President Trump is tweeting about H-1B visas today

I’m reading this as “We’re making it easier for these visas to be transferable between employers.”


If you have to pay market rates and can’t have techno coolies, the push for H1Bs declines a bit.

quote:

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charging them $10K per green card

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Hell yeah they'd be happy to pay it. They are paying more than 3 times that today in legal fees to get a valid green card.

As an Indian guy who has been in the United States for more than 15 years and having gotten two graduate degrees and still looking at a 150-year wait time for my green card, I will gladly pay that fees for me and my wife to be able to get Green Cards in a reasonable amount of time.

We have two kids ages <3 years old who were born here and are US citizens and they will turn 18 and be able to sponsor us for Green Cards in the family based quota decades before our turn comes to get our employment based Green Cards.

There is currently no per country limit when it comes to issuing H-1B visas, so on average about 50,000-60,000 Indians get H1-B visas per year. Let's assume half of them decide they want to immigrate to this country permanently using the employment based Green Card route. So there is about 25,000-30,000 Indians joining the Green Card line every year and this has been happening for about 20 years. But due to some arbitrary 1970s law, only 7000 Green Cards can go to any particular country under the employment based system per year. Now imagine how badly the queue gets backed up for Indians who have been joining that queue at the 25K-30K per year rate for the past 20 years. The back up is so bad, that for the past five years, USCIS has been processing Green Card applicants from India who applied prior to the year 2008 and still hasn't caught up and there is no signs they will get to 2009 applicants in the next few years either. Any Indian that joined the Green Card queue after 2010 will die before their applications ever come up for adjudication.

That ladies and gentlemen is how people from India ended up with a 150-year wait to get Green Cards when they follow the legal immigration route.

This is how fricked up and broken the legal immigration system in this country is and how hard the US makes it for people who follow all the rules to immigrate here permanently.

I am no one to tell the United States how they should handle their immigration flow and what countries they need to prioritize when it comes to letting people in. All I want is a fair system that treats employment based permanent residency applications on a first-come first-served basis.

How is it fair that a yet unborn child in Pakistan, or Sweden or Uganda can come to the US 18 years from now, find a job here and apply for a Green Card and still get it in less than a year and there are people like us who have already lived here 20-30 years, paying taxes, contributing into social security and other programs, and still no closer to getting ours with another 50-100 year wait in front us? I don't get it.

House Bill HR392, which would have solved this backlog problem, had 320 co-sponsors in the last congress with 50-50% support from Dems and Republicans and was as bipartisan a bill as you can ever imagine, but still didn't come up for vote in the house. It was tragic.