Indians account for 73.9 percent out of the total number of H1B visa holders in the USA.
Now i wouldn't want anyone to be discriminated but still it makes sense to limit green card based on nationality
Now i wouldn't want anyone to be discriminated but still it makes sense to limit green card based on nationality
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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™
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're saying you want people to be discriminated by nationality. Correct?