Skilled immigrants flee US

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32172403/ns ... d_business

Great article!

Correct me if I'm out of the loop but does it really take that long to obtain PR status after the petition has been made?

They say Canadians don't get preferential treatment but a friend of mine received her green card in May. Her company applied for her in 2007. To me the timing was short and she is a Tech writer. She went from TN to GC. Is it because less Canadians migrate to the U.S.?

well the long wait is mostly for people from China and India...Canadians have it easy and takes 2 years or so if you have an advanced degree.

I think it depends on the country you're coming from, and the quotas allowed for that country, and how many applicants are currently in processing. I have a friend from England whose been waiting over 5 years for an employer sponsored green card.

As the article mentions though, there is more immigration from Asian countries, so they wait longer because the quotas are small compared to the number of immigrants.

I think it depends on the country you're coming from, and the quotas allowed for that country, and how many applicants are currently in processing. I have a friend from England whose been waiting over 5 years for an employer sponsored green card.

As the article mentions though, there is more immigration from Asian countries, so they wait longer because the quotas are small compared to the number of immigrants.

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this is correct for the most part, except that it seems to depend on not where you are coming from but really the country of birth. So if you are born in China and a citizen of Japan, you would be in the China queue. Hope things have changed, this was how it was in 1999.

There are only 140,000 employment-based visas available every year, and they are divided into preference categories and by nationality as well, so if you are from China or India (pop. 1 billion+) and are EB-3 skilled worker you're in for a hell of a wait. There is a provision that allows you to carry on renewing H-1B as well after six years provided you are all the way through the I-140 process and are just waiting for your number to come up so you can do AOS.

Canadians have it easier because Canada is closer, so you could for example have the employer just use your Canadian address on the I-140 and do whatever you want to do in Canada and only work for them on TN-1 or H-1B while you're in the US. It's not really viable to commute from China or India. What all the IT people do is end up working over VPN.

What makes it bizarre is that person A gets paid $100,000 for being flown over from India and doing the work in the US, but the same person could be doing the same job and even in the same office (but remotely) and earn a tiny fraction of that. So the only reason to be in the US is to get paid more money.

Schumer (as usual) is talking a lot of nonsense in that article, people who are really at the top with master's and doctorates are already preferred on EB-1 and EB-2 and usually get employment-based visas fairly easily anyway. The problem the US has got is not enough people in certain skilled trades and so on, so instead those people have to get in via family-based immigration which is not efficient, or illegally.

But anyone suggesting that more pipe-fitters be let in from Mexico gets roasted politically. That's the US immigration debate.

[quote="Steven"]There are only 140,000 employment-based visas available every year, and they are divided into preference categories and by nationality as well, so if you are from China or India (pop. 1 billion+) and are EB-3 skilled worker you're in for a hell of a wait.

What makes it bizarre is that person A gets paid $100,000 for being flown over from India and doing the work in the US, but the same person could be doing the same job and even in the same office (but remotely) and earn a tiny fraction of that. So the only reason to be in the US is to get paid more money.

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Ya, to just go without a very good job offer is really not very logical as you pointed out. Being on any work permit sucks big time....so it really needs to make sense, unless you are there for other reasons like specific industry experience, it is a real career move (non-money related) etc.

Well, the usual mistake people make (although sometimes it does work out) is that they think they'll meet someone and get married. But usually because of the circumstances the person they end up meeting is in some sort of non-immigrant category too so they're even more screwed! When I lived in the US, I knew a girl from Venezuela who got married to someone from the UK and she didn't want to move to the UK and he didn't want to move to Venezuela so I have no idea what they ended up doing.

Well, the usual mistake people make (although sometimes it does work out) is that they think they'll meet someone and get married. But usually because of the circumstances the person they end up meeting is in some sort of non-immigrant category too so they're even more screwed! When I lived in the US, I knew a girl from Venezuela who got married to someone from the UK and she didn't want to move to the UK and he didn't want to move to Venezuela so I have no idea what they ended up doing.

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I met many in the US during my time there in similar boats..while it can be really exciting in my opinion to meet someone from another country, it could be difficult to make the practical side work.

But that is really the ultimate in terms of pure excitement; meeting someone from another country in a third...