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US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

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Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#131

Post by CCs »

firstOrder wrote: post #5

> Does turning away highly skilled and educated people due to an artificial cap on visas sound silly? This is a false way of framing things on many levels. First, as Norm Matloff has extensively documented, they are not all "highly skilled and educated people". Secondly, they can be given green cards and other such things, why is this specific visa necessary? Also, if there's a shortage of talent, then the Silicon Va…

> Secondly, they can be given green cards and other such things, why is this specific visa necessary?

Normal path: H1B -> Green Card -> 5 yr waiting -> Citizenship

You will not get GC directly, unless: (a) Apply for GC lottery (b) Marry US citizen (c) Claim refugee status (d) Your US citizen relatives ask for it and you wait 8+ years to get it

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#132

Post by Mikeb85 »

avmich wrote: post #89
JamesArgo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada will take anyone with an engineering degree.

What do you mean by "take"? Canadian employers aren't very familiar with a concept of working visa in practice - they prefer you to first have a permanent residence, then they can talk about hiring you. To get permanent residence, you have to pass the process, which is many months long. Am I substantially missing something?

Yes. Skilled worker visas which don't require employer sponsorship, and are open ended.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#133

Post by dang »

joering2 wrote: post #130
ebiester wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US. I will operationalize "good" as "an intelligent worker can make an exceptional living relative to their country of origin." Each of these places only take a limited amount of immigrants each year. Some are more difficult based on the national language -- learning Danish isn't more…

> There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US. You need to pull your eyes out of your ass. The countries you mention are far from being superior; perhaps "good enough", but frankly nothing too fancy. You need to visit Hong Kong or Singapore to see how highly qualified immigrants live there like kings. Japan has serious envir…

You need to pull your eyes out of your ass.

This is inappropriate language for Hacker News. Please don't address another user this way, regardless of how wrong you think they are.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#134

Post by PhasmaFelis »

lolwutf wrote: post #73
ebiester wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US. I will operationalize "good" as "an intelligent worker can make an exceptional living relative to their country of origin." Each of these places only take a limited amount of immigrants each year. Some are more difficult based on the national language -- learning Danish isn't more…

With the advent of remote work upon us, I find it hard that you'd be limited to those countries. In fact, literally the ENTIRE WORLD is your oyster, assuming you can reliably, regularly find power, wifi, and a team that'll work with you on your timezone's timeframe.

Those are some pretty big assumptions.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#135

Post by tn13 »

ama729 wrote: post #13
[deleted] wrote: post #4

[deleted]

Which empires failed exactly? The Roman empire was one of the most open empire I can think of[1] in its last year and it still failed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutio_Antoniniana

In the long run all empires fail.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#136

Post by pacaro »

dragonwriter wrote: post #87
pacaro wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This document is hugely important to understand. Thank you for posting. I always found Table 6 to be the most interesting, particularly in debates about immigration — I have a green card as a 9 year long EB3 process (Employment Based, 3rd class - the CIS doesn't value Philosophy degrees as highly as engineering degrees!) To take the last year for which data are published, 2011 A partial breakdown of new Permanent Res…

> In round numbers for every green card issued on basis of employment, 28 are issued to family members of citizens. This is pretty much the inverse of popular understanding of immigration. There are people that don't understand that the US immigration system is primarily family-based? I think lots of people think the motivation for immigration is largely economic (and that's also true, even for the family-based visas…

You're quite correct, “Family sponsored” also contains ‘Second: Spouses, children, and unmarried sons/daughters of alien resident’ which accounts for 96,633 immigrants in 2011, which is nearly half of this category, much larger than I had realized.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#137

Post by avmich »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #132
avmich wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "take"? Canadian employers aren't very familiar with a concept of working visa in practice - they prefer you to first have a permanent residence, then they can talk about hiring you. To get permanent residence, you have to pass the process, which is many months long. Am I substantially missing something?

Yes. Skilled worker visas which don't require employer sponsorship, and are open ended.

Hmm, http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/information/times/perm/skilled-... lists processing times in months. Options with many months of wait are known, but are there anything faster? Say, 90 days?

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#138

Post by total »

msvan wrote: post #84
tokenadult wrote: post #26

What is that makes the United States such an attractive place to immigrate to for people whose skill sets could take them almost anywhere in the world? (In other words, why is that successive sessions of Congress can basically count on lots of people desiring to live in the United States, thus setting up an environment in which immigration regulation is restrictive rather than open?) (I'm genuinely curious about this…

I live in Northern Europe. It's arguably superior to the US in many ways, but there are some things which we cannot get here. One thing is size. The US has 300+ million people, whereas my country only has a few million. All communities are smaller here; interesting things get here later or not at all (with bad localizations) because the market is too small. Things are tinier, quieter and get less traction. Another th…

> ...and wondered "why does s/he speak English so well?" it's not because of school.

As an American, I've always been surprised when conversing with people from other countries considering their usage of English is not bad and is far better than those that are American natives. However, also as an American, I'm not surprised by the lack of skill in regards to the English language that is present amongst the population here (I'll use 'amongst' if I want, Chrome) due to the general disregard for the language (as if using the wrong form of your/you're is really that difficult or unimportant).

Edit: As is inevitable when one comments upon improper usage of a language, they tend to screw it up themselves. I have done just that. I will leave my mistake to commemorate it: "As an American, I've have always been..."

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#139

Post by mataug »

nairteashop wrote: post #12

Does anyone know why the number of visas isn't capped on a per-company basis? Last year, apparently 40,000 of the 85,000 available visas went to outsourcing companies, and one outsourcing company, Cognizant, got 9,000 visas! http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134... At my last job, we tried to get an H1 for just one person, and failed in the lottery! I feel there would be much less abuse of the…

Companies like Cognizant, TCS, Infosys abuse the visa system. They are the reason for such caps to be introduced.

Recently Infosys was fined 35 million USD for visa fraud, that was just the tip of the ice berg http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230452750...

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#140

Post by dragonwriter »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #127
dragonwriter wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In round numbers for every green card issued on basis of employment, 28 are issued to family members of citizens. This is pretty much the inverse of popular understanding of immigration. There are people that don't understand that the US immigration system is primarily family-based? I think lots of people think the motivation for immigration is largely economic (and that's also true, even for the family-based visas…

People may realize that familial relations can significantly shape immigration process, but they tend to greatly under-estimate the extent. Immigration is almost always discussed in terms of fairness and, usually, "the line." But the metaphor is a bad one; instead of "the line," it might be better to think of the system as multiple, separate lines that are of varying distances from the destination. And honestly, some…

> People may realize that familial relations can significantly shape immigration process, but they tend to greatly under-estimate the extent.

I don't see any real evidence that's true, but, maybe it is.

> Immigration is almost always discussed in terms of fairness and, usually, "the line." But the metaphor is a bad one;

It's not really a metaphor at all, its a fairly literal description of the family-sponsored visa system which dominates immigration. At least as it pertains to the countries where immigration demand exceeds per-country quota, where qualified immigrants are literally on a wait list (in some cases one that will take a decade or more to reach them).

And I suspect it dominates the discussion specifically because the family-based part of the immigration system is the one most people know the most about.

> it might be better to think of the system as multiple, separate lines that are of varying distances from the destination.

Well, that would be even a more literal description of the family-sponsored system, since each category of visa has its own quota and queue.

Most of the rest of the immigration system doesn't really consist of lines...

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