In (some?) other countries work visas are not tied to employer but rather job category, and the length of time waiting for permanent residency is usually 2 years. In the US an H1B can be transferred once you reach the portability threshold if you can find another employer, and depending on the country of origin you can be waiting for permanent residency (green card, not citizenship) for 2 decades. An L1B is tied to an employer and you're effectively illegally in the country as soon as you're laid off. In practice the government gracefully gives you a week to completely uproot your life and get the hell out. I was lucky, I went from arriving in the country to receiving citizenship in ~10 years, but the 4 years trying to get permanent residency were the most stressful of my life, and being spared by layoffs did little to help. Even being privileged knowing you can go elsewhere, and fully open eyed about the situation, it still sucks.

Unfortunately, if you are a chinese or indian citizen on an h1b the wait time for a green card is outrageously long. You can't really live in a "ready to move back in a couple days notice" state for decades. People buy homes, getting married, and have kids.

Well there are temporary work visas out there in various countries that are fixed-term, e.g. a visa holder is entitled to stay in the country for 2 years. If they lose their job they're still entitled to stay for the remainder of the term, and have plenty of time to find other work (which doesn't require any sponsorship). Examples of this include the J-1 visa in the US which is explicitly a 2-year inextensible cultural exchange visa that lets you work whatever job you want.

The thing that makes the H-1B and visas like it insecure is their being tied to employer sponsorship. I don't think that's inherently unfair - the whole point of the visa is to bring in skilled workers in valuable industries.

What I do think is shitty about the H-1B in particular is just how short the grace period is to find a new sponsor. 60 days is a tight schedule even for a skilled worker in a good market, and layoffs don't tend to happen in good markets. It definitely opens up visa holders to exploitation by employers, and temporary downturns can end up kicking out a lot of valuable people.

There are other countries with skilled worker visas with more generous grace periods - e.g. Ireland's Critical Skills Employment Permit allows you 6 months to find a new job if you're laid off. I don't see the problem with that if the visa holder can support themselves financially over that timeframe.

In the US there's an H-1B Visa program that allows skilled workers to come over as a path to citizenship. However the program is fraught with all manner of requirements like company sponsorship. Changing jobs under the H-1B program results in your journey to citizenship being reset, and current bureaucracy and politics have resulted in that journey taking upwards of a decade or more.

As a result of policy, H-1B workers will take substandard pay, abuse, and burdens to maintain a job with a company willing to sponsor them until they can get their Green Card. This creates a from of indentured servitude.

The knock on affect is that it lowers wages for everyone because there's a vast pool of skilled workers willing to accept lower pay from a company willing to maintain sponsorship of them for 10+ years.

Imagine on year 9 you get laid off, now your indentured servitude got extended another 10 years if you can find a new sponsor.