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.
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.
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.
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.
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.