unknown reasons, that can take a lot of time even in trivial cases.

If that's true, you couldn't visit your family back home?

Personally, I have spent a lot of energy dealing with partially dysfunctional immigration system, I would not be willing to do that again

You can visit home, but you might end up stuck there.

Leaving the US as a non-immigrant always carries a small amount of risk: CBP can always decide to refuse your next admission, even with a visa. After the recent spate of tech layoffs some H1-B holders have been asked to show recent payslips at the border to prove their continued employment, for example.

If you’re super unlucky (with your citizenship, or even just sharing a name with someone on a list) visa renewals can be delayed by months to years for security checks (“administrative processing”).

There are also some green card routes which require a period where you simply can’t leave the US without abandoning your application, after which you’ll be refused entry as a non-immigrant and will need to do the entire multi-year immigrant visa process from your home company. H1-B holders avoid this, fortunately, but TN holders and tourists who get married and decide to stay can get caught out here.

tl;dr: the US immigration system is actively user-hostile.

> a period where you simply can’t leave the US without abandoning your application

This is crazy. I would inderdtand if the Gov asked for a million dollars upfront, but this is just pointless abuse and cruelty.

UK has the same shit, if you apply for Permanent Residency you can't leave, and my parents suffered a serious ilness and I couldn't go.

Or, you know, you could go the Canadian route--i.e. grant permanent residence to high-skilled immigrants (which lets them become citizens), and not treat immigrants (i.e. granting immigrants permanent residence) as a matter to be viewed with disgust, hatred, callousness, and contempt.

Also, Canada rapidly transitions temporary work visa holders into permanent residents, instead of letting them languish as visa holders without basic rights for decades like the US.

And once you get Canadian citizenship, you can make the bigger bucks in the USA under NAFTA (or whatever it is called these days).

> Or, you know,

This is an obnoxious way of starting a point.

How so? (I'm not a native speaker)

When I looked into it, I found that Canada’s really serious about the high-skilled part (or high-credentialed, anyway). A bachelor’s in CS and pile of experience won’t cut it (in fact, experience can hurt, because being older hurts your score) unless you have already landed a job with a Canadian company.