Explain to me how someone can become a permanent resident or a US citizen who is current a citizen & resident of Canada, India or the Philippines.
H1-B visas are the most straightforward way for someone with an education to get a job and permanent residency in the US. O and L visas are not universally applicable. Family sponsorship isn't always possible. Not everyone wants to marry an American.
It's not like the UK, Canada or Australia which have point-based immigration systems. The US has very few ways for a competent, educated immigrant to enter the country.
Try immigrating to the EU as an American; not quite so easy there either. If you are a refugee from Africa you have an easier time getting permanent residence in France than a moderately skilled workers would. My Mexican (now American) wife went through the US immigration process (she had a green card already when I met her, so I didn't 'help') You CAN immigrate to the U.S., there is a process. Funny since we're talking about India a lot on this thread, have you ever been through their immigration process? For even tourists you can only visit the country once during a six month period. Mexico's immigration system is rather difficult as well. The U.S. isn't alone in the difficulty of their immigration process. Getting residency in China is very difficult. I don't see why America gets special status with the animosity people feel towards immigration. Places like Canada are exceptions -- immigration is generally a long bureaucrat process in any country.
> I don't see why America gets special status with the animosity people feel towards immigration.
Because it sucks and treats people badly.
My wife, and mother of my dual-citizen children is Italian: I get to stay in Italy, end of story.
To have her go to the US (where I'm from) is, by comparison, a huge, expensive bunch of work even if we've been married for nearly 10 years and have children together.
If your bureaucracy manages to be worse, and slower than Italy's - which it is, in the US - you're doing something wrong.
Sorry but there is no comparaison, Europe has 25 countries with different immigration laws from which you can pretty much choose from depending on what options you are open to.
Take Germany specifically, they have a "Blue Card" (which I believe is available in other EU countries as well) which you can get automatically if you have a degree and a job offer. It converts automatically to residency and eventually citizenship over times depending on the country.
That is a very, very far cry from what H1-B are, and even TN visas.
For H1-B you need a sponsor waiting for you, you need to wait up to ~11 months to know if you are lucky to get through the quota and be allowed to work, an H1-B application is typically 100 pages thick and cost $3 to $8k of lawyer fees and $2k of gov fees (your application gets sent back to you if quotas are reached).
TN/H1-B don't convert to green cards by themselves, your employer need to be willing to go through a lengthly, costly process that takes 2 or more years to get you a green card (that is once you have gone trough all the trouble of getting a H1-B), which many employers will be unwilling to do if you have time left on your 6 years H1-B limit, and you have to stay with the same employer during all that time.
The US does take about 1.2 million immigrants into the country every year.
We mainly do this on family reunification, with a few other limited paths. I do agree that it is a terrible system. I'd love to see a points system like Australia.
That said, I don't think the evidence supports the notion of a shortage of programmers, so I don't think the goal of an immigration system should be to provide silicon valley with more programmers than they are currently getting at market rate.
The problem with the point system is that someone can qualify to immigrate but not be able to find a job. That happened in Canada a while back. A ton of foreign trained doctors were working manual labor jobs because they couldn't work as a doctor.
This could be considered a failure of the medical training system rather than a failure of the immigration system. Canada has lots of need for doctors, there's a lack of residency spots to qualify as a Canadian-approved doctor.
If US citizens who go to med school are heavily protected by licensing laws from competition, whereas US citizens who go to grad school in engineering experience the opposite, you should expect more US Citizens to go into medicine, and more international students hoping to gain entry to the US to train as engineers.
This, rather than deficiencies in the US educational system or problems with making programming "cool", goes a long way toward explaining why US citizens tend to avoid certain fields. It would also explain why the "shortage" of US citizens going into certain fields is actually a highly rational response to a market distortion created by government policy.
It's not like the UK, Canada or Australia which have point-based immigration systems. The US has very few ways for a competent, educated immigrant to enter the country.
The US and Canada both have immigration caps for different resident visas. And they are very similar between the two countries.
A more appropriate way to describe the current situation is that demand for entry into the US is far below available supply.
I don't necessary disagree with you on this: if there is a will, there is a way. Regardless of how the immigration law is, even if you make it "No immigration at all", someone will find a way to get in.
But that's far and far away from "standard and normalized", which implies something is accessible to standard and more average people. The top .5 or 1% (as in aptitude and willpower) will always find ways to get things done, but do you want to get the next 9% too?
The Nobel winner, the Elon Musk won't ever have to care much about those laws, but the discussion has never been about them either.
I'm not so sure about this. I'm a British citizen who's been living in the US for most of the past 7 years (as a student or doing academic jobs), but I can't see any easy way for me to get a job in the tech industry in the US. Perhaps a big company might be willing to sponsor me for an H1B. Apart from that there is just no realistic option that I'm aware of. What other visa could I realistically apply for?
I'm working for a startup that's willing to sponsor me for H1B, EB-1 and even O1 (I'm employee #1, so if we're doing any good, we might try to wiggle an O1 somehow, although that's unlikely).
But yes, you'd need a cooperative employer to get a visa of any sort. Most of the big company in tech (ie Google, FB etc..) are all willing to sponsor for H1B, and a lot of startups are too. But as for the questions of "how to get a job there", that's out of my ability to answer.
One thing about immigration law is that just like tax law, it's too convoluted and specific that it almost depend on your exact situation. You might just qualify for some visas just because of the area you're working on (there is something for academic for H1b that's exempt from the cap). You will need to take a very close look at the law, preferably with an experience lawyer that have done this before, and see if anything that can apply to you by the wording of the law (see the O1? It's not just Nobel winner that can get it).
The whole process will takes something like 10-15 years though ... so don't be discouraged. I've been in the US for 4-5 years, and just like you, I can say that I've no idea if I will still be here in 3 years. And I wouldn't expect for things to "settle down" (immigration-wise) for me for another 10 years-ish either.
A university-educated electrical engineer doesn't want to be an illegal immigrant and the employers that need his skills won't hire illegal immigrants either.
So this is only really true for people willing to work illegally, like migrant farm workers. Presumably the US wants a wider mix of immigrants beyond that.
Explain to me how someone can become a permanent resident or a US citizen who is current a citizen & resident of Canada, India or the Philippines.
H1-B visas are the most straightforward way for someone with an education to get a job and permanent residency in the US. O and L visas are not universally applicable. Family sponsorship isn't always possible. Not everyone wants to marry an American.
It's not like the UK, Canada or Australia which have point-based immigration systems. The US has very few ways for a competent, educated immigrant to enter the country.