<i>One major reason: the green card backlog is immense – especially for immigrants from India; it can take decades for them even to have a chance to apply.</i><p>This is bad even from the most hardcore selfish, anti-immigrant position: you want people moving in when they're educated and young, not when they're a decade or less away from retirement.
Isn't it uneconomic for a country to educate young people and then deport them as soon as they (are old enough to) start working and paying taxes?
Interesting situation and the opposite of what would make sense. You spend taxpayer money to educate in integrate all these young people, then boot them out? Can't speak for the rest of the world, but the country I do have experience with has something called "naturalization process" (not sure if it's the right translation), where children of immigrant families are fast-tracked to citizenship when they turn 18. Which makes total sense to me.
My experience getting my student visa turned me off from remaining in the US after graduating, so if the goal was to reduce immigration by embodying Kafka, it succeeded in at least one case.
If all else fails apply to immigrate to Canada. Canada has a point system and anyone raised in the US would be right at the top of the list. Currently Canada is hoping for 400k immigrants per year so the chances are very good.
I honestly cannot believe in the 21st century we tolerate such archaic systems for highly sought professionals, that we in turn educated via subsidized education (se is a nursing grad from University of South Florida) especially with the enormous demand for nurses.<p>I think at this point, especially with the massive layoffs in tech and the high back up for even renewals and thus precarious situation with H1-N visa holders, it's probably worth exploring a market-place for residence/citizenship via contractional marriage with prenuptial agreements. The situation is becoming more dire and the thought of losing more US raised talent due to such an absurd situation like a backlog of application renewals demands that tech disrupt this monolith.<p>> As someone living in a northern European welfare state, I'll just say what a shitshow the US is<p>I agree, but the truth is that EU/CH isn't much better either. There is a large stigma of German professionals, specifically physicians, coming to Switzerland 'taking all the jobs' when most Swiss who do attend university don't even study medicine to fill the roles they require in most cantons.<p>And then try and come into Switzerland as a professional that conflicts with te Swiss population if you're from a less desirable country like Czech Republic, Hungary or Slovakia--there is a large Croatian population in Switzerland due to the diaspora after the collapse of Yugoslavia, but one of my predictions is how they will delay things for those who want to come and enter Schengen next week.<p>And I'm not even going to go into the quota situation because its murky, and varies from canton to canton.<p>But honestly, it's an absurd system that as the article outlines is ultimately upheld with bi-partisan support in the US, which means that their is no alternative has been the maxim for far too long with no change in sight despite the massive shortfalls of talented professionals in a post COVID World.
This is incredibly unfair to the children of immigrants who have lived in the US all their lives. Leaving out the ethical discussion it doesn't even make sense financially, the government spends all this money on making these people productive members of society and then kicks them out the moment they start paying back into the system. I can't think of a single reason to maintain this system other than "foreign people bad".<p>It's not even because of dumb racism, as the article highlights through the woman of Northern Irish descent who's white as can be; this is due to an arbitrary definition of "foreign" which I don't think any reasonable person would apply to someone who's lived in their country since they were 3.<p>On the other hand, I wonder what some of their parents were thinking.<p>Their children should definitely get a visa or even the ability to apply for citizenship, but the parents knew what problems their kids face once they become adults. Perhaps those waiting on the green card program couldn't have known because the huge wait times weren't a problem when they first arrived and they simply couldn't have known, but for those on temporary visas with no chance to get their children citizenship, they could and should have known. For decades they let their kids work towards an impossible future.<p>Until immigration policies get fixed, I think it's incredibly unfair towards these children to be forced to go through this. I don't know what parents were expecting to happen when they took their young kids into a country they knew they couldn't stay in, but I can't help but feel they're part of the problem. I don't expect the problem to disappear any time soon either, with Trump aiming at a second presidency and (close enough to) half the American voting population still voting conservatively.
I've observed any discussion about US immigration (no matter how relevant to tech) gets booted off the HN front page, probably deprioritized. I'm not sure if it's something others have noted too.<p>I do wonder why though. Is it because it doesn't generate any new discussion and just attracts flame wars ?