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Comment by raquo | Hacker News Reader

You can change companies, but your ~7 year wait for US permanent residence will reset. So you basically can't change companies if you intend to immigrate.

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Pretty sure you retain your priority date across job changes if you already have an approved I-140 from your old employer.

Hm indeed, that seems to be the case now. They must have updated the rules since the last time I looked.

In fact even just changing locations within the same company will reset the green card process.

getting promoted would also reset the process. (unless they've fixed that)

What 7 year wait? I got mine in 10 months.

You must not be from China or India then.

Or Mexico or the Philippines or Vietnam or Pakistan or a host of other countries on 6+ year immigrant queues.

Only India have China have significant employment based immigrant queues. Some of the other countries you mentioned are severely backlogged in the family based categories.

Hmmm... the only countries that have a major backlog in employment-based green cards are China and India.

Philippines has a backlog for family-based green cards.

Unless they have an advanced degree (I believe a PhD, or at the very least a Masters), foreign workers, even highly paid silicon valley software engineers fall under the EB-3 category, which has a further backlog than that. I have friends with Filipino passports working at Google/MS/etc for 4+ years and still waiting on movement on their green card applications.

I stand corrected! Wow! I used to check the State Department's visa bulletin all the time when I was waiting for my green card. Back then China and India were the only countries with backlogs.

Looking at the current bulletin.[1] It now looks like China, India, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and the Philippines all have some backlog for EB-3.

Yikes! However, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras only have a ~4 month backlog.

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

Just to clarify the item of confusion.

EB2 green card visa wait times: only China and India (for now)

EB3 green card wait times: Mexico, Phillipines and other countries

I think most folks may not realized that there are a variety of green card paths, even within the employment category, and the requirements for EB1, EB2 and EB3 are completely different.

10 months from H1B not L1A?

However an H1 is a non-immigrant visa. So if the intent is to immigrate, that's the wrong visa and thus permanent residency eligibility ought to be irrelevant. H1s being used as back door immigrant visas is a misuse of the program and violates the intent.

H1 is a dual-intent visa. Meaning that it's deliberately set up so that you can file for a green card on it, and not get kicked out of the country immediately (as is the case for e.g. tourist visas).

So, no, it doesn't violate its intent. And, pragmatically speaking, it's the only viable track to green card and, ultimately, citizenship for the majority of skilled immigrants into the USA.

Yes, it is still a silly setup, and most other countries have an explicit skilled immigration track that covers the same niche. Most of US immigration law and regulations is so ad-hoc and randomly slapped together (due to widely differing polices and a lot of knee jerking), that it is like that in general, though.

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