150-Year Green Card Wait for Indian Immigrants With Advanced Degrees

This is <i>one</i> of the enormous penalties we as a nation have to pay because neither of our political parties actually wants to solve the illegal immigration issue.<p>Republicans get to use ‘illegal immigrants taking jobs’ as a stick to beat democrats with, and progressives use cries of racism to rally support amongst Latino voters.<p>Meanwhile anyone who espouses common sense ideas such as reforming our immigration policy gets called a racist and ‘anti-immigrant’.

So this is the result of several factors that are at odds with each other.<p>1. There is no per-country quota on H1Bs<p>2. There is a per-country quota on EB-1&#x2F;2&#x2F;3 GCs<p>3. And this is crux of the problem: H1Bs are issued indiscriminately, most problematically to so-called bodyshops.<p>There are various proposals to fix the immigration backlog. There&#x27;s one bill that would get rid of per-country quotas. I wonder what that would do to the backlog of everyone. I kind of see this one as a nonstarter.<p>Bizarrely, it&#x27;s the current (otherwise abhorrent) administration that is the first to even talk about fixing the real problem, which is (3). H1Bs are a lottery now. When the likes of FAAMG companies can&#x27;t hire people because the likes of Infosys and Tata are flooding applications for people who will essentially become indentured servants, that&#x27;s a problem.<p>Infosys settled a visa fraud case with the US government several years ago including a payment of millions of dollars. How exactly are they still able to apply for visas?<p>There are problems with ranking applicants based on salary (or total compensation) as the one proposal would do. This would potentially drown out lower-paid STEM fields that have legitimate need with FAAMG SWEs. Then again... that&#x27;s still probably better than the current system.<p>People have also complained &quot;well you can&#x27;t hire graduates if you rank on salary&quot;. That&#x27;s true. But at the same time, are newly minted college graduates fulfilling unsatisfied demand for specialty occupation? Or just being used to lower labour costs?

How does this wait play out in real life? I doubt any company actually waits 15 years, and clearly not lengths exceeding a human lifespan, to fill a position, even if it went through the trouble of filing an I-140 and certified that zero US workers were available.<p>So what do all these applicants do in the meantime? Are they overseas? Are they in the States on dual-intent visas? Are they in some creative legal limbo?<p>If somehow, in the meantime, they obtain a green card or work permit, are they allowed to take that same position, if it&#x27;s still open -- clearly, they can accept any other position, as they&#x27;re fully allowed to work in the States, but can they take the one EB-2 and I-140 was filed for originally?

The dilemma of intolerance is that tolerating intolerance makes you intolerant.<p>Some forms of intolerance: believing in gender superiority, a caste system, exceptionalism based on ethnicity or country of origin. If you believe in those things, you might have a tolerance problem, no matter where you are from.<p>I try to be as tolerant as possible, and do not have negative views against immigration. But if you are intolerant I will have a hard time getting along if you openly express those views or if you apply those at work.

I am one who can be in this boat and don’t know what to do yet.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lifeboat_ethics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lifeboat_ethics</a>

97% people in India are poor by global standards <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;idronline.org&#x2F;addressing-inequality-in-india&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;idronline.org&#x2F;addressing-inequality-in-india&#x2F;</a><p>They&#x27;ll wait for 250 years

Isn&#x27;t it a false assumption that immigrant workers should eventually get Green Cards? The whole point of the H1B system is to temporarily fill shortages of skilled workers, not to be a path for permanent immigration.

Not a bug: working as intended

Is it really discrimination if the system is already known to have a per-country limit, and yet more and more people from that country continue to file for Green Cards? Indians who come to the US these days know for a fact there is a 10+ year wait for a Green Card, so they&#x27;re the ones taking their chances. If they scream discrimination, I call BS on that.<p>It sucks that the system is the way it is, and I think a point-based system like Canada is far more efficient, but it&#x27;s not discrimination. If there are already known rules, and one particular country comes in an adds a massive amount of applications, you can&#x27;t turn around and yell discrimination.