Why am I leaving the American Dream? | Hacker News Reader

Why am I leaving the American Dream?

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20 pointsvirtuabhi7 comments

It's really sad how hard it is for an Indian-born migrant. The 10 year wait he cites is the wait time if one had applied 10 years ago. Current backlogs are much much worse:

https://www.cato.org/blog/no-one-knows-how-long-legal-immigr...

We're talking of a 25-300 year wait for EB2 applicants born in India. This includes those engineers at the Googles and Facebooks with a master's degree!

This is entirely because of the 7℅ cap on green cards for applicants from any one country of birth. If literally India splits into two, highly skilled immigrants from India would get green cards twice as fast. If instead of being born in India, one we're born in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, it would be no wait times.

Another point of note is that the h1b has no country cap. What this effectively does is allows some body shops to hire Indian born employees at little above h1b min wage (~$60k), sponsor a green card for them, and keep them as indentured labour for a long long time.

For most immigrants from elsewhere, the challenge is getting sponsored a visa and then green card sponsorship. For someone from India (and increasingly China) that is just the beginning of decades long uncertainty!

Skilled immigration in the US is broken beyond despair.

Walking the same path. I thought studying here, getting a "skilled labor visa", and working for a core tech company would put me in a swift path to the American dream. Slowly realizing that the elusive dream may not even be something worth the hazzle. It was certainly fun living in the USA during early years of learning and first job, but there are better places in the world to settle down and offer my skills to than here.

Have had the same experience, but instead of US, I decided to stay at UK. Most of my friends chose to migrate to Australia instead.

Lately I have been wondering if I took the right decision to stay back.

And with Trump in the Oval Office, just think how many more great people are going to end up leaving America.

trump stated that he's going to crack down on illegals and fix the legal immigration nightmare. If you read the article someone who comes here illegally seems to get preference over those who come legally. The system is currently screwed up and has been for a while.

There's been a huge imbalance from where we've been getting immigrants from. Prior to what 1960s we got a good chunk of them from europe, and immigrants were admitted because of skill. After that it was all about numbers from Mexico and a lot of 3rd world locales. And any immigration work IS a zero sum game, so the highly educated western cultured people and their intelligent offspring who were destined to go on to do great things in industry were not admitted nearly as often.

The point of immigration is for future prosperity. And just because a quote on the Statue of Liberty makes it seem like the United States is supposed to be some kind of shelter for anyone the world regardless of background, doesn't mean that's the case.

It's funny how he got stuck at American dream at the end.

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