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Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you generally, but I think you might just be a missing a piece of the puzzle. For folks from countries that don't have a large backlog, you can get a green card in something like 3 or 4 years today.

But if you're from somewhere with a large backlog (e.g. India and China) you're looking at a decade+.

So the real issue here is the green card quota levels, not so much the h1b itself.

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This is good information, thank you. I had team members who had put down roots here and they would be terrified every time they had to renew. They were Indian so it was likely because of the queue you mentioned their green card application seemed to never end.

I'd still rather spare people that terror.

I am a conservative strongly against illegal immigration, but conversely I think we need to open up legal immigration a lot more, especially to those who've worked here and contributed to our economic success, like H-1B workers.

> For folks from countries that don't have a large backlog, you can get a green card in something like 3 or 4 years today.

If you've got a motivated employer you can get it done in 18 months.

- PERM takes 6-9 months to prepare.

- PERM takes 120 days to certify currently.

- I-140, I-485, I-765, I-131 and I-693 can be filed simultaneously for rest-of-world.

- I-140 with premium processing takes 1-15 days (3-12 months without).

- I-485 takes 8-14 months, but after 180 days you're AC21 portable.

I think you are missing the point that it's only a pain point for countries with a backlog, not ones without a backlog. 3-4 years in the grand scheme of things is not all that long for gaining PR of a different country.

Indeed this assumes your priority date is current, which it is for all EB2 excluding India and China, and many EB3s. [1]

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/visabulletininfo

On top of that, the pain is extra bad for people from India, where the queue wait is effectively infinite. While for Chinese people it's a relatively tractable 5 years last time I checked.

Why should it take more than a couple of days?

The longest part of the process is the labor market test to ensure there are no willing, able and qualified American workers. This includes advertising the position in a number of different locations and channels for a set number of days and interviewing any American workers that apply.

Right, what purpose does that serve?

Economies are demand driven. Participation is good. Banning foreign workers to protect a subset of American workers is bad.

Or just also quota H1B.

This assumes the green card quotas are actually solving a problem in the first place.

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