But, I don't do any state of the art research, or highly specialized academic work, or anything worth publishing on academic journals.
How hard is to do the Labor Certification for the EB-2 green card?
Edit:grammar
Generally doing the labor certification isn't hard, just time consuming and a lot of paperwork. 1-2 years is not uncommon even with the new PERM system. After that it depends what country you come from.
The main gotcha is you cannot use your experience of doing the position on your H-1B towards your labor certification application if you are currently employed in the position so you'll have go on your previous experience.
As ever consult a lawyer. This goes double for immigration related stuff.
After your PERM is approved, you get to file for I-140, which takes another 4-6 months. Then you get to wait until your priority date becomes current which depends on your category and country of origin. This could be anywhere from immediate to 10+ years.
Once your PD is current, you get to apply for I-485 which takes anywhere from 2-6 months and includes doctors exams, finger printing and possible interviews by USCIS. Of course while they're processing this there is no guarantee they wont retrogress your priority date and put you back into the waiting game.
Of course all of this starts again if you change employers (but you do get to keep your priority date if you had an approved I-140).
the h1b is a dangerous game. it's essentially a do whatever i say, and i "may" sponsor your green card "eventually", with an emphasize on the may. not everyone uses it that way, and i would would be leaning out of the window saying most do, but it's definitely enough to be a common issue.
i was brought into a university with an h1b under the premise that i could work on my own startup. what didn't tell me was that that what they meant was that i should work for them for 5 years before they would consider sponsoring a green card application, and that they expected me to work unpaid overtime whenever they asked me to.
i've heard from a friend running a consulting company in the area, that a lot of companies bring in workers with h1b's and then don't even have the decency to sponsor a green card after keeping them for 6 years.
to my remembrance there was a house voting sometime last september about an immigration reform. one side of the table was asking for better accessibility to visa's for specialized workers(including cali afair), and the other was asking for more audits.
sadly i can't tell you how much good came out of it, maybe someone else can elaborate on that.
edit: there is a reference at the end of the ops post, but it's not really prominent. eb-3 wait times can be years, which is why it's not really a reasonable choice, but eb-2 is different
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-2_visa