Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

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It looks like this rule would provide the entrepreneur a 5 year stay (2+3 additional if the start-up is doing well), but I don't see any mention of granting a green card, so what would happen to that entrepreneur on year 6?

EDIT: from the medium link posted in another comment by yurisagalov:

> DHS will also publish guidance to clarify when entrepreneurs may self-petition for lawful permanent residence (also known as a “green card”).

EDIT2:

> That entrepreneur will have the confidence of knowing whether she is eligible for the temporary “parole status” pathway, allowing her to start growing her company here right away. Later, she will know under what circumstances she may qualify for the green card pathway, if she is successful in creating jobs for U.S. workers and attracting more capital from U.S. investors, allowing her to become an American over time. (Note that these pathways will likely also be open to "bootstrap" entrepreneurs who are successful in generating revenue from U.S. customers, without needing to rely on external financing.)

(From https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/11/26/entrepreneurs-wan... )

It appears, it has the same issue as H-1B visas. At least in my opinion.

If your business fails and you invested 5 years of your life, you are kicked out of the country and have to move your family and everything back to wherever you came from. This big uncertainty of the future is, in my opinion, a huge negative of both H1B and this parole.

> It appears, it has the same issue as H-1B visas. At least in my opinion.

For India/China natives on EB-2 or EB-3 categories, I agree.

For all the others, being able to self-petition for the green card as an entrepreneur means you won't need a company to sponsor you. (or your own start-up is sponsoring you?), and the full process could be done in less than 5 years. The downside here would be the legal costs and hassle associated with it that you would have to take care of.

Thanks to the unquestionable red tape and annoyingly (really annoying) slow and sloppy work-culture at the USCIS it is a privilege here to share with you that even the EB1 categories of both India & China are now s̶i̶g̶n̶i̶f̶i̶c̶a̶n̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶b̶a̶c̶k̶l̶o̶g̶g̶e̶d̶ frozen [1].

Yes, welcome to 2016.

A significant portion of talent that used to earlier fall in H1B->(Eb2/Eb3) category has now grown up in life and also gone up the corporate ladder to only come back and (re)apply as multinational managers/executive in the EB1C category.

No matter what the USCIS tries to do now it cannot make up for the pile of shit (at the cost of anxiety and torture of millions of legal immigrants) accumulated in the past fifteen/twenty years. The beast is simply too big.

[1] money.cnn.com/2016/08/19/technology/eb1-visa-india-china/

EB1 visas are now taken away by highly skilled and talented "managers" from TCS, Infosys, Cognizant etc. There's a special category of EB1 visas, EB1C which is on offer for managers. Skills that these companies face severe shortage in US include HR, Relationship Management, Finance/Accounting.

It will be interesting to see what happens to these people if Trump were to get elected, given his promise to investigate H1 visas.

Will he ask whistleblowers to step forward? Perhaps deport these "extraordinary individuals" and hand over their green cards to the actually deserving ones in the queue? Or is the number of affected people too small to matter?

Many people on message boards rarely seem to appreciate the actual pull of a person like Trump. Very few people actually want to support Trump, but the system badly needs a shake-up, even one that might well be too arbitrary and might negatively affect more people than it helps. The alternative feels like being the frog boiling in water.

While I am on the matter, I would also comment that the H1B visa lottery mess itself can be cleared quite quickly by someone who is not catering to lobbyists. Ask the ones who obtained their higher degree in the US if they genuinely think there are more people who are qualified to get the visa than the number of people who actually receive it - that is, does it make sense that there would be a lottery for the visa?

I know this opens an entirely new can of worms - why does getting a degree in the US give any more credibility? Here is a not very PC answer: being a student in the US actually gives you a chance to understand the culture and work ethic which makes the US what it is, which is almost 100% lacking in people who suddenly find themselves in the corporate environment of a completely different culture from their country, don't particularly care for assimilating, and often cause a lot of questions to be raised about whether the H1 visa is actually serving its designed purpose.

> why does getting a degree in the US give any more credibility?

It does not! And probably never will. A lot of people who I know went on to get a phd because of lack of options or because of frustration and failure in corporate life. The latter is statistically a sizeable number; consider unless the kid in your class went off immediately after school.

Whereas a multinational manager is usually directly contributing into the US economy for years with sweat and hard work, including engineering and research -- if needed, for their business to survive and grow. I'd rather say they gather and implement more according to the culture and edge it off with cultural gaps between the host country and their own. Of course now we're entering a class war. :-)

Not sure if your comment was just sarcasm.

With all due respect to the multinational manager who may be extremely good at what they do, everyone knows that there is still some pretty drastic exploitation of the process going on if they are actually coming in under the EB1 category. Here is an easy test: these individuals will very rarely openly discuss exactly why they qualified for an EB1 (if they even willingly talk about it) - and I am fairly certain the deserving ones in the category will feel no such compunctions. Here is another - you can usually find scores of people with exactly the same qualifications as these multinational managers if you actually bother to probe further.

Having said that, I do think the system is too far beyond reform at this point, and people would be much better off trying other countries to showcase their talents, including their own.

It is just temporary until fiscal year starts again, much better than EB2/EB3 who have to wait more than a decade.

For the backlog of this year - yes! But imho it is just the beginning of clogging pipeline and the symptoms will only worsen going forward.

Haha it's like it's written by Trump's USCIS: "We prefer immigrants whose businesses succeed."

I depends a bit on the details as to whether you are allowed to start on startup #2 if #1 fails without leaving.

If you have a path to a green card then 5 years is a pretty solid amount of time for most places (not india/china).

If they made it a separate quota for entrepreneurs then you could get most people a green card within that timeline.

Why is China and India the exception here? They keep getting mentioned as an exception in this discussion.

A single country of origin is not allowed to use up more than 7% of the total green card quota. Thus, very populous countries with lots of qualified potential immigrants, and strong incentives to immigrate (e.g. significant quality-of-life difference), are at a disadvantage.

China and India are heavily backlogged due to high demand

https://travel.state.gov/content/visas/en/law-and-policy/bul...

> If you have a path to a green card then 5 years is a pretty solid amount of time for most places (not india/china).

Agreed. However, since you can't self-petition in most cases, it is unclear if you have a path or not.

Where does it say bootstrappers can use this method?

I'd love it to be the case. My market is almost entirely based in the USA. I'm in Canada, but have no legal method to do any work in the US. So it's all remote now.

if you are actually doing well you can setup a US subsidiary and then do an L1-A transfer.

Oh, I added in another comment that I run a solo business. I don't think an L1-A would apply in that case, because I couldn't have a subsidiary without employees.

I could hire employees, but it would involve doing a whole new business model purely for the sake of a US visa.

This is an unexpectedly sane step from Washington. In five years here a capable entrepreneur will find a way to get a green card.

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