[cletus]

This is an emotional subject. I've gone through this but come from a country that has a relatively easy path.

The source of the huge delay for Indian-born people is these four facts:

1. India has a population exceeding one billion;

2. Green cards have a diversity rule that no more than 7% of applicants can come from a single country;

3. Your category is based solely on country of birth not country of citizenship; and

4. H1B visas have no per-country caps or quotas (beyond the total annual quota).

The companies that are really ruining this for anyone are the bodyshops like Tata and Infosys who direclty benefit from the situation. As the article mentions, if you have a pending I140 petition you can stay beyond the 6 year limit and changing jobs is dangerous. So employes get to hold this over employees creating an indentured servant type situation for 10+ years. These bodyshops flood applications and create the lottery problem.

There are numerous problems with all of this and (I really do hate to say this but it's true) the only administration who even made noises about reforming the H1B system was the Trump administration like basing H1B on salary (these bodyshops pay low for software engineers). None of this came to pass.

Here's one big problem: children ageing out of the system. If an Indian national has a pending green card petition and their child is born outside the US and that child gets to age 18 before the petition is approved, they are no longer eligible to receive a green card as part of their family's petition. Given how long Indian delays are, this may mean deporting someone to a country they left when they were 6 months old and have no memory of. They may not even speak the language.

Prior to the pandemic a couple of bills floated around to fix this backlog, most notably S369 [1]. These all ultimately went nowhere and (IMHO) had a lot of problems. For example, this didn't really increase the annual caps (it did, kinda, by only counting the petitioner and not their family against the quota) and eliminated the per-country cap. But what this would've done is made things terrible for everyone else for a transition period of years.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31338329

[22SAS]

I am an H1B holder and an Indian national. The bodyshops alone did not screw this up. A TON of Indians come here for graduate school, the main motive being that it is an easier path to getting a job here in the US. A lot of them also end up on H1B's and have their companies sponsor them for residency permits. A lot of those students have zero passion in what they're studying but it's all ok for them for a chance to work here.

A family friend's kid just arrived here for his MS CS. He told me upfront that he plagiarized all through his undergrad and couldn't write basic programs. I was like "why on earth would you purse an MS in CS then?". I saw a lot of folks like that.

[0xcafecafe]

Attributing all the problems to those bodyshops is a bit disingenuous IMO. Yes they are part of the problem. Even Chinese nationals face 5+ years backlog for their green cards. Limiting immigration from populous countries based on arbitrary country caps for employment based immigration makes no sense. As it is it is a small piece of the overall immigration pie (14% and if we count only primary applicants, ~5%).

What is happening due to this is all advocacy to fix this has to be done by the folks in backlogs (Indians & Chinese) and the rest of the world folks can happily go about business as usual. Yes, H1 reform is needed but green card reform is needed yesterday.

[cletus]

All of the factors I listed apply to China. But even though both countries have similar populations, around two-thirds of H1B applicants are Indian nationals. Bodyshops are a big factor here. This flood of H1B applications is a big factor in everyone having to go through a lottery.

So if two-thirds of the H1B applicants are Indian nationals but the current system caps per-country green cards at 7% (per category), you see why Indian nationals have a much longer wait time than anyone else.

In saying that I'm not denying others (eg China, Mexico, the Phillipines) don't have long wait times too.

[huy-nguyen]

This is a great point that is rarely mentioned. China has larger population than India yet has a much shorter backlog so is it really the fault of the US immigration system that India has a long backlog? The Indian outsourcing industry and India’s lower level of economic development are parts of the problem.