By Yash Sharma
Regardless of their politics, everyone has a view on immigration. More often than not, people support legal immigration over illegal immigration. Both sides also generally agree that highly skilled immigrants are a valuable asset to the U.S. economy. I would even say most people who immigrate illegally would want to do so legally. But obscure and dated laws in the U.S. make legal immigration downright painful.
I am a legal immigrant from India on an H-1B visa. I work in technology and have lived in the U.S. for 8 years now. I am considered a highly skilled immigrant, and despite a recent statement from Trump perferring immigrants with college degrees and an executive order from Biden prioritizing tech workers, I have no realistic path for permanent residence (green card) and citizenship.
There are multiple pathways for getting a green card: employment, family, stateside investment, etc. I fall into the employment category. Most categories have a fixed ceiling as well as quotas for recipients based on their country of birth. U.S. law provides 140,000 employment based green cards per year and no more than 7% of that number can come from any one country.
As you can imagine, this system disproportionately impacts India, as it doesn't take into account the country's population. India is also the world’s most populous country and has an ascendant tech sector with a large number of tech workers in the green card queue. Right now, there are more than 1.2 million Indians waiting in line for a green card, which they'll have to wait around 150 years for.
As a result, many Indian tech workers stay in the U.S. on H-1B visas, which are temporary and were designed to address specific short-term business needs. H1-Bs are limited to a maximum of six years; that means you can get it renewed many times, but not past six years. The authorities know about it, so they created provisions to extend it indefinitely for those in the green card line. For workers from India, this basically means we will be on this visa forever and thus bound by its strict criteria and bureaucracy.
The H-1B visa literally ties your life to your job. You can't change roles or employers without facing a long and expensive bureaucratic process for a transfer. I have done it twice, and it has cost me about $6000 and 3 months of work. Not many employers can afford to pay those fees, so there are fewer jobs that sponsor visas. This limits career growth as smaller companies and startups usually don't hire folks on visas.