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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

The entire situation is a shitshow. I know multiple families who immigrated to the US on H-1B for tech jobs 20 years ago but are still waiting for residency. Green cards are legally available but USCIS just won't process their applications, citing lack of resources. Now as their kids – who were as young as one year old when they came here – turn 21 they are being deported to their "home country", that they have zero connection with.

There is no DACA/DREAM equivalent for these people even though they did everything 100% legally and have greatly contributed to the US economy. There are estimated to be >960,000 people currently stuck in this limbo, mostly Asian and mostly in tech (https://www.fwd.us/news/per-country-cap-reform-priority-bill...).

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This is a terrible situation. As the kid of an H1-B I can’t imagine being in that predicament.

At the same time, this is what happens when the basis of your immigration system is “legislation by hostage taking.” Ever wonder why the H1B says “temporary” status on paper, and you have to pretend like you plan to go back home at some point? (“Dual intent?”) That’s because it’s because it was never designed to be a permanent immigration system. No permanent immigration system designed for that purpose would let you build your life in the country first and then decide only a decade later whether you’ll be allowed to stay. It’s absurd.

Since the 1960s the executive branch has been doing with fragile regulation or executive action things that it can’t achieve consensus to do through Congress. The 1990s reforms that created the H1B did nothing more than paper over the most egregious shortcomings of using a temporary worker visa as the main vehicle for permanent immigration. DACA is a prime example of what happens when your political system is so broken that you have to use executive action because you can’t get concensus in Congress. And it shows how fragile that can be.

Folks considering immigrating to America should understand: H1B is not meant for permanent immigration. Proceed at your own risk. Maybe try the more sensible immigration regimes in Australia or Canada.

> Ever wonder why the H1B says “temporary” status on paper, and you have to pretend like you plan to go back home at some point? (“Dual intent?”)

As I understand it the "dual intent" means you don't have to pretend you plan to go back home at some point. After I switched to an O-1 from an H-1B for a new job I was advised not to leave the country while my green card application was in progress because applying for a green card could potentially be grounds for denying entry at the border on a visa like the O-1 without the dual intent.

Yes h1b dual intent means you dont have to prove ties to homeland and such as was explained to me by my company’s lawyer a while ago

No, dual intent means that you can have the non-immigrant intent required for the H1B while doing something that would cause the government to infer immigrant intent, like applying for a green card: https://www.dekirby.net/library/dual-intent-article.cfm

> The concept of dual intent is a legal fiction that allows an immigration officer to grant a nonimmigrant visa or admit a foreign national into the United States even though the visa may allow for the holder to seek permanent residency status. This means that a foreign national may enter the United States on a nonimmigrant visa that may allow him to seek a green card in the future or, alternatively, he has already filed a petition for a green card but is seeking to enter the United States on a nonimmigrant visa.

The distinction is critical. At all times when you hold an H1B, you’re saying “I intend to go back when my H1B expires,” because that’s required by the visa. All you have with “dual intent” is the government’s executive grace that they won’t consider it to be a signal of immigrant intent when you apply for a Green card.

Anecdotally, many emigrants (a dozen or so) that I know are now choosing to go to Canada. The US has lost a significant amount of its shine over the last few years for them, and their skilled labor is going elsewhere.

How are they dealing with the lower tech wages in Canada? I know salaries there have increased in recent years, but it’s still a huge salary drop

It is easier to deal when one considers alternative of returning to India. One can get a job in IT in some tech hub back home in India, However everything that people find commonly available in US/Canada for middle class or sometimes even lower than middle class is either not available or just reserved for 0.1 percent of ultra rich.

I have had distant relatives earning in tune of million dollars a year dying for a need of hospital bed. Plenty of people in India who are not Chinese level rich but still well-off and looking to move to Canada from India. They are not in hope of better earning but just better living standard with the money they earned in India.

Having said that there is thin slice of situations where one can be better off in India. One of which is having lot of domestic staff. So someone can have a full time worker at home who can cook, clean, and take care of kids for about same money that will get you a weekly maid service in USA in a month.

> and you have to pretend like you plan to go back home at some point? (“Dual intent?”)

This is backwards. Dual intent means that you do not have to "pretend"; having an immigrant-intent, expressed by things like applying for permanent residency (marrying a US citizen), does not invalidate an H1-B in the same way that it invalidates an O-1, TN, etc.

Yeah, it's really unconscientious to have a system where the stakes are so high behave so unpredictably. People make important decisions based on how things are supposed to work. Whatever the "correct" parameters for immigration are, the system really should behave predictably.

This is even more sad when contrasted with the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border.

We are rewarding criminal entry into the country and punishing lawful citizen candidates.

Welcome to the era of inverted incentives!

> This is even more sad when contrasted with the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border.

There's no illegal immigration crisis at the southern border. There are occasional refugee crises and most critically a mistreatment crisis (the latter exacerbated by the people that have, for political purposes, also invented the myth of an illegal immigration crisis), but actual illegal immigration has been low, not a crisis, for some time.

> We are rewarding criminal entry into the country

Uh, no, there are lots of things you can make colorable arguments about about no-visa entry on the southern border, but that it is being rewarded right now is not one of them.

This argument is dishonest or misguided. [1] Illegal immigration is real. There is a [2] crisis at the southern border.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration

[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/09/24/poli...

We live in strange times.

There used to be a time when kingdoms would raid each other for new subjects, now the opposite is in effect.

Why raid other kingdoms for their most productive subjects, when you can use your economic and cultural might to make them want to come and work for you?

Indeed, the West braindrains the entirety of Asia, and gets best talent at an unbeatable price.

Yet, some come forward, and still complain.

The wait times at the border service centers are lower than the west coast USCIS service centers for green cards, so I don’t think you can say that is the issue here. In addition, there’s a complex system with many centers over the US that deal with immigration and visas (and embassies in particular for the latter), which depend on what you are doing and where you are filing from.

There doesn’t seem to be any correlation there.

What bothers me about this sentiment is that many people will interpret it as a call to make illegal immigration harder rather than a call to make legal immigration easier.

> their "home country", that they have zero connection with.

This has never been my concern as an immigrant because we just assume we won't have any connection, in any country, from the moment we leave our home.

I think going back is more of a problem with a way of life we are not (no longer) familiar with, culturally and politically

"lack of resources" is utter BS.

My wife got her green card in less than a year after we got married. And she came to the USA on a fiance visa.

Where did she come from?

India. We applied for her green card during peak covid.

Isn't an H1B only renewable once for a total of 6 years? Maybe it has changed but I think it was like that when I had one ~12 years ago.

It can keep getting renewed indefinitely if a green card application has been filed and is in the backlog.

Got it - thanks for the clarification.

Here you could sue them to process the application; is this not viable in the US?

Generally no. The US has relatively tight rules on when and why you can sue them.

That's being tried [1]. Although, it's not going well [2].

[1] https://www.visalaw.com/onboarding-mass-litigation-clients/

[2] https://twitter.com/LilySAxelrod/status/1437846756394520582

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