[bobfrost]

I'm at somewhat of a cross-roads related to this matter.

Note that this mostly applies to immigrants from India or China. I'm from India. This applies irrespective of education level (I did my Bachelors in the US, just FYI)

Currently I'm in the US on a student visa (currently during a period of that visa that permits me to work) that expires in a couple years. I cannot renew it. If I want to continue working in the US. My only option is an H1-B (work) visa.

There is basically no other option to me.

Okay, so let's say I do get the H1-B visa. Then, I have to work for a few more years on that visa, before I'm eligible to apply for a green card - which grants permanent resident status. Now, once I file that application, I'll be on a waitlist. Guess how much time it takes to get a greed card? Atleast 100 years. I'm not joking. Unless there's a policy change, there's no possibility.

Even if there's no possibility of me getting a green card, I can still work. I can still buy a house, get married, have kids, etc. A lot of Indians and Chinese in the US currently are in this limbo period, where they don't have a green card. So they still continue to work, start a family. Because no other country will pay as well.

But personally, I hate the uncertainty. While even getting a green card isn't a guarantee to get to stay in the country, not having a green card is much worse. A CBP officer has the authority to deny you entry at their discretion. If do deny entry, you are banned from entry for atleast 5 years.

That's it. You're life in the US has vanished into thin air.

While I love my current job, I trying to immigrate to Canada. You get a PR immediately if you quality based on a points system calculated using specific, meritocratic criteria. If I have a PR I feel I won't worry when I buy a house, plant roots, that my life won't be upended because I failed to follow my visa's restrictions.

[sg47]

Now is the time to leave. 18 years in the US with a kid born here. I missed the boat in getting my priority date around the time when my friends were getting theirs (my company was laying off people in other departments and my application got audited). Didn't think it was a big deal at that time. Now, my friends are getting their citizenships and I'm still stuck on a visa. I'm at the whim of the Consul officer and the CBP officer every time I renew my visa or come back into the country. Heavily vested here assuming I'll get a green card but planning to apply for Canadian PR just in case. There's an easy way to game the system if one is in the right situation and is willing to risk it. Leave the country and work for the same company for a year as a manager. Come back on a L1 visa and boom you can apply in the EB-1 category and get your green card in a couple of years. I've quite a few friends who easily got their green cards working for TCS, Infosys, etc. Meanwhile, with a Masters degree and 16 years of experience, I'm at the mercy of immigration officers.

[klipt]

> 18 years in the US with a kid born here

If you wait long enough your US citizen kid can sponsor your green card as an "immediate relative" once they turn 18 :-)

The backlog for Indians and Chinese is truly ridiculous though.

[bobfrost]

18 years? That's scary.

I'm surprised at the amount of confidence you have in the USCIS that you might get a greed card. If you are still on a visa, I don't see how soon you believe you can get a green card in a reasonable amount of time. I'm not sure you can use the EB-1 category even with an L-1 - unless you're at a very high level in your company. Even for that category, the waitlist is currently about 5 years.

[sg47]

Well, I just don't think about it. Pay being very high makes up for it. My priority date is 2 years behind the current priority date for EB2 so I'm hoping for a miracle. I cannot leave because we are so entrenched here and have lots of friends we don't want to leave behind.

It doesn't have to be a L1. Even with a H1B, if you worked as a manager in India and come here with a manager title (even Project Manager), you can apply in EB1 as a multinational manager. It's a terrible loophole and one that's mercilessly exploited.

[kamaal]

>>Come back on a L1 visa and boom you can apply in the EB-1 category and get your green card in a couple of years.

Those days are gone now. You go into EB-1 only if you get into the US on L1-A. They don't give L1-A's easily these days. For starters you need to be in director level positions to even qualify for L1-A's. Even then the waiting period for India EB-1 itself is growing and stands at 5+ years now. And it will only increase.

>>I've quite a few friends who easily got their green cards working for TCS, Infosys, etc.

Put the saddle on the right horse. People who come in from those companies often work for <$70K an year. Most are poor blokes who survive on ramen, and giving haircuts to each other so that they can save $8.

The real deal is Cgnzt which even until recently filed L1-A's and EB-1's for thousands/lacs of people by cooking up documents. Often promoting some one with a BCom degree to a director, granting them a GC and then rolling back the promotion. Thousands to lacs have made it to GC and Passports this way. When I worked for a short time in the US, it was painful to see PhD students in Stanford struggle for little extra stay, while some one with a basic 2 year diploma land GCs in like an year. In fact even until recently the biggest incentive to work at Cgnzt was this.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...

8.4 lac Indians got citizenship only last year. 5.8 lac got green cards. This is basically abuse max.

Add this to manager's pets who routinely get their documents cooked to be Nobel Prize worthy talent and land GC's. Literally the wrongest possible people occupy the numbers these days. Add to this a large number of body shopping firms.

There are several top level doctors, lawyers and scientists who don't even get B1's.

In short we Indians bought this upon ourselves. Like everything else. We abuse things so much, so far and so blatantly it makes things impossible for the real people when they arrive at the scene.

I'm one of those people who got burned badly due to all these politics at every level. I have largely given up, you just need to get very lucky early life to win at these things. Or cheat shamelessly.

[triceratops]

> 8.4 lac Indians got citizenship only last year

That was the total number of citizenships granted last year. Indians were about 50k of that total - approximately 6%. That's from the article you linked.

[kamaal]

Oops, I stand corrected.

But the part about abuse still stands. Basically get married to an American, or be lucky to be a part of some one time abuse drive.

[rohit2412]

> In short we Indians bought this upon ourselves.

I was with you till here. No, we did not bring this to ourselves. The answer is that USA has dumb policies.

[refurb]

The reason for the backlog is the US is trying to get a diverse set of immigrants to the US. Any one country can’t get more than 5% of permanent visas in a given year.

If it wasn’t for that, 80% of people getting green cards would be Indian and Chinese.

[TheCoelacanth]

That's a pretty ridiculous policy when China and India are a third of the world's population.

[rewq4321]

Agreed. I'm Australian and was investigating my options for potentially moving to the US to start a company in the AI space, and there's so much friction that I ended up deciding to just stay here. I can't see how they think these policies are a good idea in the long term (or even short term, for that matter).

[kamaal]

>>The answer is that USA has dumb policies.

Oh well, yeah. That part is true to some extent. But I can only comment on things we have control on. And to some extent a system with some specific rules needs to be used the way it was intended. We can't exactly say, we have a right to do what we like(in this case, cheat) especially when these things work like resources in a common pool. I can absolutely understand if some thing like this happened less than a percent. But the moment you enter double digit percentages of abuse/fraud, you are just hurting every one else. Expecting the other party to just offer an infinite pool of resources to accomodate our doing just adds to the anti-immigrant sentiment that is going around. Please note there are also people from other countries here.

Beyond this. Every system needs to work with a degree of fairness and merit, immigration is same.

On the shorter run, I do see someone putting a fix to these things and making things harder for every one else just to stop this abuse. On the longer I can see there will be increased pressure from economic centers all over the world, because every one is fighting for talent concentration at one place. This will lead to more liberal immigration policies.

And contrary to what our American friends believe it's hard to believe they will be the only country with economic centers attractive to everyone. Paris, London and Berlin have a growing tech scene. Then there's also Singapore and Dubai. Canada is another destination.

Beyond this the Chinese Bay Area(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong-Hong_Kong-Macau_Grea...) - Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area. Seems to be especially designed to take on Western Economic Centers. They are building state of the art infrastructure. Roads, Railways, affordable housing and top notch Airports. They'll be fighting for the talent pie, and with their demographics on the decline, attracting top notch foreign talent with be a Chinese government priority too. I don't expect them granting them citizenships. But liberal Dubai style 99 year visas on owning a home are possible. And a lot of the world talent will want to work there.

The way I see America will only eventually succumb to the pressure and might have to open up immigration again.

[just4tscomment]

An addendum: The consultancies (TCS, Infy, Accenture, IBM, Capgemini, Wipro etc.) are also to blame. They've kept salaries stagnant for over 15 years, particularly for fresh college graduates (yes, this is in part due to a glut).

They also offer employment abroad as a carrot to incentivize employees sticking with them for long periods of time in unfavorable conditions(Most co.s have high attrition rates - due to the low salaries). The companies also maintain a bond : you have to pay the company if you quit before completing 'x' years of service per contract. They withhold your experience certificate if you don't; a common requirement of any new company you hop ship to.

Most outsourced tech work is manual dreary labor. I've been on that side for 2 years.

[screye]

I hope the US immigration system stops being so meritocracy blind.

The abuse of the h1b and GC process by these coding/consultancy sweat shops is truly despicable. Every competent Indian I know, hates them. Every American seems to hate them.

They seem to have support from neither Democrats (for shit wages) nor Republicans (because most people here are immigrants). What is stopping them for getting their comeuppance.

Why not sanction them in particular ? If it is so blatant to the consumer, it should be fairly blatant for a Government auditor.

[coolplants]

> There's an easy way to game the system

Please stop subverting our laws, you’re making it worse for people who don’t break the law.

[sg47]

This is not illegal. It's just a different way to obtain a green card faster. By the way, I'm one of those people that's NOT gaming the system if there was any confusion. I've been waiting patiently for 9 years now. I'll have to wait for the foreseeable future or do something about this. Moving to Canada or back to India seems to be the only two options if I don't like waiting.

[coolplants]

Stop gaming our system, stop recommending others game our system.

[sg47]

I'm doing neither.

[ipnon]

Nothing he suggested was illegal.

[coolplants]

You’re not a lawyer. Are you defending gaming our immigration system?

[whack]

Are you a lawyer? What he suggested is about as "subversive" as using your 401k to lower your tax bill. The EB1-C program's explicit requirements are to work as a manager abroad, and that's exactly what the person above suggested.

[coolplants]

401K is not “gaming the system.” The IRS explicitly treats it specially for the purposes of allowing hardworking seniors to retire in dignity. The immigration law does not make explicit allowances for people to game it. If less people gamed the system, it would be more fair for the rest of us who do things the right way without manipulating.

[bobfrost]

Can't seem to edit although it's been <2h. Regret the typos.

For people looking for data backing what I'm talking about, here's[1] something that everyone looks at to track timelines. This data is released monthly. Search for "EMPLOYMENT-BASED PREFERENCES"

In that table you'll see China, India and Mexico specifically called out since they're the ones with such extreme wait times. EB-1 is extremely difficult to qualify for[2] so most people apply for EB-2. You can see currently applications from 2009 are being processed. That was more than a decade ago. Then consider the increase in applications each year since that year. That's where the 100 year figure comes from.

[1]: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

[2]: https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent-worker...

[whack]

> Guess how much time it takes to get a greed card? Atleast 100 years. I'm not joking. Unless there's a policy change, there's no possibility.

Not disputing how ridiculous your situation is, but you do have a couple other options.

The most realistic one would be to save up all your money and apply for the eb5 investor visa. If you're making 6 figures, you should be able to save up the required million dollars in about 10-20 years, depending on how much you make, and how frugal you're willing to live.

The other possibility is you marrying someone who isn't born in India. If you did that, you can use your partner's country of birth instead of your own, when waiting for the priority date. But obviously this isn't something you can plan for, and I wouldn't recommend letting this guide your life decisions.

The last option is progressing your career to the point where you can mount a realistic eb1 application. I've heard anecdotally that it's very hard, but not as hard as people may think it is. If you work at it over a 10-20 year time frame, it may be very realistic.

[sprashanth]

> The most realistic one would be to save up all your money and apply for the eb5 investor visa. If you're making 6 figures, you should be able to save up the required million dollars in about 10-20 years, depending on how much you make, and how frugal you're willing to live.

I'm an early career engineer, and this is something that a few of my friends have looked into. The number was 500k when I started working 3 years ago. It's now 800k. It looks like how much ever I work, the number will increase faster than I can save, cause there will be more people like me. Unless I become sufficiently senior and comparatively rich like a VP, I can't realistically beat the trend.

> The other possibility is you marrying someone who isn't born in India. If you did that, you can use your partner's country of birth instead of your own, when waiting for the priority date. But obviously this isn't something you can plan for, and I wouldn't recommend letting this guide your life decisions.

This is true. Your tradeoff point hits the nail on the head. I have heard some cases of people feeling like they were married to just for the GC, and some from the other side who stand some abuse. But your broad point stands.

> The last option is progressing your career to the point where you can mount a realistic eb1 application. I've heard anecdotally that it's very hard, but not as hard as people may think it is. If you work at it over a 10-20 year time frame, it may be very realistic.

Need to progress outside the US though. Unless I become a Carmack/Jeff Dean/famous inventor, the logic of the law seems to suggest that if I could rise to this position here, then an American could too. That's why the EB-1 has an allocation for applicants who became managers outside the US and transferred in.

I have upvoted you and I feel you make some great points. I wanted to iron out some details in case a third person was reading this.

[whack]

> The number was 500k when I started working 3 years ago. It's now 800k. It looks like how much ever I work, the number will increase faster than I can save

The number was 500k for almost 30 years, without any increases for inflation at all. No one can predict whether it will increase again in future, but going solely off of history, there's a very good chance it will stay at the current numbers for a while.

> Unless I become a Carmack/Jeff Dean/famous inventor

I have personally met people who have successfully gotten the EB-1 without being nearly as successful as the examples you gave. If you're as successful as the average FANG employee, and have ~5-10+ years of work experience, you might have a realistic shot. I would recommend talking to some people who have gone through this process first hand, before dismissing it.

[bobfrost]

I see where you're coming from, but any of those options aren't realistic, especially when I compare them to Canada's system.

As I noted in my comment, I can stay here for a while hoping for some way of getting a green card. It's those 10-20 years that I don't want to endure, with which again I need extreme luck (I would consider me saving up $1MM within 10 years or becoming a EB-1 level 'multi-national manager' not a guarantee).

If I did go the Canada route, I can do these things there (making $1MM or becoming an C-suite executive) - however unlikely those goals are, while not risking having my life uprooted. Canada doesn't pay as high as US, but then again I don't have to worry about going back to India (where jobs don't pay as well as either US or Canada) and finding a job there without notice.

[diebeforei485]

EB-5 isn't too realistic either, considering the wait time between applying and actually receiving a green card is ~10 years.

[whack]

Can you clarify? The EB5 priority date for India is Sept-2018, so why would it take 10 years?

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

[diebeforei485]

The visa bulletin is useful for past applicants, but is not generally helpful for current or recent applicants. The question current applicants should ask is: if I apply today, when will I get my green card?

Last year, the State Department (which runs the bulletin and has all the numbers) said[1] 8.4 years for India EB-5 until visa number availability. It then takes around a year to actually get the physical green card. So, 10 years is a good estimate for someone applying today.

1. The last slide of https://iiusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/IIUSA-2019-EB5-...

[toephu2]

On the flip side, if a U.S. citizen moves to India and wants to become a naturalized Indian citizen, just curious how long would that take?

[0x8BADF00D]

If you’re of Indian origin (i.e. parent or grandparent is from India) it’s relatively quick to get an OCI card, which will allow you to remain indefinitely in India as well as work there. You don’t get the right to vote under that status.

Full blown citizenship is another matter, you’d have to give up your US citizenship, which still has its benefits. I can say with a great amount of certainty the US government cares a lot more for its citizens than other governments of the world, whose governments are usually outright hostile to their own citizenry/populace.

[tathougies]

> Guess how much time it takes to get a greed card? Atleast 100 years. I'm not joking. Unless there's a policy change, there's no possibility.

So my entire family migrated from India (not H1B though, so no idea what that process is like), and some are still migrating, and this is just ridiculous. Green cards and citizenship are issued quite regularly. I'm not going to say its fast, but it's not literally 100 years (can't tell if you were being sarcastic or not). My uncle got his a few years back, and got his citizenship this year. The system works, as long as there're no discrepancies.

[sg47]

That's the current prediction because of the backlog. Family-based migration is different. On a H1B visa, if you get a priority date today, it'll take you a very long time to get your green card. Every year, the backlog moves by 1-2 months. i.e. in the last 6 months, I think the backlog went from processing applications from April 2009 to June 2009. Some months it doesn't move at all. I don't think you know how this system works. Of course, people exploit family-based migration which is more permissive and bring their extended family here but the situation is completely different for people on work-based visas.

[thansharp]

My friend, there's a huge difference between family based green cards (FB categories) and employment based (EB). The wait times change from 1-10 years in the former [1] to 100 in the latter [2]. A normal indian cannot go through family, since they're not closely related to a citizen. I have close relatives who gave birth here (they're working on a H1-B). The mom and dad would make it quicker by waiting for the US citizen kid to become 18 and apply, than they applying. Heck, they can wait for the kid to turn 18, go to Iceland/Sri Lanka, give birth to the grandkid, and that grandkid can apply for the citizenship and that would be faster. :(

[1] - friends and my roommate here in the bay [2] - my application

[thbr99]

That's what's called chain migration. Just because your "uncle got a greencard" doesn't mean skilled immigrants get a greencard unlike your unskilled uncle. This is the kind of immigration that Trump wants to stop. You should not comment on things that you have no idea about.