Tech firms' nightmare: Vanishing green cards
As someone who has gone through this process let me summarize some of the issues this always raises:<p>1. Green cards have a per-country cap (of 7%) but there is no per-country cap for work visas. This creates a bottleneck since India has the same quota as French Polynesia;<p>2. Applications for work visas and green cards from low-value employers, specifically IT body shops (eg Tata) are clogging up the system. Relatively few of both of these categories are actually being given to high0-value employers like the Big Tech companies;<p>3. H1B visas are for 3 years and can be renewed once, for a total of 6 years. After this there needs to be a gap of a year. But if you have a pending green card application you can stay indefinitely;<p>4. Demand exceeds supply (being the annual quota), which leads to a lottery situation. One of the few things the previous disastrous administration proposed that I actually agree with was the proposal to prioritize work visas based on compensation rather than handing them out randomly. This would help combat the body shops in (2);<p>5. The bottleneck in (1) means people from certain countries, most notably India, means employees may be in the queue for decades. This is actually an advantage for those aforementioned body shops. it is a modern form of indentured servitude. The employee can&#x27;t leave nor complain about conditions because then they lose their application and have to return home;<p>6. This can go on so long that children of said employees age out of the system before their parents are granted a green card. If when granted a green card you have children under the age of 18 they automatically become permanent residents. After that, they don&#x27;t. This can mean that children who turn 18 may need to leave the US and return to a country they have possibly never known. This is barbaric and inhumane;<p>7. Before the pandemic there were proposals to alleviate this situation by removing the per-country cap. The pandemic stalled this and it seems to be dead. I personally think this was the wrong solution as it means we would spend the next 3-10 years where only backlog applications would get processed. As such, it&#x27;s likely to be met with resistance from other immigrant groups. We need a better solution; and<p>8. If a person is granted a green card and has a spouse and 2 children that counts as 4 in terms of the quota for employment-based green cards, both in total and per country of birth. This too is problematic.