> This person can get married and raise a family while still waiting for that green card.
That's your mistake right here - making long term plans while being on temporary visa. Just assume that you're here for a few years to make money, and then need to go back to your home country. That's the idea behind H-1B visas anyway.
The green card wait for chinese and indian citizens is decades long. This is "don't make any long term plans until you are 50" kind of advice.
The idea behind h1b is to bring people to this country to work in useful and productive ways. Telling people to get the fuck out after a few years of work (even if they've spent 8-10 years in school here prior to that) is heartless and definitely not good for the country.
> The idea behind h1b is to bring people to this country to work in useful and productive ways.
Specifically, in a temporary way. H1B is not an immigration visa, it's a temporary working visa, for which duel-intent is acknowledged (it's legal for an H1B holder to intend to get and apply for a green card.) But at the end of the day, an H1B visa is still a temporary work visa, not an immigration visa.
I'm not saying I like it. If it were up to me all the temporary work visas would be done away with and replaced with a system of permanent visas. But it is what it is.
That's hiding behind technicalities. A person on H1B needs to leave the country within 30 days after being laid off. What life plans can one make around that? Even a simple housing lease is minimum 12 months in most parts of the country.
It leads to immigration in the sense that an H1-B terminates in a green card or the worker loses it after 6 years. Compared to a Chinese Z work visa, which you can just renew indefinitely and has no path to a permanent residency, an H1-B is a completely different beast.
OK, why don't you volunteer then to give up the basic human tendency to fall in love, and give it up indefinitely for many years at a time? It's not temporary if it can last for a decade, is it? Just live a pathetic little life in a box, collecting money for the day, many years away, when you can finally let yourself be a human again?
Tell me, which decade of your life would you be OK with throwing away this way? Your 20s? Your 30s? Get back to me on that.
By the same logic college students should never date, as they may move somewhere far off after graduating.
Sadly, while there is surgery that takes away your ability to procreate, there is as yet no surgery that will supress your ability to fall in love or to live a normal life.
So even if an immigrant comes here with the same stupid mindset you are displaying, and tries hard to never fall in love, it may happen anyway.
I don't know if I've read a more unempathetic statement on HN. Perhaps you are a happy lifelong bachelor, and can't relate to any other point of view. That is the only case that would make me understand where you're coming from, for if you have ever actually experienced love, you would understand the hypocrisy of your view.
Well, it's not like decades-long delay for green card processing is something that surprises you - it is known long before you set foot in the US. Why would you plan your life around the assumption that somehow the issue won't apply to you? Also, H-1B visas are relatively short term (6 years tops) so that's the time to figure out your green card chances and life plans. Finally, it's not like love somehow totally strips you of the ability to think rationally. If it is, it's not love, it's obsession.
this is unimaginably callous, do you not see the worker attached to the visa is a human being. they cant even have the most basics of human need by the virtue of being on a visa? you guys basically want immigrants to be slaves & guess what that works for your employers but not you the populus. your anger & callousness towards immigrants is misdirected.
btw No H1B is just 6years, thats just paperwork, all employers know this & workers know this & us gov knows it too because you commonly file for a GC near the end of that term & use it to further your stay. the problem parent post is facing is that us immigration rules are unclear and adhoc in many cases & folks in the pipeline end up suffering for it mostly.
> they cant even have the most basics of human need by the virtue of being on a visa?
Well, if you ignore reality of your situation because you are high on love hormones that's on you.
BTW. I'm not even from US, I live in central Europe, I spent a year in the US for one of the projects I worked on, didn't last, so I came back. You might say that I also fell victim to "unclear and ad hoc immigration rules", except they aren't ad hoc or unclear at all: if your intention is to immigrate to the US then H-1B (temporary worker visa) is not even the right visa type for you, you should apply for EB-3 instead, from the very beginning. So, to sum it up, original poster is trying to game the system, and bitching about the fact that the system is hard to game.
EDIT: Another problem with China and India is that combined they have population 10x that of the US. That's why US puts limits on number of immigrants from there (via wait times), otherwise the US population can easily double or triple in the next decade, leading to a lot of problems.
> Well, if you ignore reality of your situation because you are high on love hormones that's on you.
you mean getting married & starting a family? Even bloody monks who take chastity wows are not immune from carnal desires but you want some poor immigrant to be better than a monk because you waived a legal doc? btw thats works out great for illegal immigration in US.
> if your intention is to immigrate to the US then H-1B (temporary worker visa) is not even the right visa type for you, you should apply for EB-3 instead
Yet most GCs happen either H1B or asylum path. its because its designed that way. BTW I have been through the process so keep this BS to yourself, H1B is dual intent. And OP was not trying to game the system the system is poorly setup, surely your solution to a jobloss could not be just up & leave. especially when the rules are not clear (hence the needed to be clarified).
>..China and India is that combined they have population 10x that of the US..
nope, India's population is 4x of US. and agree there are per company h1b quotas BUT if US wants to limit the number of immigrants then they should stop issuing APs after H1Bs 6 year and force workers to go back. thats totally fine, but what US does is worse because they are stuck in a limbo state (I personally know many such people) waiting for GC to become current at some arbitrary date. And while this happens they have little leverage over company so they get treated like shit with subpar pay. So USCIS should either come up with a better plan to resolve the backlog or invalidate APs. they wont do that because employers dont want that.
Oh and BTW if they dont let workers become permanent residents then they should return all the SS & medicare taxes they took from paycheck as that is just plain theft.
The US diversity lottery sets a constant cap per country. The same number of Iclandic citizens as Chinese citizens can get it. The cap is absolutely not being set because the US is worried about its population doubling.
I agree with the above assessment that your posts are simply heartless.
> That's your mistake right here - making long term plans while being on temporary visa. Just assume that you're here for a few years to make money, and then need to go back to your home country. That's the idea behind H-1B visas anyway.
Just to be clear, since H-1B (or visas with similar restrictions) are the only path to permanent residency for people of many countries, this attitude is tantamount to "we don't want any immigrants from ______, period".
That's your mistake right here - making long term plans while being on temporary visa. Just assume that you're here for a few years to make money, and then need to go back to your home country. That's the idea behind H-1B visas anyway.