My journey through the American immigration system as a computer engineer
software.rajivprab.com
software.rajivprab.com
These are the dichotomies I(and many immigrants) have had to live with. Time is a great healer of things and over time and with financial cushions the dichotomy might fade, I am still not sure it completely goes away. One can only think of the present and make the best of it.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/01/the-mak... [2] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Karma_of_Brown_Folk...
This is not to be understated.
I was born a US citizen. Last time I entered the country, officers faked that a dog had alerted "on my anus", forcibly strip searched me, and fabricated a story that plastic baggies that they suspected 'could be drugs' were coming out of my ass.
I was shackled and cuffed and dragged around the state of Arizona for 16 hours while publicly paraded in Hospitals, including the waiting rooms. Officers attempted repeatedly, across two different cities one hour apart, to get medical staff to perform unwarranted and consentless x-rays and/or probing of my body, which I repeatedly refused. Doctors, despite having zero medical evidence I had did anything wrong, wrote on their paperwork I was 'suspicious' because I denied the allegations.
After 16 hours of this harassments I was release, uncharged, with no apologies.
On yet another occasion, I was told by border officials they would not let me in my own country, despite providing full proof of citizenship (immaculate condition passport, plus identifying myself fully). After 4 hours of probing questions including going practically line by line on what's on the IRS 1040, most of which I didn't answer, I was released.
Now imagine this same happening, legally entering the country at the proper port of entry with full authorization -- except as not a citizen or looking like a boring middle-class corn-fed white guy like me. These sick fucks would treat you even worse. A woman (actually a citizen) who went through a few years before me brutally had her orifices probed in a 'search' for 'contraband.'[0]
[0] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6451513/cervantes-v-uni...
If you look at your comment, apart from the 4th amendment issues, it's kind of like a "have you stopped beating your spouse?" kind of question.
Honestly, I'm not so sure about that, given the commenter. IIRC, in a couple of previous threads they've taken pretty strong positions that they'll do what they want regardless if the law says it's illegal and they're risking jail. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some suspicious or belligerent behavior on their part that they left out of the story.
>they'll do what they want regardless if the law says it's illegal and they're risking jail
So go ahead and quote that, assuming it was said, and go on and explain where it creates articulable probable cause for an x-ray.
I honestly can't believe I'm even responding to this victim-blaming garbage. Try reading Ms. Cervantes complaint, who's circumstances were incredibly similar to mine but she was treated even worse, and think again about your opinion here.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.985...
The situation is this: I don't know what happened, but I also don't trust your account of what happened.
>> they'll do what they want regardless if the law says it's illegal and they're risking jail
> So go ahead and quote that, assuming it was said,
Here you are advocating that convicted felons should manufacture guns that would be illegal for them to possess: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29985376
Here you are claiming that you would continue to trade cryptocurrency from a prison ass-phone, in a hypothetical world were it was illegal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29922956
> and go on and explain where it creates articulable probable cause for an x-ray.
Why? I never claimed that at all.
2) I stand by my belief that felons ought to be able to protect themselves with firearms of any type.
3) My belief that felons have 2nd amendment rights is not probable cause of having drugs.
4) There's no nexus by which officers inventing an alert or falsifying evidence is justified by my exercising of my first amendment right regarding belief in second amendment right of felons.
>Here you are claiming that you would continue to trade cryptocurrency from prison, in a hypothetical world were it was illegal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29922956
Again not probable cause of possessing drugs.
Your whole argument is a red herring. None of this is probable cause for possessing drugs.
>Why? I never claimed that at all.
So how is this even relevent? None of this first amendment protected activity and opinions provide any legitimacy to falsely accusing someone of having drugs up their ass.
That thread was not discussing "replica black powder rifles." It was discussing stuff like the FGC-9 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9), under the assumption that guns like that were illegal for felons to possess.
> Your whole argument is a red herring. None of this is probable cause for possessing drugs.
I never said nor thought it was "probable cause for possessing drugs." It's evidence of an attitude, and attitude affects the probability of certain behaviors that you may not have reported in your account.
2) Felons can in fact legally own and manufacture modern firearms after having their rights reinstated.
3) Felons can in fact own firearms legally by leaving the jurisdiction of the united states.
4) None of this first amendment protected opinions provide any justification at all for CBP officers faking a dog alert or manufacturing evidence during a strip search.
>It's evidence of an attitude, and attitude affects the probability of certain behaviors that you may have not reported in your account.
Ergo illegal detention and causeless strip searches (which even at border require PC) are justified? I take it Ms. Cervantes was also an HN poster? Did you even stop to think about whether you would like to live in a world where some low level podunk border patrol officers can fabricate evidence merely on the extremely unlikely chance they happen to read my HN and decide to target me because of my absolute stance on 2A and 1A?
No. I'll repeat the situation: I don't trust your account of what happened. That is all.
It doesn't, and it's pretty clear you're grossly misunderstanding me.
There are a few other paragraphs in the affidavit that are entirely uninteresting to read and offer no evidence whatsoever. I can tell you '10' and '11' here are the entirety of their argument 110%. Maybe I'll get around to redacting the other paragraphs but they offer nothing. If you want to know the 'other side' -- there it is.
I also have a pile of medical paperwork with doctors documenting there was zero evidence whatsoever other than being 'defensive' of being accused of this crime and being 'anxious' to be dragged up and down 60 miles from city to city in cuffs.
I remember after 9/11 getting detained on a flight out of the country than for no other reason than my family was the wrong kind of brown. I remember how unfair it felt watching my mom and my sister cry under the stress of what we all knew was security theater. I remember seeing my dad pull out some diplomatic reserves from somewhere I didn't know in order to de-escalate the situation and get us on to our flight.
We were lucky that day. Many people were not. These situations shouldn't have to be about luck. They should be about fairness, safety, practicality, and most of all respect.
I flew to Sweden, and then on an entirely different ticket paid for via Swedish company from Sweden to Iraq.
This isn't advice or saying to do that. But when I did it, the computer in the US didn't know to flag my flight -- I looked like a normal person just going to Sweden. It's all horse shit of course, going somewhere the government doesn't approve of isn't evidence of a crime.
> That's your opinion.
You are quite correct: that is my opinion.
> I invite you to read this excerpt [0] affidavit and decide for yourself whether that reads like anything other than made up garbage designed to fabricate probable cause.
Honestly: it could be made up or it could be true. There's nothing there to tell either way.
One thing I don't doubt is that you weren't, in fact, smuggling drugs.
Are you employed?
The situation in this thread.
Am I supposed to believe everything I read on the internet, or always believe I'm getting the whole story?
> Are you employed?
Of course.
Every single 'search' along the way was used to fabricate evidence against me. Remember these people are professional psychopathic liers so every inch you give them, they just use it to justify something even worse.
1) The dog -- never alerted -- they lied and said it alerted on my anus (WTF!?!). Used to justify a scan of my body with some x-ray looking machine at the border.
2) The "machine" (IDK what it was, but looked like a body scanner type thing) -- there was nothing, but then someone claims they "Saw something" which turned out to almost assuredly to have been my belt buckle.
3) The machine was used to justify strip searching me.
4) Fabricated evidence from the strip search was used to justify dragging me to hospitals for an x-ray.
Now what was to be expected next? It just doesn't end. I did nothing wrong.
It's understandable (and not necessarily wrong) to vent here, and I'm not going to ask whether you have done this already, because it's not useful to draw out an answer, but: if you can, find the relevant anti-corruption agency and report the events to them.
There's a chance that doing so might increase the likelihood of harassment again in future -- I have no idea how these things show up on border entry systems -- so it's your choice, but the key idea is to get a paper trail in place that will show up if (and hopefully when) investigations are later taking place.
I haven't worked in law enforcement, but I imagine that the same way that good policework involves collecting statements and records of events to put together a case, internal (or independent) investigations into misconduct require similar records. The ability for individuals to get away with bad conduct is, I'd guess, based on people believing that it's not worthwhile to file reports against them. They do get caught when they are.
>There's a chance that doing so might increase the likelihood of harassment again in future
I'm probably already at max likelihood already. I am detained 4+ hours everytime I enter the country. In 2015 I fought alongside the Kurdish militia YPG in northern Syria against ISIS, and ever since the CBP has targeted me. There is a flag on my passport that basically says 'harass him' as best as I can tell.
>if you can, find the relevant anti-corruption agency and report the events to them.
Still in the process of filing the complaints against the relevant medical professionals who violated patient consent. I am currently working in order of operations from where I expect justice to be most likely (complicit medical workers) to where I expect justice to be impossible (CBP officers).
Sounds like you've got a good, considered approach, so keep up the work to improve the environment and keep in mind other ways you can develop (and enjoy) your time is probably the best platitude I can offer (and one you probably already understand).
Criminal 'justice' in US is in dire need of overhaul, and an actual plan on how to get our imprisonment rate down to other first world nations.
Persons such as Mr. Eckert who went through the x-ray, found that after that there were even worse things to come such as a colonoscopy [0]. Thes entities just want to dig deeper and deeper, and there will basically be no stopping until they even knock you out and insert a camera into your colon. The only winning move is not to play.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2014/01/16/justice/new-mexico-search-set...
I can't imagine the horror of having the Feds have so much power over my life as an immigrant does. Or the fact that you can loose it all in a heartbeat (as happened to my friends in the bay areas in the 90s when they lost their jobs and their VISA sponsors).
I'm completely with Louis CK on this one. We should all fly strapped down completely, upright, I guess with slightly bigger windows as a compromise, realizing the fact of flight and being like "I am flying through the air at nearly the speed of sound, crossing continents and oceans in a mere matter of hours". Just respect it a fuck of a lot more, if flying were easy we'd have flown much sooner. In fact rockets are much older and easier to make than flying machines, rockets got started a little after gunpowder, about the time of the Mongol invasion, and flying machines date to the turn of the century. People think rockets are harder because the space race came after the big improvement in plane speed, nah. Well they're studied together, aero-astrophysics. Basically not going splat.
So 9/11 was about going splat. That's literally what it was, Muhammad Ata and his conspiracy of Al-Qaeda Sunni Muslims decided, let's all go splat with a big plane, at the same building, at the same time. And they did! Because the whole difficulty of flying is not going splat, going splat on purpose is easy (although they were artistic about it, did a lot of difficult maneuvers). Suicide and aviation, interwoven.
So back to TSA, I don't know they actually respond well when you ask them about anything, or thank them for keeping the planes from falling out of the sky. It's not a transportation or border thing, it's an aviation thing.
And one time, when I was repatriating to the states, an agent asked me like what company did you work for, I never heard of that company. As though it mattered, resumes are irrelevant to citizenship once you have it. So yeah there are moments that are rougher. I think I've had good luck.
I would swap "suicide" for "risk". And while I do concede that traveling on an airplane is inherently risky (and argueably one of our most remarkable achievements as a species), I think it's dangerous to deny that TSA - or any other security enforcement body for that matter - is not susceptible to power abuse by their representatives; we have years of evidence to prove it, especially nowadays with social media. Too much blank-cheque power is given them, with little accountability (again, on account of the risk). (Incidentally, airport security is a nice topic to play with error rates conceptually, e.g. precision, recall, etc.)
> It's really goddamn dangerous to fly, you're relying on so many parts to work right
Indeed, the latest systemic failure coming directly from the making and selling of planes. An activity where once safety was held as a sacrosant goal, it's now been placed second to profits and corporate interests (see Boeing).
And they practically never flew together. Then, at most one of them would die at a time, and the other could live to continue defying death. They were the first great aviators to fly and not die. They crashed sometimes and it was brutal, identical to falling out of a building. There were endless deaths in early aviation, all the time, all the time. In the early 30's the Army was charged with paper mail by airplane, and the weather was terrible, and everyone equated aviation with suicide. Young soldiers dying most days of the week. I think even Roosevelt said it was suicidal, that what these pilots were tasked with meant leading them to slaughter.
Like heroism, which I carry out all the time, also intrinsically suicidal, for instance all the times I've fought alone, outnumbered. Everyone says that's suicidal. So it turns out it's not actually that dangerous, any more than aviation, you just need to act perfectly, meaning no mistakes.
TBH I think I would click the smiliest smiley in any foreign country
I've seen those machines at Ikea in the US, though they did seem more common in China.
However, it's almost unbelievably superficial to rate "authoritarianess" by the anecdotal cheeriness of front like officials.
Or is it just fashionable on hn to drop a “ha, anecdotal!” comment?
I've seen the same differences in the attitudes of Chinese and American immigration authorities. And if my memories of childhood visits to the USSR are correct, the same differences existed between Soviet and American authorities. I believe the main reason is that America is fundamentally suspicious of anything foreign. Authorities are more likely to see threats than benefits in international dealings.
*deletes your comment, welds you into your home, and blocks searches for anything containing your username*
I assume that you are not a white middleaged guy and suddenly the hate is immense. Even with an US Passport ... how in the world ... I mean, WTF.
I m sorry that that happened to you, nobody should go through this.
I was flying back from Peru through LAX and held by security for about two hours with no explanation. Eventually, a pair of officers came and after a bit of questioning, dumped the entirety of my 65L bag onto the floor. I had a few pill bottles—all labeled—just Advil, Ibuprofen, some other OTC thing for altitude sickness. They emptied them all out onto the table in front of me.
They took a few tablets of Advil with them for testing. About 20 minutes later, they returned and told me I was free to go (with everything still on the floor, the pills all over the table, no apology, etc).
The icing on the cake—as I re-entered the LAX domestic terminal, my hiking poles that I had just flown with were confiscated.
The ICE director has repeatedly made statements under the Trump presidency that they believe the organization is above federal law (like the army) and only beholden to the president's orders
For me it was clear that I would never be accepted as a citizen regardless of how many years I live there or what passport I hold. People would continue to mock my religious beliefs and culture pretending all the time that it is a joke.
I'm not a minority in the US, have worked in other countries, and I'm still at the same whim of a country's immigration system as you are.
In fact, a white colleague I work with will be returning home from Asia because the government has decided "we don't need so many foreigners" and has declined to renew their work permit. This is someone making a top 5% salary, with a special skill set that the company needs, that can't be filled with locals. The government could care less that she has kids in school, that they just signed a lease on a place or that their spouse still has a job they want to keep.
It has zero to do with being am minority, it's just the consequence of not being a citizen. If you decided to move to another country as a temporary worker, that's the risk you take - that the rules change, often unfairly so.
You might think driving an EV or making a lot of means you should get some special pass, but I'd argue that's not a reasonable assumption at all.
The same dichotomy I talk about might be created in other countries as well but what is different weird is that in the US they intentionally chose[1] to make this community to show to the world, in part, how they liberal and progressive America can be (which has its own contradictions). The intention was and is very clear and the policy really screws with the mind.
To me(and maybe others) being in the reference is very relevant because we, I, in many ways live a privileged, sheltered life and I wanted to highlight how odd that is for my mind to comprehend that that privilege is at the whims of people and circumstances barely in my control and in ways that if I were in my country of citizenship such privilege would be be interpreted by me as laissez faire.
The other thing is that being a part of choosing the reference is that I have done nothing special to get here. I am lucky. And then there are other people that some apparatchik did not choose who were exactly as good as me but are living in tough circumstances back in my home country. This makes the dichotomy of living here even more crazy for me
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_minority#Selective_immig...
That's not the processing time, that's literally just the appointment you need to make as part of the application. There is additional processing time added to that if it is successful.
You can plug some cities in here[1] to see how long it would take.
[0] If you've visited several countries in the MENA region since 2011, have ever held one of their passports or are not flying on a passport from one of the 40 countries listed here: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/tourism-...
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-inf...
USA, you're just another country. Next time I'll take my tourist money elsewhere.
Now that the world is diversified, globalized and everything is connected with the internet, I don't understand why people have to cling so much to the American idea of success. Are people living outside really that unsuccessful? I don't see any problem with what USA is doing. It's their country, let them do their thing. As long as US is open to trade and exchange, everyone is winning! They made so many great things and everyone can reap benefit out of it.
I hypothesize that it's the generational problem that got passed to other people because of globalized world. Everyone has equal access of information. Just 20 years ago, when people had less information, they were probably more content with the local things. But the result of globalization is people tend to be blinded. They starting ignoring opportunities. I realized that even few people from rich country think that it's only in the US where they can be successful.
I feel it's like how people moved from farms to cities then to another countries. Now the time has changed and the new city is US. I think every place has their own flaws and gains, but life will just keep on going. I believe we should learn to be more gratuitous and be thankful for what we have.
On the sidenote, congrats to author getting the card!
I.e. digging a hole and filling it in again is hard work, but doesn't get you anywhere.
Compare with China, a non-ESTA country that makes the US a lot of money. The wait time for a visa appointment in Beijing is two days.
It's stopped us having conferences in the US because non-EU nationals working in Europe can't get US tourist visas in time.
Correction: most citizens of ESTA countries qualify. For example, approximately three million Canadian residents are not citizens of Canada (they have work permit, study permit, or permanent residence permit instead). Wait times for a visa appointment from Canada are about 1 to 1.5 years now.
Fun fact: permanent residents of the US can visit Canada without needing a visa, but this is not reciprocated. Permanent residents of Canada need a visa to visit the US, unless their country of citizenship is one of the ESTA countries.
* Because I'd been through this process before, that is.
I went back home twice in that 18 years because I was always afraid that I might not be allowed back in the US when I renew my visa (F-1 student visa or H1B work visa) at the local embassy in my home country.
If I could turn back in time, I'd have gone to Canada to not have to deal with this. Or I should have married a US citizen to make my path to green card easier, or even applied for asylum using my country's political situation as a cover (I didn't do either because I thought these are dishonest *for my situation*; there are a lot of people from my country who do either of these things). Legal immigration (including work visa and green card) is very difficult in the US.
I guess you can say that it really took me 6 years to get a green card via employer sponsorship (although those 6 years were anxiety-filled to say the least). However, if the startup (my first employer out of college) sponsored me work visa and then green card, I would not have gone for the PhD either. I hope it makes sense.
Whether that is HR, Purchasing or whoever, I sure would like to know the real dynamic at work, because their ineptitude serving the visa holding engineers has a measurable productivity impact on these engineers when some screw up of theirs consumes the engineers’ lives.
I should also note that the guidelines for filling out CPT and OPT are also completely nebulous. I forget what the specific issue was, but I remember the administrator at my university being unsure of how to answer some question, them having no recourse, and me having nobody to ask.
I'm on my 4th year of H1B and I need to figure out how to apply for a GC. The time investment in putting together all the documents is significant. Not to mention exiting the country to go see loved ones is always a pain.
When I was getting my green card, USCIS actually lost the one they had already printed. A very kafkaesque situation for which there didn't appear to be a clear process to resolve. I knew I didn't have to leave the country over it like you, but I had no idea if I'd be able to start in my new job, which came with a very significant, almost life changing, pay raise. The USCIS officer I went to see about the situation basically told me "not my problem", and nothing else.
It all turned out ok in the end, but the week or two I didn't know what would happen were the most stressful days of my entire life.
It was stupid and aggravating. You could see on their faces that they thought if they told me just one more time that I'd come to my senses and do it the "approved" way. They never did accept that I had no choice in the matter but eventually accepted my application and I got my passport a while later.
My name is also misspelt on my social security card. I didn't bother to have that corrected and so far there have been zero repercussions.
Before approving the application, the Amex agent did a 3-way conference call with me and an agent from my bank to confirm the details in my application.
Amex: "Can you confirm the customer's name is André?"
Bank: "Yes, I confirm the customer's name is Andrew."
Amex: "Thank you for confirming, André your application has been approved"
My memory is a little hazy, but I remember having the photo taken at USCIS, walking over to a photo booth which asked to confirm some information like name or number and maybe a fingerprint too? Anyway, it wasn't a polaroid paperclipped to my forms: it seemed like a different system that would have to be linked to my application.
The images are very different: same gender, but different race, and off by about 30 years and 1 head of hair!
In 2021 (I believe they are changing this now…I don’t know when it will be implemented) USCIS only accepted payment via paper checks.
The wastage works like this - 1. Every country is allocated an equal number of visas per year .
2. However a lot of smaller countries do not come close to utilizing their full visa allocation
3. The remaining visas can be allocated to the backlogged countries (mostly India and China)
4. The law also allows for the utilization of unused family based visas to be given to employment categories if there are backlogs.
5. However the Us government gets a fixed amount of time to make that allocation . If they do not do that allocation in the correct time period then those visas are wasted.
Just as an example last year, USCIS wasted around 50K visas and this year they are on track to almost waste 85K visas.
Looking at these numbers, it looks like a manufactured crisis to keep employment based immigrants in a constant state of flux so as to limit job hopping and limit their pay negotiation options.
Occam's razor suggests that, given how fucked up DHS, and USCIS in particular is, private sector pay negotiations is well below their noise floor.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/less-than-half-of-us-chil...
>The Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103, enacted March 26, 1790) was a law of the United States Congress that set the first uniform rules for the granting of United States citizenship by naturalization. The law limited naturalization to "free White person(s) ... of good character", thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free black people and later Asians, although free black people were allowed citizenship at the state level in a number of states. [1]
Race based citizenship remained the law until United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) [2] where the Supreme Court interpreted the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause of the 14th Amendment to meant that anyone physically born in the country was automatically granted citizenship. Race-neutral naturalization wasn't enacted until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 [3] and racial discrimination and national original based immigration (not permanent residency as should be obvious) controls weren't banned until the Hart–Celler Act in 1965 [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...
I’m sure there’s some distinction I’m missing.
Why does it matter if a particular race is the majority or minority of citizens? What concerns do you have about it?
FTFY
Many people don't need a reason to resent immigrants, they just use anything they can use as an excuse.
You are not at fault, if you are a good parent, or if you maintain your house well.
So if the child breaks the law, or damages something, if the house has a weakness not known but someone gets injured, you are responsible.
But the due dilligence, such as disciplining, teaching, and trying to instill good values in a child, or inspecting and maintaining your house, are key.
With a democracy, participating, voting, being an activist on vital matters, working to keep your democracy responsible and behaving correctly is that same due diligence.
We're always responsible, but are we at fault? Did we do our best?
Or did we decide that taking care of the child was too much bother, and disappear from their lives?
Did we try, at least?
And twitter posts, facebook this and that don't count here.
Because, would that be how you raise a child? Deriding them on twitter? Yelling at other parents because it was their fault?
There is a difference between the personal things you can influence and being the 1/13000000th voice of the people.
It's a little ironic at the very least that it's so hard to get into the United States, given its history.
ask yourself: why would the US allow these people to come and work here in the first place?
it’s because they NEED them. from highly skilled tech workers to “unskilled” low wage workers. Immigration and pumping human capital into our economy is the way the US stays/stayed? dominant and a superpower.
Close the pipeline and in 10-20-30 years innovation is gone ,the edge we have us gone. The American dream fuels the growth. Act shitty toward the fuel, scratch your head why things fall apart.
Really shocking how an immigrant describing his decades long naturalization process has triggered so many white men!
How much time must pass after a land is conquered before nations are morally justified in enforcing sovereignty over borders? Particularly when the border belongs to a welfare state with finite resources and a host of internal issues that require fixing.
The idea is to not look at a gift horse in the mouth. And stop punishing the most productive people in your economy. You don't want brexit thinking if you want to have an economy.
That's debatable.
>It is a tremendous gift, not a punishment- unless you are alluding to some wierd racial monoculture thing.
Immigration is not free. There are social costs which are being dismissed with shallow accusations of bigotry as an alternative to engagement (as you are implicitly doing with your monoculture reference). All peoples are entitled to preserve their cultures, that a particular nation happens to have a predominantly white population does not erase this entitlement.
Cultures clash. Immigrants vote and potentially originate from countries with incompatible cultures, many of whom have no interest in assimilating, yet their votes influence the laws that natives are obligated to follow. If democracy is meant to represent the will of the people, then it is unfair to dilute representation with immigration from nations with totally different value systems. Case in point is the ubiquitous middle eastern treatment of women; how much influence do you want such beliefs to have over your laws and cultural norms? Not even getting to the statistically proven increase in sexual assaults that native women have to suffer on behalf of immigrants in certain European countries. Consider it the paradox of tolerance.
No, its not.
> votes influence the laws that natives are obligated to follow
Natives? You might want to think again before using that word. Trust me, none of the new immigrants have any violent intentions or intent to steal from earlier immigrants or native Americans.
> Not even getting to the statistically proven increase in sexual assaults that native women have to suffer on behalf of immigrants in certain European countries.
I thought we were discussing US immigration. Columbus was an accomplished rapist too. Or do rapes by white men not count?
> Case in point is the ubiquitous middle eastern treatment of women; how much influence do you want such beliefs to have over your laws and cultural norms?
The post is by an Indian Hindu. Keep in mind that not all brown people are the same. Especially considering the kind of racist violence some white men inflicted on the Jews in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps, it is unsafe to let white people dominate a culture. The risk of holocaust and genocide is ever present. It's great if some non white culture is introduced in the society to keep the keep the genocidal tendencies of "white" culture in check.
> shallow accusations of bigotry as an alternative to engagement
You can do your part by not making the bigotry so easy to spot. A highly productive brown immigrant describing his 2 decade long naturalization process really really ticked you off, innit?
>Keep in mind that not all brown people are the same. Especially considering the kind of racist violence some white men inflicted on the Jews in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps, it is unsafe to let white people dominate a culture. The risk of holocaust and genocide is ever present. It's great if some non white culture is introduced in the society to keep the keep the genocidal tendencies of "white" culture in check
Your post is predictably combative so I don't know if you're being ironic here or if you are acknowledging these increasingly common and overt intentions, but in any case you are generalizing all of Europe and today's culture based on the actions of Germany 80 years ago. This is textbook racism. I'd remind you that some 50MM+ white european allies died opposing the nazis.
>You can do your part by not making the bigotry so easy to spot.
This poor substitute for an argument demonstrates my point.
>I thought we were discussing US immigration. Columbus was an accomplished rapist too. Or do rapes by white men not count?
Again, textbook racism. Generalizing all of modern day Europe based on the actions of a small minority from a selection of countries. In any case this is another deflection and says nothing about the modern day increase in documented rapes and assaults. An academic who tried to report on it was placed under investigation [0], so it seems that institutions really do share your fervor in denying inconvenient truths. Almost like people are using equality as a trojan horse for petty revenge.
I've lived in places where you have a zero chance of getting permanent residency, let alone citizenship. Even if you marry a citizen.
A friend of mine lives in a similar country. On paper there is a route to permanent residency, but no one gets it unless they're well connected to a senior government official. Lots of people living there for 30+ years who have to renew their status every few years.
In parts of Switzerland, your neighbors will vote on whether to grant you citizenship.
Of course - it is fair to criticize the US immigration process - particularly in regards to Chinese and Indians. It's also perfectly fair to be grateful that their is a path.
I've lived in places where you have a zero chance of getting permanent residency, let alone citizenship. Even if you marry a citizen.
> Another country that is very difficult to receive citizenship is Qatar. There are lengthy continuous residence requirements and not all children or spouses receive citizenship automatically.
> Children born in Qatar to Qatari parents are automatically entitled to citizenship. Any person born with a Qatari father may apply to be a citizen, if they meet eligibility criteria. However, the same is not true for individuals with a Qatari mother.
> People who qualify for permanent residence through naturalisation are those who have lived in Qatar for at least 20 years consecutively (if born outside Qatar) or ten years (if born there).
> Applicants must be fluent in Arabic, hold good character, and be able to support themselves financially during their stay.
> Although there are very generous government benefits available for citizens, the government only grants a maximum of 100 permanent residencies per year.
So if you're male, marry a Qatari woman, your kids won't even be citizens. While there technically is a process to get permanent residency, you can see how limited it is - a max of 100 per year, and I bet the majority of those have government connections. Similar story with nearby countries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZQl6XBo64M
That said, as a green card holder, sure, I'm grateful that the US has this process. But I think Americans need to also acknowledge that they've generated trillions of dollars of wealth from immigrants and they could make the paperwork a little bit simpler.
Also, you are talking about your wife's family?!!! You mean her great great grandparents or even earlier ancestors?
I am very intrigued by this inheritance based credit system that you are proposing that goes beyond wealth inheritance?
Do you still get points if your ancestors participated in the revolt but were highly incompetent? How many points do you lose if some of the ancestors fought on the British side? Do you gain or lose points for capturing native American territory and massacring them? Do you also get to keep the points earned by the slaves the ancestors owned or do they go to the descendants of the slaves? Do you gain/lose points for dropping napalm in Vietnam or searching for WMDs in Iraq?
I find this line of argument intriguing. I have soooooo many questions!
It's not about "assigning points" but rather distinguishing "of a place" from "foreign to a place." I think I win on points--my family was wealthy landowners in Bangladesh, and her's settled the west coast of the US. My family had indoor plumbing way earlier than her's did.
But that doesn't mean I'm "of the U.S." just because I'm a citizen in the same way she is "of the U.S." The U.S. as it exists today reflects the culture that her ancestors handed down to her much more than it reflects the one mine handed down to me.
> I find this line of argument intriguing. I have soooooo many questions!
I have come to the conclusion that most Americans don't understand that culture exists in the same way most can't tell the difference between the national deficit and the national debt. They know the words, but don't actually grasp the concept.
People do not get to choose where and when to be born.
Yes, for citizenship, as opposed to Permanent Residency - the author of the article must wait another 5 years at the very least to be eligible for citizenship if he desires it.
Immigrant describes his immigration situation.
Your response
1. How dare you complain
2. I am going to pretend you called Americans racist. (Wattabout Indians being racist)
You or your parents being immigrants is no excuse for your crude behavior.
As a Gore/Kerry supporter I agree. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s been a broad repudiation of George W. Bush’s vision for an evangelical role for America in spreading democracy among his own party.
I think Americans have many great virtues. But they’re not aliens, and America isn’t a science experiment. I don’t begrudge any American who wants a country of their own, just like Indians and Bangladeshis do.
Setting aside the fact that your reply had no relevance to OPs argument, I have other questions.
Do you consider your presence in this country impugning on an Americans desire to have a country of their own? Just like Bangladeshis do? Perhaps there is a more appropriate country on this planet that you should call as a country of your own. Why are you treating America as some kind of science experiment?
This clayton bigsby schtick is only funny the first time around.
Of course! My presence changes the country, because I can’t help but bring my foreign values and beliefs with me. People who were already here; and maybe like things the way they were, are entitled to not like those changes.
People back in Bangladesh would certainly complain if my wife’s family headed over there and brought with them all their individualism, social liberalism, notions of gun rights, antipathy to social hierarchy, etc! Different societies around the world are different, and in particular the differences between immigrants and native born go much more than skin deep, because even the ones born here are typically raised and socialized by parents who come from a different culture.
Under international law, distinct peoples are entitled to say “I want a country for people who look like me and have my culture and speak my language.” My home country of Bangladesh exists because of that principle, as do many other countries. Why should I begrudge those Americans who feel the same way?
> Perhaps there is a more appropriate country on this planet that you should call as a country of your own.
As an ethnic Bangladeshi my kids and I have a right of return. I can obtain Bangladeshi citizenship any time I want.
> Why are you treating America as some kind of science experiment?
I try not to! My family was invited here by Americans on certain terms, and nobody has ever really complained. But I think they have every right to complain if they wanted.
> This clayton bigsby schtick is only funny the first time around.
I point out that I hold Americans to the same standard as people from my own country, and you respond by accusing me of self hatred? I hope you realize how incredibly racist that is.
Neither do I, but between "open borders let everybody in" and the Kafkaesque legal immigration process highlighted in the article above, pretty sure we can come up with something in a happy medium that is more useful and less stressful to everybody involved.
Anyone who is a citizen is already an American. Or do you mean only white Americans are "real" Americans?
Who said anything about white people? I’m talking about distinct cultural communities with roots in the country, who live in places which are deeply reflective of the culture of those people. Some of those people are white (like my wife’s family who settled the Oregon coast), some are Hispanic (Mexican Americans in Texas), many are Black, many are American Indians. Conversely, many white people lack deep roots in the country, and no part of the country really reflects their cultural heritage.
One of the most fundamental aspects of democracy is drawing the boundaries of the body politic. My parent’s generation went to war to create a country where the body politic would be mainly Bangla-speaking people, instead of sharing a body politic with Urdu-speaking Pakistanis. Why would I begrudge a descendant of Germans in the Midwest or a Tejano in Texas for having the same impulse?
When you mention Germans below are you talking about the Chinese origin Germans?
>One of the most fundamental aspects of democracy is drawing the boundaries of the body politic.
You're conflating legal immigration and demographic shifts to open-borders. Those are not the same.
>My parent’s generation went to war to create a country where the body politic would be mainly Bangla-speaking people, instead of sharing a body politic with Urdu-speaking Pakistanis. Why would I begrudge a descendant of Germans in the Midwest or a Tejano in Texas for having the same impulse?
I don't know what impulse you're referring to. Please expand on that.
I gave several examples of people who could point to a part of the country and say that their ancestors built those communities and those places reflect the unique culture that’s been handed down to them from their ancestors. Some of those examples were “white” and others were not: Mexicans in the southwest or Black people all over the south.
I lived in Atlanta for many years, a city that’s distinctly shaped by the culture of southern Blacks, and which continues to attract Black people for that reason: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/opinion/georgia-black-pol....
What Charles Blow talks about in the article above is an especially poignant example of a universal impulse: the desire to live among and be governed by people from one’s own cultural community. Nobody suffers more for not having a “country of their own” than Black and indigenous people in America, but the underlying impulse to want that is universal.
> You're conflating legal immigration and demographic shifts to open-borders. Those are not the same.
I’m not talking about “open borders.” I’m talking about having to share political power over your own community with people from a different cultural background. With the example of Bangladesh and Pakistan, there was no immigration involved. My parent’s generation fought a war against Pakistan because we didn’t want to be in the same body politic as Pakistanis.
> I don't know what impulse you're referring to. Please expand on that.
The impulse for people from distinct cultural groups to govern themselves. Bengalis didn’t want Pakistanis to have control over the laws that applied to them. They wanted their own country that they could run the way they wanted.
Notions of governance are deeply intertwined with culture, and having people from distinct cultures try to govern each other leads to tremendous animosity. One concrete example: my family comes from a part of the world that’s had government and civilization for thousands of years. We’re farmers going back to before anyone can remember. My wife’s family, by contrast, settled the frontier of the United States, living off the land, and not being able to count on established governments to help them (because there were not any).
This leads to extremely divergent world views between my dad and my wife. My dad said the other day that he doesn’t see why anyone needs a gun because “nobody hunts for food.” This is true to him—nobody has hunted for food in Bangladesh as long as anyone can remember. Meanwhile my wife grew up hearing people refer to “store bought meat” because it was the exception until her parent’s generation. She grew up eating meat that her grandfather had hunted. It’s a completely different acquired understanding of not only the role and purpose of guns, but more generally the relationship between and among people, the land, and authority.
I look at those interactions and think: if someone from rural Oregon is mad at people like my dad coming to America from Bangladesh, who thinks “nobody hunts for food,” and voting to take away his guns, why isn’t that justified? Why can’t he be mad that people who aren’t acculturated into the cultural underpinnings of his community have so much power in deciding how that community should now be governed? Why would I begrudge him that sentiment when my uncle fought in a war over the same exact impulse?
Americans of German, English, Irish, Italian, Swedish origin are not all seeking to maximize the number of individual ancestral cultures being represented in the government. Inside Europe, the Italian culture is completely different to German culture. Being American is not the same as being Italian or being German. Which is why I asked if you were lumping everyone seemingly white as having the same culture.
>if someone from rural Oregon is mad at people like my dad coming to America from Bangladesh, who thinks “nobody hunts for food,” and voting to take away his guns, why isn’t that justified? Why can’t he be mad that people who aren’t acculturated into the cultural underpinnings of his community have so much power in deciding how that community should now be governed? Why would I begrudge him that sentiment when my uncle fought in a war over the same exact impulse?
If people can't convince others and get consensus on their ideas, then those ideas should die out. Tough shit. We managed to clear out the idiots objecting to giving civil rights to minorities and voting rights to women. A country is not static, the laws are not static and should never be. The laws are something we made up to serve our needs. It's a democracy, and all citizens get to vote and make decisions. What you're describing sounds anti-democracy.
Edit: The guns issue is a hot-button but you can draw parallels to anything that one group of people want to "preserve". Well if you want to preserve it - go make the effort of convincing people who aren't convinced. I can appreciate guns from an engineering perspective, but I think owning guns and killing defenseless animals from a distance is not something I would personally do. But I am not "taking it away" from anyone I am simply exercising my right as a citizen.
>Oh, you think Americans are racist for wanting to restrict immigration? How would people in India react to massive immigration from Africa?
It's my view that people, in any country, should seize political power to fight for and implement changes they wish to in a legal, peaceful and non-violent manner. Whether it's about healthcare/internal policies/laws/immigration/foreign policy or whatever. If legal immigrants wish to fight for changes to the immigration system, then they should use all the legal rights they are afforded to under the current law. The previous arcs of history are all irrelevant, people should use the power they have in the here and now.
Ok, but the article doesn't even talk about naturalization? It's talking about permanent residency.
To wit: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-lawsuit/california-...
India's requirement is 12 years seems a lot, but practically Indian citizen's path to citizenship in US is more than that(~10 years to get GC + mandatory 5 years after GC). EB1 might be an exception, which will also come around 6-8 years. But most end up waiting more than 15 years to become US citizens.
US restricts employment visas with a specific time limit. L1(7 years) and H1(6 years). After that period, you have to stay out of the country for 12 months, before you can reapply again. The other option is to apply for Green Card (Permanent Residency). So most of them end up applying GC rather than move out of the country for an year.
US has weird rules that inherently makes difficult even for employment based visas. E.g. If your visa is near expiry, then you can apply for extension. But the extension processing times takes up months. You can't travel out of the country during that period. Even if your petition is approved, then you have to go to US embassy in your country of citizenship to get visa stamped in your passport. Unless you have a visa stamped in your passport, you can't reenter US. Practically there is no visa appointment slots available at US embassies in India at this time. You are in a soup if you have to travel on an emergency
https://twitter.com/debarghya_das/status/1520966725210042368
https://twitter.com/USAndChennai/status/1517067638584664064
If a foreigner works in India on an employment visa, I don't think they have to run into issues what someone faces with the US immigration system. Just see what Curl's author Daniel Stenberg experience with US Visa process,
Note that India does not have a kafkaesque renewal process for work visas like America does.
The salary barrier is also reducing a lot now a days. When I moved, I used to make high five figures which was quite good for European salaries but now, almost low to mid six figures.
Imagine how frustrating it must be being qualified, living in the country for decades and still blocked from residency all because you were born somewhere, it’s something you have no control over
It’s pretty atrocious though that people born in India have to wait in line for decades or, like that person and many of my colleagues, have to marry someone who is not born there, while all the French people I know in the US got their green cards in 1-5 years.
The primary complaint here is the massively different waiting period for the same employment based green card category (qualifications) between a potential immigrant born in India (multiple decades) versus let’s say Germany (maybe a year). It’s an immutable qualification.
This is one of the reasons why I find the "just wait in line" argument so disingenuous. If it takes a world expert in a high importance topics literal decades to get a green card then there simply isn't a legitimate path available to people.
For what it's worth, sounds like the professor would have qualified under the EB1A/B scheme, which even for Indians is "Current". The qualifications are not very hard to meet for someone working as a professor, or even a postdoctoral researcher.
$900k or $1.8M now:
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent...
>USCIS administers the EB-5 Program. Under this program, investors (and their spouses and unmarried children under 21) are eligible to apply for a Green Card (permanent residence) if they:
>Make the necessary investment in a commercial enterprise in the United States; and
>Plan to create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs for qualified U.S. workers.
>This program is known as EB-5 for the name of the employment-based fifth preference visa that participants receive.
Most Indians don't. In fact, the default, like he mentions go in the 'Deportation parties'.
Most Indians return, in fact nearly all.
It's the luckier ones who make it even this far. As much as crazy this sound, I envy this guy. It's basically a giant life lottery.
Source?
Still, my green card was delayed by a random audit. They do this deliberately so people don't learn to game the system. At that time, an audit added 18 months to the petition processing so overall my green process took almost 3 years.
The author accurate describes just how arbitrary, uncertain and punitive this process is. His example of having to go get a visa stamp in the Bahamas and potentially not being allowed to reenter the country. It's also worth noting that H1Bs have different reentry permissions based on your country of origin. IIRC a mainland Chinese born coworker told me he could only renenter the US on his H1B for the first year of each 3 year H1B.
The author also portrays the necessity that you need to learn an awful lot about how the immigration system works. All of what he said rang true and I only had one issue with one thing he said.
His move of resigning right when getting his green card is a dangerous one. He mentions this and also mentions how you can be subject to claims of immigration fraud. In his case it was for potentially extending his stay at Amazon. This is true. But immediately leaving a job after getting a green card can come back to haunt you if you ever apply for US citizenship because at that time, possibly years later, they can still view this as visa fraud.
So how long do you need to stay in a job to avoid this? Like so many things in the immigration system, it's unclear. Many lawyers will give you advice to stay for at least six months to demonstrate your intent but this is a discretionary test so there's no hard-and-fast minimum.
Even looking to change jobs (including founding a startup) while your petition is being processed can be a red flag as far as visa fraud goes.
So if anyone is in a similar boat, here's my advice to you: don't even look for jobs in this stage. Get your green card in your hands, celebrate the end of probably a long journey, give it a few months and then consider your options.
There isn't a separate re-entry restriction, it's just the expiry date of the visa stamp in the passport.
For Chinese nationals, US consulates only issued visa stamps valid for 1 year. I am not sure if this is still the case.
This would be a non-issue if visa stamps could be issued within the country (like basically every other country on earth), and in fact the US did issue stamps internally in the old days, but after 9/11 they changed it so only foreign diplomats and officials of UN, NATO etc can get visa stamps here.
Yeah, no. Even if you are current, it could be months away, or it could be years. 2 years is not uncommon these days, even if your country is theoretically 'current'. More if there are RFEs. If you are exceptionally unlucky they can even send a RFE _after_ approval, sometimes months after (these are called Notice of Intent to Revoke).
Even permanent residents can theoretically receive RFEs years after approval. Or site inspections. As of today, this is uncommon and only really done if fraud is suspected. However, if the administration changes again, you never know.
And getting the green card is never guaranteed. It's a 'privilege'.
If you change jobs you need to restart the whole green card process. But not if your Adjustment of Status has been pending for 180 days or more. Then there's some 'portability' clause. Still dangerous - there were lawsuits because USCIS sent RFEs to a previous employer. Which obviously they didn't respond to. People were unaware that anything was going wrong until their applications were denied, at which point it is too late (and, if your I-140 gets denied, and you have been using your EAD, you are retroactively out of status and have accrued unlawful presence, as well as your dependents). They did this because according to them, those applications are not related to the employee at all, they are done by the employer.
As a result of the lawsuits, they will notify the 'beneficiary' now, at least.
> Any secondary source of income, even if it’s from a business that you’ve built from the ground up, would violate the terms of your H1B visa
Interestingly, you are never given those 'terms'. You'll eventually learn about this. But it's very vague. Doing a garage sale? Might be ok, if you don't do it very often. How often is often? You can be a landlord (and bring in significant revenue), but you can't fix a tenant's clogged sink - because then you'd be working. Hiring someone else to do is is apparently A-OK. You definitely can't drive for Uber, or release an IOS app on your free time, or have an Youtube channel (again on your free time).
My case took a bit over 18 months, from PERM to Green card. Even worse, there was a gap of 20 days between my visa expiration date, and the arrival of my EAD, so I had to be put on unpaid leave.
The USCIS has been a complete shit show since the Trump administration took over, and COVID made it even worse.
If you get a PR through express entry it should be 6 months, then 3 years living as a PR in Canada, then apply for citizenship, and a year later you are a citizen.
And express entry is "simple" to apply, you fill boxes, get points, every month they publish the points threshold, if you are above it, you get a PR!
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
Why Canada ?
- Getting a masters level education is much cheaper.
- Immigration has less hoops to jump through. Specially if you are willing to live in the Atlantic side.
- Great government and social benefits
- I heard people are generally nicer.
Why not Canada -
- TAXES! TAXES! TAXES!
- Canada is essentially the money laundering heaven [0] of North America. So buying a house and being in the so called "middle class" is a nightmare.
- I believe that there is no middle class in Canada but I could be wrong as an outsider. If you are making money within a specified range that supposedly makes you an middle class individual, it is best to find shelter in government assistance programs because the income taxes are so brutal. I could be wrong, and I hope I am wrong.
- American LCOL salary even if you live in Vancouver or Toronto which is HCOL.
- If you want to earn big bucks you have to open an LLC and start contracting, which I believe requires a Canadian citizenship. I don't think you can open an LLC with a PR. Doing contract or remote work often requires an LLC.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_washing
I am happy to hear your feedback though. I personally prefer the whole middle region of America (WY, SD, ND, KS, IA...) than to Canada.
I'm a citizen, but I work as a contractor without having to do anything to create a legal entity. I'm considered self-employed, and a de facto business of one.
> Great government and social benefits
> - TAXES! TAXES! TAXES!
are one and same thing. Unless you think benefits can just appear out of thin air. Or just that others must pay for all good stuff that you looking to get.
First of all levying higher taxation or regulation for money laundering. I think that alone will reduce the tax burden on the middle class people.
Taxation is a long controversial discussion that often leads to no where.
But the gist is that, for the 60k+/year roles, if you are employed in America, from what I heard, your medical coverage is the same as the public health coverage by the Canadian government.
In America you can buy a house within a smaller time frame at a more reasonable financial burden compared to Canada.
The cost of Canadian taxation is reasonable to a limit.
They should take it one step further and make it illegal!
Making money laundering illegal will send shockwaves across its economy. Canada is being criticized by both its citizens and foreign governments but the illegal moneyflows are actually proping the housing markets of Vancouver and Toronto up. It is a very complicated situation as taking any action against money laundering will also might greenlight foreign governments to sue Canada for harboring money from corruption and illegal activities.
Taking actions against money laundering is always a slippery slope.
The canard that the housing market in Canada has been propped up by illegal money has been debunked so many times it's not funny. Everyone continues to prefer to think that over the real truth, which is that domestic speculation and house-horniness (house at any financial cost, down-payments from a HELOC on the family house, etc.) is responsible for the insane market. How else do you explain the 50%+ increase in rural Ontario over the pandemic? Peterborough didn't suddenly become the hot spot for laundering.
If you want to call money laundering foundational, then you need to explain how on earth that is connected with the market in Peterborough being up 50%+ over the pandemic. Peterborough isn't unique; it just gives the lie to the idea that this is somehow foreign money causing the problem. Foreign buyers have tanked in the last two years (since most of the time they were not even permitted to enter the country) yet it is continually called out as the culprit. Nonsense.
I have been thinking about the idea of social benefits. For the middle class what is even good social benefit? Affordable housing, affordable medical, maybe some kind of financial support for the elders, good public education, enough social benefits which lowers crime rate. Like if that is the things that are essential, America is doing a fantastic job.
But over emphasising social benefits aspects at the cost of the middle class is a bad idea. Canadian middle class from what I heard is somewhere between too rich to not get access to subsidized housing and too poor to buy a 600k house.
* Saving for retirement
* Saving for college or having a kid in college
* Having young kids and paying for daycare or losing an income
* Dealing with a health crisis (while not currently a full time employee at the kind of corporation that has great insurance… even if at other times you were or you will be again)
* Caring for an aging parent
These are all significant financial stressors even to the upper middle / professional class in America, whereas in a strong social benefits environment none of them are a big deal at all. The idea that middle class families need to stand up to all all these costs personally, sink or swim, is not necessarily pro-middle-class.
Like, why is it so important to own a house? One reason is so that you could sell it or otherwise tap the equity in case you have to do something ruinous like go to the hospital while between jobs. Another is that the apartments are all in neighborhoods overrun with untreated mentally ill people. Both of these are self-chosen problems.
This isn't true. Canadian PRs can start a business
I found out that PRs can do essentially everything except for vote and run for office.
Thanks again.
From the point of view of someone who immigrated from a developing Asian country to a EU country, geez, I had it a lot easier than he did. The country's law doesn't seem to allow refusal without concrete grounds as long as the applicant meets all the requirements, whereas in the US, even if you meet all the requirements, the decision is still arbritary.
I am in the grips of it now: my ex and I both filed to renew our green card within a week or so of each other in early 2021. She received her replacement card in less than six weeks. According to the USCIS web site I still have at least another eight months to wait.
Meanwhile I can’t even get a stamp in my passport to indicate my status (so that I can travel): I arranged for such an appointment but when they finally called to tell me when it was instead to tell me that there are no appointments available.
US immigration policy is built around maintaining a diverse pool of immigrants and focusing on family reunification. Skilled labor is obviously a plus but it's of secondary concern.
Putting aside politics & whether you agree/disagree with US immigration policy, i think going elsewhere is simply a better option for Chinese/Indian immigrants as of now. Most of the West is staring down an aging population and is desperate for young labor, so there’s tons of options. A lot of places have well functioning governments and the demand for technology is global.
But here this could be case of of person less talented the pizza delivery person, having very classist attitude, looking to settle in explicitly racist country by their own admission.
I know that some companies hire you for 1 year in Europe and then offer you move to America, but they are usually big companies where it's difficult to get hired.
> it is not /super/ difficult to win this lottery, as there are so few applicants.
I see in the Wikipedia article that 13M people applies. I guess that you mention that not so many people emigrate from Europe to the US, that's why it's more likely to get this. I will consider this, it's so interesting.
I can't fathom waiting almost two decades for a permanent residency status. It was excruciating just reading the post, yet alone living it. Mad kudos to the author for enduring the process. Personally I'd never go for it.
However, throttling(7% quota) based on country of birth appears to be a bad proxy for diversity as India is a very diverse nation with rich cultural and linguistic distinctions. Designing a new immigration system would be a reduction problem from the existing one but we have seen successful implementations in other countries such as Canada and EU (albeit with their own set of problems)
This is really important point in case anyone missed. The gross misuse of this rule to bring in project managers, account managers (L-1 based) and such have really made things worse for non L-1 immigrants by hogging most of green cards awarded per country basis.
"You must have been employed outside the United States for at least 1 year in the 3 years preceding the petition or the most recent lawful nonimmigrant admission if you are already working for the U.S. petitioning employer. The U.S. petitioner must have been doing business for at least 1 year, have a qualifying relationship to the entity you worked for outside the U.S., and intend to employ you in a managerial or executive capacity. "
Using this criteria, IT body shops are running wholesale scam.
1. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent...
It was stressful, but after reading this, I have to admit that immigration in Japan seems like a walk in a park, at least if you're privileged enough to speak Japanese and have a high-paying job.
S.386 was introduced in the Senate by Mike Lee in 2019 [1]
There was a unanimous consent on it in 2021 [2] but the bill expired (?) because Dick Durbin, senator from IL wont table it (I dont clearly understand the process in the Senate but some people who follow this had expressed anger at Durbin for not doing anything - https://www.durbinisracist.com/)
It was reintroduced in Congress as Eagle Act [3] but its been stalled ever since. It ironic that people think Democrats want open borders while the same Democrats could not even pass a sane bill for legal immigration (especially for immigrants who contribute a whole lot to the US) with their majorities while immigration was a top agenda for President Biden. Not to mention all the big tech companies with big lobbies cant get this move at all.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/386... [2] https://cis.org/Vaughan/Senate-S386-HR1044-Country-Cap [3] https://eagleact.info
Note that we are told that Trump is racist and his opponents are not, but a lot of lawmakers with an axe to grind against Indians with 150-year immigration wait times [2] are prominent democrats.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/3012
[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/150-year-wait-indian-immigrants-ad...
Oh, and to be clear I am the whitest white dude whoever whited, so I wasn’t even being subjected to skin colour based racism, and yet was getting screwed around.
Most of H1B could be fixed if we could get rid of Wipro/etc. staffing agency abuse (almost entirely of people from India, but there are lots of Indian H1B who work for other companies and are fine); the process seems relatively non-abused by actual end-user tech employers, with the biggest problems for smaller companies being the "can't work here because if company fails you lose status (in 30 days now, thankfully, not immediately)" and "hassle of the process".
I'm not sure how legally to ban the Wipro style use of H1B while preserving the rest. I'd also always prefer fees vs. delays; there are jobs for which $200k/yr fee paid to US Treasury would still be worth it for ~instant processing, and it's inefficient/bad for everyone to not have that as an option.
Read here about the history of existing immigration policy and its roots in union anti-immigration policy https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5124597.pdf
Just received my card in the mail two weekends ago.
Here’s a full writeup linking to 2 previous visa writeups, if anyone’s interested: https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-used-indie-hacking-to-sponsor-...
caveat: I’m from a small country that’s well under quota and there is no wait time beyond the usual processing times.
Each time a developer works for the US from abroad, the US economy loses up to 50% o salaries in taxes for gov funding, and up to 80% of the reminder in spending within the economy.
An argentine developer making 150k from the US pays 0 taxes and spends 80%+ in argentina. If he moves to the US he pays 60k in taxes and spends 80%+ in the US.
US is shooting itself in the foot so hard. The solution is the easiest - remove H1b caps.
US taxes all income you anywhere in the world for US residents.
If you work a laptop job currently then assume that it can be done by anyone anywhere in the world. Wouldn't you want that person to buy US products, US services, and pay US taxes?
And what Argentine devs are making 150K USD? Few.
I believe that all countries need to reduce restrictions on the movement of people. Humans should be free to move and live where they want.
I am worried, however, that transitioning away from our current flawed system will have a lot of unpleasant side effects. Many Americans might lose their jobs, simply because others will work for cheaper and probably provide around the same quality.
Additionally our house prices would likely decline as well.
For these reasons I am selfishly concerned about my job prospects, especially since I have to compete against others in my own country, but I will never be given the chance to compete against them in their own country.
Now i wouldn't want anyone to be discriminated but still it makes sense to limit green card based on nationality
Do you agree that should be weighted by the need of the country to remain competitive, say in the hypothetically scenario where we came to the conclusion that the average american is lazy, and that that's the core reason why immigrants replace them?
If you're worried about losing your job to cheap labor that's an issue with our immigration system not a problem with immigration in general. You should be asking yourself why companies are allowed to pay non-US citizens less for the same jobs we're doing.
> You should be asking yourself why companies are allowed to pay non-US citizens less for the same jobs we're doing.
I would ask myself this, but I know the answer. It's because these companies have our lawmakers in their pockets. That is the problem that really needs to be solved, which would take care of this and many other issues.
In the tech labor market (as per the post) the labor simply isn't available. We don't generally see American software engineers languishing and unable to find jobs.
I guarantee that the like of Microsystems, Google, and Amazon were not paying the poster a pittance.
Since it isn’t based primarily on past experience, it won’t matter that they haven’t had opportunity if they do have the skills.
I’m in HFT. Only hire people I’d consider capable and I’m comfortable with our interview process. If they knock the interview off the hook they’ll be in. Let me know.
I rest my case.
That was me from 2016 to 2018. Trust me, there are weirdos like me out there in the country that can't get a job. I decided to go all in on this exciting tech stack called Ruby on Rails. I heard all the cool kids were doing it. Spend all my life savings trying to get in on the action. What I didn't realize is that they were all unemployed......as a result I don't think Matz is so nice.
I'm ok now, wasting my life writing one line of code a day on software that does not make one lick of difference in this world (and no its not in ruby on rails): The American dream™
It's supposed to be accepted as fact that if there are a lot of non-whites somewhere, it's simply because they're better. But if there are a lot of whites somewhere, it's because of racism.
Their numbers are so high simply because they represent almost a fifth of humanity - there are almost as many Indians as there are people in Europe, South & Central America put together.
Sure, it matters because there are tens of millions of black, hispanic, and latino US citizens -- numerous with CS/STEM degrees -- who cannot get into FAANGs. Many end up in retail or as best buy tech squad reps or tmobile store salespersons.
Yet we're told that someone from a foreign country is a better candidate for these FAANG jobs. In my experience, half the foreign workers cannot even speak english legibly.
Do Americans and the US Government owe at least some chance to local citizens who are being passed over for jobs generation after generation?
FAANGs aren't discriminating against black, hispanic and latino US citizens. If someone can't get into FAANG its not because of their "race" or "citizenship", it's because they can't pass the hiring bar -- whether hiring is broken is another question, but hiring isn't biased against blacks latinos and hispanics.
> Many end up in retail or as best buy tech squad reps or tmobile store salespersons.
This comparison is disingenuous. Had you said they therefore have to work in the government sector as software engineers, I'd say you might have a point. But your comment reads as: "because they can't get a job as at FAANG they work at t-mobile as salespeople.
1. India is poor but not too poor
2. It has a huge population
3. A lot of upper class Indians already have family in the US
Of course, it is not clear why any of this should matter. Why should it be capped by country (as opposed to continent, zipcode or planet?)
1. Canadians have TN visas, so they prefer to use that since there is no lottery for that and it's a simple process of taking your offer letter and have CBP stamp a 3-year TN visa. Even though it is not dual intent, people can and do apply for green cards on TN status since for Canadians the wait times are current and they can get a green card before they need to renew their TN visa.
2. Australians have E-3, so that is what they will use.
3. The Chinese use H1B's but the numbers have dropped as more Chinese prefer to stay in China or return there after their foreign education since a lot of big Chinese tech companies have sprung up.
4. Europeans either do not want to move to the US, they sometimes don't try to have a prospective employer sponsor for H1b visas since a lot of them seem to believe that Indians have a monopoly on those visas.
You're left with mostly Indians, most of who study STEM subjects in college, overwhelmingly come to the US for studies and then hop on to work visas post-graduation. Most of the highest paying tech employers in India are American companies even then many Indians still want to move to the US since there are still a lot of socio-political and quality of life issues in India.
Take all these points and that's how so many H1B's go to Indians.
With people, you have the added benefit that if people working within your country they spend and consume in your country.
Countries all over the world fight each other for talent, and the US immigration system is doing to itself what other countries spend money to prevent.
The source of the huge delay for Indian-born people is these four facts:
1. India has a population exceeding one billion;
2. Green cards have a diversity rule that no more than 7% of applicants can come from a single country;
3. Your category is based solely on country of birth not country of citizenship; and
4. H1B visas have no per-country caps or quotas (beyond the total annual quota).
The companies that are really ruining this for anyone are the bodyshops like Tata and Infosys who direclty benefit from the situation. As the article mentions, if you have a pending I140 petition you can stay beyond the 6 year limit and changing jobs is dangerous. So employes get to hold this over employees creating an indentured servant type situation for 10+ years. These bodyshops flood applications and create the lottery problem.
There are numerous problems with all of this and (I really do hate to say this but it's true) the only administration who even made noises about reforming the H1B system was the Trump administration like basing H1B on salary (these bodyshops pay low for software engineers). None of this came to pass.
Here's one big problem: children ageing out of the system. If an Indian national has a pending green card petition and their child is born outside the US and that child gets to age 18 before the petition is approved, they are no longer eligible to receive a green card as part of their family's petition. Given how long Indian delays are, this may mean deporting someone to a country they left when they were 6 months old and have no memory of. They may not even speak the language.
Prior to the pandemic a couple of bills floated around to fix this backlog, most notably S369 [1]. These all ultimately went nowhere and (IMHO) had a lot of problems. For example, this didn't really increase the annual caps (it did, kinda, by only counting the petitioner and not their family against the quota) and eliminated the per-country cap. But what this would've done is made things terrible for everyone else for a transition period of years.
What is happening due to this is all advocacy to fix this has to be done by the folks in backlogs (Indians & Chinese) and the rest of the world folks can happily go about business as usual. Yes, H1 reform is needed but green card reform is needed yesterday.
So if two-thirds of the H1B applicants are Indian nationals but the current system caps per-country green cards at 7% (per category), you see why Indian nationals have a much longer wait time than anyone else.
In saying that I'm not denying others (eg China, Mexico, the Phillipines) don't have long wait times too.
A family friend's kid just arrived here for his MS CS. He told me upfront that he plagiarized all through his undergrad and couldn't write basic programs. I was like "why on earth would you purse an MS in CS then?". I saw a lot of folks like that.
The US issues roughly 1 million green cards each year. 86% of those go to family based immigration. The rest 14% are for employment based immigration. Even in there the dependents (spouse + kids) are counted against that quota. So net effect is close to 5% employment based immigration if we count only primary applicants. What purpose is discrimination by country of birth serving here?
Already this is forcing companies to make investments in offshore centers as it is difficult to hire here. There is enough proof this is bad for Americans but the current political climate makes any change impossible.
The language, religious practices, food, festivals and traditions change every 100 miles in India. It is an old civilization with as much or more diversity than all of Europe.
Small countries like Belgium, Netherlands and Austria can balkanize and claim diversity over minor differences. Yet, Indians are clumped together under 1 umbrella ? How does that make sense ?
India can have diversity claims if they let individual states in India their passports, languages, flags and so on. It's on them to show diversity before expecting others to appreciate it.
Guess what ? Everyone who lives out of Africa has a common-ish ancestors as far as 80k years ago. So, Africans are significantly more diverse than the rest of the world combined.
So, clearly the diversity of US isn't representative of the global population.
There are other "diversity" visas. One is a literal diversity lottery and a family permanent resident visa. Does it not make more sense to look at qualifications for employment petitions.
Diveristy actually means not getting everybody from the same place, being that inside or outside the US
> Why though? If Google is hiring an engineer, it doesn't make a distinction and does so purely on skill. Why should it matter if said engineer is from Argentina (arbitrary example) instead of India?
Because the priorities of the system don't have to be the same as Google's. Specifically, the US decided it prefers to get immigrants from everywhere rather than letting a couple big countries flood the queue.
There is no amount of money that can make you truly happy being away from your friends, family, your culture, etc.
If there were good opportunities in India, people would be happier there.
You're saying you want people to be discriminated by nationality. Correct?
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374276027/thislandisourla...
You cannot compare policies with any random country - most immigrants pick the countries that have already hoarded all the wealth over centuries by waging and funding wars. In light of that history, the US should do a lot more than bend over backwards as reparations.
The legal immigrants that came here are mostly self-supporting people whose taxes and spending supports a lot of US citizens.
Therefore your statement is almost entirely reversed, it is beneficial to the country that these people join us here.
Of course, we can kill the H1B program entirely. Businesses will find a way, except this time all of the aforementioned taxes and spending will happen somewhere else. Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Satya Nadella, they'll all work elsewhere, along with millions of other people in the tech community.
If 1 billion people suddenly all wanted to go to the same restaurant, or do anything that involves certain form of capacity, that system would collapse.
Then, companies want to keep people under H1B as long as possible because H1B is a form of control.
Once and for all. Be it tomorrow or in a month or in 12 years.
Then you can decide to wait or cancel.
Very simple.
Did he have to wait outside for 18 years? No. Was he prevented for working? No.
Considering how saturated the system is, I see a working system and a happy person that lived, studied and worked in the US for 18 years.
The actual impact to my life was negligible, as all of the actual work was done by immigration lawyers. The only thing I had to do was submitting some info to the attorneys, a biometrics appointment and a short interview. And paying fees, and presenting a vaccination record.
And the system is at capacity because there are long waiting times, which is the definition of a saturated system. And this is public, published information.
https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/
If the guy has anxiety and checks the case status every 1 minute, there are good solutions for that, all of which have nothing to do with the immigration system.
Do they do it because they hate people? Because they have an evil political affiliation? No.
They do it because of simple common sense and I agree with it. Same with the immigration system which is similar to the one from my country of origin.
The guy in the article is definitely a the type of immigrant any country wants, sure. But he comes from a country where you have jerks like Infosys and Tata submitting 10 copies of the same application for every employee, DoSing the USCIS. And where there are fake universities with 24/7 phone numbers and websites and fake photos. And a world of cheating in every aspect imaginable.
This has resulted in higher skepticism not only from the USCIS but from every governmental immigration agency on the planet.
Did you go through an EB2 application as an Indian/Chinese? If not, then it's not the same process. For every other national, you know your status in a couple of months, not decades. Children do not age out of the application as happens for Indians/Chinese.
But then, that aging you described happened while residing in the US where you were making money hand over fist same as a US national. And your US-born kids are citizens.
So in the end the only difference is the inconvenience of the paperwork that you worked on very rarely. The rest of the time you were enjoying life in the US.
So, this story of 18 years of suffering is really nonsense. The guy had a great time working at great companies and making millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and stock while being midly bothered by some paperwork that was mostly prepared by an attorney.
The average small business owner is bothered by the government 1000x more and won't have the prosper life of a MAANG engineer.
I'd disagree with that assessment. The issue really isn't the amount or the effort of paperwork - for most people it's the uncertainty. There's the very real possibility that at the end of that very long process you do not get a green card. The making money hand over fist also only applies to a certain proportion of Indian applicants, especially in tech. There are plenty of other Indian applicants who make nowhere near as much money and face just as much (if not more) of an uphill task. For example, I'm an Indian working as a postdoctoral researcher in Developmental Biology & cancer and yet make probably less than a tenth of what this guy does. Nor does the US offer substantially better pay in this field as compared to say, Europe (worse in some ways). Yet for me it still feels worth it because the work here is just better in my field, but at some level the system feels incredibly unfair. My European colleagues are able to apply and get an EB3 green card in a few months that's very little paperwork while the only reasonable pathway for me is an EB1 petition that's exponentially harder and a lot more paperwork. My European colleagues could go directly from a J1 visa to an EB3 visa simply because their petition will be processed in a few months. For an Indian in my position that's not possible - I must first secure an H1B/O1 before I can think of an EB1/2 petition. All the Indians I know in my field who have green cards have had to make EB1 petitions while none of the Europeans have had to.
Here's the practical considerations - very few companies in my field offer immigration support. The Europeans tend to apply for an EB3 after about a year or two of postdoctoral experience and move into industry with their prompt green cards. For Indians and Chinese postdocs, they tend to work for an average of 6 years before they've accrued enough publications to wrangle an EB1 petition. That's 6 years of grueling work at very very low pay and a very uncertain future at the end of it - but only for the Indians/Chinese.