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Comment by belltaco | Hacker News Reader

According to the current queue times, many of these people will die of old age before being able to legally work and their spouse getting a green card.

This rule only applied after waiting six years in the green card queue. Is 90k folks in the entire US really that high when fields like Computer Security have 0% unemployment? This might end up encouraging offshoring.

Country based discrimination at it's finest.

Born in the wrong countries(China/India) = 70 years waiting for a green card and dying before your spouse can legally work.

Born in the right countries = Green card in 7 months and being able to work instantly.

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You know that the H1B program is actually _not allowed_ to discriminate based on country, and equal numbers of H1Bs are reserved for each country, right?

The fact that some countries have a decades long wait list and others do not is not because different countries are being treated differently. They're all of them being treated the same. The wait lists are a result of more people from some countries wanting H1Bs and fewer people from other countries.

Of course I agree that this state of affairs is not good. It is stupid to me that countries with 1M people get the same number of visas as countries with 1B people. But it's important to understand the proper causes of problems if you want to fix them

The key thing however is that the H1B is a non-immigrant, temporary worker visa. Expecting wine from water doesn't engender much sympathy. Using H1B as a pathway to a green card is not any different than expecting to convert an EU tourist visa into a work permit. The long waiting times for a green card are a symptom of expecting an immigrant outcome for a non-immigrant visa.

If people want to immigrate, then isn't the correct choice to obtain an immigrant visa?[1]

An H1B is a non immigrant visa[2]:

"Temporary worker visas are for persons who want to enter the United States for employment lasting a fixed period of time, and are not considered permanent or indefinite."

So I'm confused. How is it some kind of tragedy when the visa under which you are working doesn't provide a quick path to a green card? Isn't the visa doing exactly as advertised? Furthermore, providing the H1B spouse with a work permit -- doesn't that mean that the spouse can work in a non-shortage occupation without restriction? Doesn't that necessarily mean that the spouse is able to compete with Americans and permanent residents for jobs that are not hard-to-fill? Basically 1 work visa provides 2 jobs? That doesn't seem like the intent of the H1B program which is to provide temporary workers of high ability to fill specialized jobs for which there are verifiable shortages. It certainly isn't designed to be a recruiting tool for big tech: "Come work for us and your spouse can get a job too! The salary is lower than an equally qualified American, but since your spouse gets to work too, you'll have enough money to live in San Jose and maybe one day, you might even get a green card!" That seems to be the promise the H1B crowd is expecting.

I'm not opposed to immigration -- but H1B isn't about immigration; it's about filling otherwise unfilled jobs in specialty occupations for which there aren't enough qualified Americans. If the sole purpose is to fill shortages, then providing the spouse with a free-riding right to work in any occupation (not shortage areas) is not consistent with the purpose. If H1Bs can't afford to have a non-working spouse, then they ought not accept the jobs at the salaries offered. What's happening now is that the working spouse's job is actually a subsidy to compensate for an H1B wage that is lower than it should be. That lower H1B wage is then being used to displace American workers.[3]

[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat... [2] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/employme... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...

H1B is a dual intent visa.

>So I'm confused. How is it some kind of tragedy when the visa under which you are working doesn't provide a quick path to a green card? Isn't the visa doing exactly as advertised? Furthermore, providing the H1B spouse with a work permit -- doesn't that mean that the spouse can work in a non-shortage occupation without restriction? Doesn't that necessarily mean that the spouse is able to compete with Americans and permanent residents for jobs that are not hard-to-fill? Basically 1 work visa provides 2 jobs? That doesn't seem like the intent of the H1B program which is to provide temporary workers of high ability to fill specialized jobs for which there are verifiable shortages. It certainly isn't designed to be a recruiting tool for big tech: "Come work for us and your spouse can get a job too! The salary is lower than an equally qualified American, but since your spouse gets to work too, you'll have enough money to live in San Jose and maybe one day, you might even get a green card!" That seems to be the promise the H1B crowd is expecting.

The problem is that everything you wrote currently applies to only two or three countries. For H1B from all other countries, H1B is a pathway to green card in as low as 7 months upon which their spouse gets a green card and work authorization. How is that fair?

If H1B is all what you claim it is, why are these people getting green cards and work authorization?

  How is that fair?

In the case of those three countries, what is their immigration policy toward incoming work migrants? How many foreigners (especially Americans) has each onboarded in the past decade compared to the USA?

"Fair" goes both ways.

H1B is dual intent, meaning a H1B holder is allowed to have intent to immigrate. This is different from, say, a TN visa, where a holder expressing intent to immigrate at a border could be denied entry

right so H1B is temporary worker visa, then why is someone there in the country 'temporarily' supposed to pay social security tax ? he is there temporary, will go away in 6 years, is not eligible for any social security, spouse cannot work, pay income tax and also pay social security tax ?

For all practical purposes, H1B is the skilled immigration track in the USA, because you don't have anything better available to most. Other countries generally have more sensible policies.

> Country based discrimination at it's finest. > Born in the wrong countries(China/India) = 70 years waiting for a green card and dying before your spouse can legally work. > Born in the right countries = Green card in 7 months and being able to work instantly.

Born in some countries... have almost zero chance of getting any visa at all.

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