This is really bad. Families are going to get told to leave. I’m surprised that there is no discussion on this thread about the impact to people who haven’t done anything wrong.
It's not a moral issue (except for the big H-1B mills that are gaming the system.)
But nothing has changed: these are not an offer of citizenship. They are temporary work visas with no guarantees: an opportunity to do temporary specialty work in the U.S.
If someone were to bring their family, they have done so with the explicit knowledge that the situation could change at any time.
I support the free movement of people, but also the sovereignty of individual nations to decide who that country belongs to. For a strange example, the UK belongs to the queen, but she's nice enough to let her subjects have the use of it.
And back to naturalization, these H1b changes highlight why naturalization is important and should be achievable for anywho who ties their life to the USA. Citizenship confers privleges and protections and asking people to make life altering investments into a country without offering citizenship in return is exploitative and immoral.
No one said that it was, but there is a difference between submitting for an extension X months ago and fully expecting to get it, and then the rules changing out from under you and being told "No. I understand you've been here for 10 years, but pack up all your shit and leave".
5 years ago it was technically "and leave tonight" (which I'm sure you understand is unreasonable). Luckily now there is at least a 60 day grace period to look for something else, but still.
You are being rather unsympathetic to people who find themselves in this situation.
Considering the backlog for green cards if you're from india/china, there are _tons_ of people in this situation.
It happened to me, I lost my h1b a few weeks after filling for my GC and I had no problem staying in the country. It was a GC via marriage though, rules ma be different for employer sponsored GCs
Edited to correct the form number
Rules are indeed different for Employment based green cards. Marriage based green cards don't have a limit while the number of employment based Green cards that can be given out in a year is fixed ( in total and within that there is a 7% cap on how much each individual country can receive)
People stuck this way from India & China aren't even able to file for GC's. You can only file for a GC if your country's date is "current" (which is not the case for marriage based GC)
Their only legal basis to stay in the US is the H1-B which they can keep on renewing because they have an approved I-140. In my current situation, i have an approved immigrant petition and i will have to continue to get H1-Bs approved till i get current (which current projections are about 40-50 years). I've been in the US for a decade and it will be many many decades before i can remove the dependence on the H1.
The math is simple - there are about 400K Indians with approved immigrant petitions. And across 2 categories the maximum number of green cards that Indians can receive in a year is about ~6K. Each petition is roughly 2 green cards
So if an Indian gets an immigrant visa approved today in 2020 , they're looking at wait of 800/6 (133) years even be able to file for a green card.
Part of the problem here seems to be at least to some extent everyone(us Indians) flooding these queue's while native population keeping these quotas fixed(to control they don't change their society too much).
One also needs to realize there will always be limits to these things. Now given every one wants to come to US, they can't accommodate everyone. There will be limits. Limits to number of H1B's, limit to yearly GCs. What should the limit be? 6K, 60K, 600K? How much?
Imagine India doing this. We recently passed laws to restrict immigration. For some reasons we expect to shut doors to everyone, while simultaneously expecting the whole world roll out red carpets for us.
BY DESIGN, as H1Bs (as well as L1s and a couple others) are dual intent
I don't disagree - and I'm a US citizen, who previously was a greencard holder, who previously came here via the H1B process.
But look at it this way: the whole greencard approval process sometimes takes years, or even over a decade. When people spend 10 years in some place, the perspective changes a bit. It does become a complicated issue, with moral overtones too.
Make the goddamn greencard approval (or rejection) faster. If processing the papers took a few months, instead of years, after which you got your yea or nay decision, then the whole issue would be much simpler - and, indeed, as you say it would not be a moral issue at all.
But think of someone who spent here 10 years, brought their spouse here, had a couple kids (that clock doesn't stop ticking just because you're waiting for a rubber stamp to hit the paper), the kids go to school, and from a cultural perspective the kids are American - and then they are all told to get the hell out of here. That's terrible.
Speed up that stupid process. Then sure, tweak the rules any way you see fit.
If they were giving 50 year H1B visa that are not guaranteed to be renewed, would you still say that it is the visa holder's fault for bringing their family?
If not for 50 years, then when should we start blaming them? How many years is a reasonable amount to put someone at fault for putting down roots?
This means the US economy will lose all the taxes and local expenditure in the economy by the family like rent, food, travel, vacations, utilities, entertainment, cars, home sales, etc. etc. And if that works out, the next hire may just be directly hired in India or Canada itself.
If I were in the Canada govt, I'd immediately create a way around the travel ban for workers who's visas didn't get renewed to be able to move to Canada after following a strict quarantine protocol. If the worker was able to work remotely in the US using Zoom, why can't they do the same job remotely in the same time zone in Canada using the same remote working tools?
There is already a small industry in Canada where a company takes a few % of the billing rate in order to sponsor and hold a Canadian visa for people who lost their H1B visas due to increased and inconsistent rejections over the past few years, but whose employer is willing to allow them to work from Canada. This moves a lot of money to Canada.
Also, some tech companies have been outright moving jobs to Canada because they can hire from a global workforce and Canada has been welcoming them. This is going to intensify.
E.g of companies handing Canadian compliance and billing their US clients. https://syndesus.com/why-u-s-companies-need-a-peo-to-recruit...
The amusing part is that both sides now look like hypocrites. The outcomes for individuals and their families is obviously tragic either way.
A non-retroactive raise of the wage scale isn't bad per se - it cuts down a lot of the incentive to flood the system, and prioritizes employees who will add the most value.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that this surprise kick-out is a feature, not a bug.
Existing H-1B holders should clearly be grandfathered in, but those aren't the only people who have done nothing wrong. What about the would-be future H-1B holders who would have benefited from working while making less than the new requirements? In other words, the vast majority of people who are going to be affected by these new rules.
Does the Indian government care about americans? How about the Chinese?
Americans are constantly being fired and replaced with cheaper h1bs.
Americans lost jobs to Europeans after the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe and kickstarted the European economy.
Americans lost jobs when Japan industrialized and dominated the semiconductor industry.
Despite Americans losing jobs, the United States Government continued to support other nations on their path to development. Despite losing all those jobs, America continued to prosper, is still the wealthiest nation by far, and most advanced and militarily powerful.
Americans are not constantly being fired and replaced by cheaper h1bs. Some are. There is little evidence to support that h1bs have contributed to any kind of large scale wage depression in the technology sector. In fact, wages continue to grow, and most companies are still hiring lots of software engineers.
If you don’t have your facts straight, I don’t know what to tell you. You can look at localized instances of job losses caused by companies abusing the system. I can point to localized instances of immigrants on h1bs starting new companies and hiring many Americans. This gets us nowhere.
There is no evidence that H1b abuse is causing anywhere near the amount of wage suppression that would cause massive shift in wages across the US tech industry.
There is a thing called career progression. Many people are underpaid earlier in their career but if they are any good it gets better at some point or they at least still get a low paying job. In software if you are a citizen you have great mobility to job hop and get a huge pay bump until limited by your ability.
IMO the software industry is one of the least innovative industries in the world, constantly reinventing the wheel with its copycat programming languages and database software.
USA is also part of a larger community of countries, treating their citizens with less dignity is not a smart policy.
The question now is do we continue that flow of labour while jobs are scarce, or stem that flow while we get back on our feet again? On this, the Trump administration appears to have made a tough, but rational choice.
That’s a straw man. Those people do not exist. Look at the data.
There’s currently 18 million unemployed Americans. The majority of pandemic related job losses are low wage retail, hospitality and restaurant workers.
There’s a total of 500k H1b visa holders in the US, the vast majority of which are in IT.
There is very little (if any) overlap between those groups.
You aren’t suddenly going to make more money by kicking out all the immigrants. That’s not how the economy works. Those H1b holders are also consumers who spend a majority of their salaries on taxes and products/services in the US. Kicking out 500k people would further hurt unemployment in sectors hit most by the pandemic.
Somewhere in the last 20 years, they began rubber stamping renewals for anybody who'd paid a few thousand dollars to get into the Green Card line, which is absurd because the Green Card line for Indians is at about 100 years due to their population.
You didn't do anything wrong except assume the corruption would go on forever and Americans wouldn't eventually notice they were being replaced by foreign workers, and vote accordingly.
To do this a company must (1) hire you; (2) decide to sponsor you for a long, expensive process; (3) interview broadly and prove it couldn't not find an American to fill the role. Not to speak of a number of hoops an applicant has to go through.
Few thousand to get into green card line? Have you ever tried doing this? There is an elaborate over a year long process to get into this line. and even then its a broken broken system that stipulates that queues are country based, which mean a Lithuanian who enters the queue today will get a green card before an equally qualified chinese or indian person who has been in the queue for 10 years!