H-1B visa to green card: Wait time for Indian workers is up to 151 years: report | Hacker News Reader

H-1B visa to green card: Wait time for Indian workers is up to 151 years: report

mercurynews.com

30 pointstestrun22 comments

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I think we should hire the best and brightest from anywhere in the world, regardless of race, color, religion, sexual preference, etc.

On the other hand, my current employer has a large number of H1Bs and junior OPT recipients. These guys are happy enough to be in the country and are honestly hired in the name of hiring the best and brightest to keep wages low and keep an environment where people don't speak up.

These guys would rather live in the US than go back to India. They'll put up with a ton of shit that a person born in America wouldn't want to deal with.

I've only worked at a few companies in my career in both tech and non tech companies. It was the same everywhere.

Tech companies with shitty conditions for devs use this to pay less than the industry and keep these guys on call 24/7.

Non tech companies hire them through third party contracting companies who basically eat the majority of their hourly rate.

It's a messed up situation IMO.

It won't be a messed up situation if the politicians said what you just pointed. The employers are taking away jobs of americans, not the immigrants.

It will be a totally different debate altogether.

If that were true, wouldn’t software engineers have trouble finding work? Also, see the effect of immigration enforcement on agriculture in some states... the premise that “you could find an American to fill any job if it wasn’t for visas” is flawed.

To fix a problem, you need to frame the problem correctly. And at least in the political sphere, money or talent is not even up for discussion. Even after the effects you mention.

This projection is based on bad methodology that ignores mortality (and abandonment); the article obliquely references this by mentioning that people waiting will either give up or due before reaching the 151 year delay, but the fact that they will (and thus remove themselves from the queue) is why the delay will never get anywhere close to that long. Any model for the growth of the waiting period has to consider how people increase in likelihood to fall off the list by abandonment or death as the wait time increases, since that will affect the actual increase, and be an increasingly significant factor as the wait time increases.

What does it take to be qualified in EB1 extraordinary ability visa?

Literally, win a Nobel prize, or you have to "tick" several boxes for "extraordinary ability." I don't think a good professor in an American university will even qualify. It's pretty legit.

Note that that "extraordinary ability" green card is not employer-sponsored. You don't have to have anyone sponsoring you to get it - that means you can be unemployed and Uncle Sam will be happy to pick you up as a permanent resident.

Hmmm. There's an article here by someone who claims to have got an EB-1 by being a leading SEO blogger: https://www.google.ie/amp/s/thenextweb.com/contributors/2017...

I remember a few months ago reading on some criteria for EB-1, which if met, was considered to be a good thing by USCIS.

One of them was having higher remuneration than your peers from the same field, a lot higher. Gave me an impression of being 10X more or something.

I remember a few months ago reading on some criteria for EB-1, which if met, was considered to be a good thing by USCIS.

One of them was having higher remuneration than your peers from the same field, a lot higher. Gave me an impression of being 10X more or something.

My Co-founder got his EB1 while in PostDoc. Not a Nobel laureate but he has 50 peer-reviewed publications. Went on to become a Faculty Research Professor in Physics Department. He has PhD and MBA when applied for EB1. He actually has helped other great researchers get their EB1 as well, part of it has to do with the petition and how genuine and how strong of a case you make for making an impact on USA. Also, things like being an Editor or reviewer for academic journals, establishing a track record for guiding MS students on way to PhD, strong publication record, etc.

How can I do this while I am working in an IT company? Peer reviewing and similar work? I work in Enterprise Software (BMC Software)

Please guide.

Unless you're in a researchy department, working and publishing papers, this is very very hard.

My father got EB1->citizenship.

It went pretty fast ( a couple of years until citizenship)

EB-1 Requirements: a couple of patents, and a whole bunch of endorsements from notable companies(Apple,Dell and some others) that his company was a vendor to.

Then again I knew a bunch of chessplayers on EB-1 too in 1990s, IMs/GMs.

May I ask in which field had your father been awarded his patents in? Electronics? Software?

Consumer / Professional Electronics

He is definitely qualified as within his niche his company was among the leaders(before it was sold to VCs but that is another story).

The main thing were not the patents (although those helped) but the endorsements from higher management in PUBLICLY known companies.

This is what the lawyer stressed: immigration officials are people too and name dropping works as silly as it sounds.

I got an EB1 after switching from an H1B to an O1 since academic H1Bs are not transferable. I am good at what I do but am nothing like a Nobel prize winner. It requires fulfilling the requirements in a way the makes sense for a software engineer. For me that was working on projects at organizations of high repute; reviewing others work in open source projects; being a member of various open source organizations based on the merit of my contributions; the job I was switching paying well (more than 2-3x the prevailing wage, which most large tech companies pay); speaking at conferences; having letters of recommendation from people in my field.

That's great to hear!!

Did you finish your MS from US? Asking coz your said academic H1B.

May I ask for your LinkedIn profile? Asking so that I may get a fair gist of how things work to go towards EB-1.

Thanks for detailed reply :)

I don’t have a higher degree. I moved here to work on a high profile academic project as a software engineer. It was their policy not to sponsor permanent visas (lost an amazing colleague over this) so to stay here required finding a company willing to sponsor a complex visa. My linkedin is the same as my user name.

To add: this was just pre-Trump so don’t know if my experience is still typical.

It seems I need to thank you for reasons more than one today.

As far as Trump is concerned, I am not aware if he has started cracking down on extraordinary ability folks too.

Thanks again :P)

This seems interestingly lopsided. It says EB2 wait is 151 years, while EB3 is 17 years. It used to be the other way round.

So it seems in recent years a lot of folks got the Masters degree to get on to EB2 that the folks with just bachelors now have an advantage.

As the root source mentions, the analysis explicitly ignores the fact that anyone qualified for EB2 can also qualify for EB3 and if the wait times in practice were anything like what is suggested, EB2 qualified individuals would file EB3. (Which means the numbers are pretty much meaningless, even before accounting for the giant methodological errors that aren't explicitly noted the way that one is.)

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