[guyzero]

Ha, funny guy. The US immigration system is shit.

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.

[briandear]

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.

[davidw]

> 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.

[tarikjn]

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.

[guyzero]

Chinese, Indian and French kids don't grow up watching this on their TVs every single Saturday morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZQl6XBo64M

[geebee]

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.

[refurb]

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.

[guyzero]

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.

[geebee]

Yes, that's certainly a factor.

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.

[refurb]

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.