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Workers - Including Linus - Left in Limbo by INS
Anonymous Coward writes, "Read how the young and highly skilled engineers are being left angry, frustrated and perplexed. The delay in INS processing messes with lives of these people." One specifically mentioned in this
Mercury Center story (published Sunday, Jan. 30) is a gentleman from Finland named Linus Torvalds.
Everyone had better setup marches on congress and turn this into a real election issue.
Al Gore: "Seeing as I fathered Linus Torvalds..."
as the article suggested, security clearance backlog contributes greatly to the green card delay. It takes several months to get the security clearance (almost 6 months for mine, but that's partly due to my place of birth and clearance level). I've heard from several security officers at work that now there's a 6 month backlog now to get your clearance, so I got lucky. If this is true, that's 6 months added to the green card application process. This isn't something that can be put aside.
The people the article is talking about aren't a bunch of unskilled slovenly idiots who know little about English or personal hygiene. These are intelligent, educated people who have come to America to work in silicon valley and are being hired because they are the most qualified for the job at hand. The only people who suffer are people less qualified who would be filling the same jobs if it weren't for those darned immigrants. Don't blame all your problems on foreigners.
I worked for a while for an online Health Care recruiter. We got tonnes of applications from people who didn't follow the instructions that were clearly posted on the site. That took time to clean up.
It also takes a human to judge the merits of a case. Someone might have "too perfect" credentials, therefore arousing suspicion. We had people from overseas (ie not USA or Canada) applying for any job they thought they could do, but that's simply not the case: almost every hospital will simply NOT hire staff without North American experience. *bam* we have to go and un-apply them from the jobs they applied for so they stop coming up on our database searches.
Simply putting records into a database doesn't make the process faster.
Remember the great Conservative promise of "smaller government?"
Basically you fire all the people who do this sort of work, and guess what? It takes longer.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Our application went in September 1997. They said it would take up to 12 months to process. 22 months later we had our preliminary interview. 7 months after that and we still haven't heard anything.
I also like to share the experiences we've had at the office, but I'm already off topic, here. Needless to say, I can think of a lot more appropriate last names for the INS than "service".
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Stupid sexy Flanders.
Compare this to the Chinese students and post-docs in my department. They have to have an interview every time they apply for a visa and the visas are only single entry. A case in point, one of our postdocs was sent to a conference in Italy. His first port of call was obviously the Italian consulate in Boston to get a visa to enter Italy. Now of course he only had a single-entry US visa and had used that entry up on arriving in the US so he had to renew the visa. You can only renew US visas in a US consulate, the nearest to Boston of which is in Montreal. So his second port of call was the Canadian consulate in Boston to get a visa to enter Canada. At the US consulate in Canada he pleaded for a double-entry visa as of course one entry would be used up returning to the US.
Luckily, we have a large contingent of Chinese students and researchers who are well versed in this circus.
So there you have it, a trip to Milan requiring several months of planning and a considerable amount of cash. But at least he learnt that not all Western cuisine sucks...
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
I'm Brazilian by "jus solis" (right of birth) and Finnish by "jus sanguinis" (right of blood). According to both countries' legislation, I have the right to dual citizenship. I have birth certificates and voter registrations in both. I'm a Brazilian citizen and a Finnish (i.e., by extension, European Union) citizen. I choose to live and work in Brazil, theoretically the poorest country. Why? Because I have lived in Europe, and South America, and in the USA, and I feel that Brazil, despite all its problems, all things accounted for, offers the best qualtity of life. I'm an aerospace engineer, and, if you think Brazil is a backwards country in this respect, you don't know anything about the aerospace industry.
The name: Linus. Linus Torvalds. Designation?
"Alien of extraordinary ability"
Call out Mulder and Scully. We've got one.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Official US Visa Site
If you are from a low-immigration country (i.e. from Western and Cenral Europe, Oceania, etc) you might be better off trying for the DV visas, i.e. lottery visas. That was my ticket to a Green Card. The odds for a European are actually good (one in 12 I think) and the maximum processing time (i.e. mail-in of the lottery entry to actual Green Card) is at most 24 months.
If you have the option to go for GC (Adjustment of Status) processing to your home country, go for it. Embassies usually have to deal with fewer applications and are easier to get a handle of than the INS. If you have a good chance to get the GC (most people do), you don't even have to worry about your current visa.
Check out misc.immigration.usa on Usenet. A great medium-traffic forum (hopefully it will still be after being mentioned here) with a lot of old-timer immigrants that already have been through most of the INS bureacracy.
;-)...
As for the whiners: INS is by far the worst US government service. It's quite easy to suck this bad when the people you deal with have no political power whatsoever. Maybe we should get a PAC going
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
A business, for instance, has a wonderful incentive to respond to needs: if it doesn't, it will lose out to competitors. If Intel kept pushing first-generation Pentiums while AMD was developing K6 and K7 chips -- and the market needed speed -- Intel would lose out; they would first have become less profitable, and finally would go out of business.
A skilled laborer (for instance, a coder or sysadmin) has a similar incentive. If all you know is Windows NT, but Windows NT is in decline and being replaced by Unix, you have an incentive to learn Unix. If you don't, you will find your skills not worth as much money.
Business and laborers exist in a market relationship with their clients. In order to make more money, businesses have to fill the needs of their customers, and laborers have to fill the needs of their employers. If you're not good at this, you get less money, or (worse yet) you either go out of business (if you're a business) or you lose your job (if you're a laborer).
Governments do not exist in a market relationship with their "clients" -- the residents (citizens and resident aliens) of their territories. A government has a monopoly. Unless it does something seriously bogus and gets kicked out in a revolution, coup, or major political upheaval, it's just gonna sit there and fester.
Hence, governments do not have the kind of incentive to correct shortages that businesses and laborers do. If there's a shortage of beer, the price will go up, causing more businesses to make more beer -- solving the shortage. If there's a shortage of Linux sysadmins, the salaries will go up, attracting more skilled people to the field -- solving the shortage. But if there's a shortage of green cards -- what incentive has INS to act?
INS is not responsible to its nominal clients (the resident aliens and their employers). One could say that it is responsible to the American citizenry through the democratic process, but this responsibility is so very diffuse it is more or less nonexistent. A fussy article in the newspaper does not constitute "being held responsible", sad to say: immigration is not a big-ticket issue in most parts of the country.
When you entrust a particular power to a government bureau -- when you take a certain kind of decision-making out of the hands of individuals in the market -- you will necessarily lose efficiency, because bureaucrats have so little incentive to accurately and speedily meet needs. And in this case, I don't think we get enough benefit out of the process to justify that inefficiency, and these injustices.
End restrictive immigrations laws. Let law-abiding people like Linus Torvalds work wherever people are hiring.
As one who is experiencing the hell that is Adjustment of Status on a first hand basis, let me tell you that it truly sucks. I am a natural born US citizen, and my wife is Chilean. We were married 2 1/2 years ago and hope to finish her Adjustment of Status in about 5 months (of course 2 years ago they said 1 year). As far as Green Cards go, marriage to a citizen is the simplest option. There is no security check or per country quotas, but it takes forever (although less than H1 apparently). She can work without restriction in the meantime, thankfully, but needs to reapply yearly. She can't leave the country without special permission, even to visit a grandfather who had a heart attack recently (not sick enough). We have spent all told about 48 hours on line at the INS, travelled 400 miles on LA freeways, and spent $600 on paperwork. We would gladly have spent more if it meant the process would go any faster.
On the INS website, you can see the lie inherent in their claim of having too large a workload. Their workload has remained roughly constant for the last 3 years, but the backlog has increased substantially.
Why does it take so long? The answer is partly that those who are against legal or illegal immigration don't support steps that would make the INS more efficient and (god forbid) friendly. That being said, the fault is mostly borne by the INS itself.
It is a beauracracy which was left behind by reengineering and the computer revolution. I have not seen a single computer at the main INS office in LA. Proof of payment is a cash register receipt, correspondence is often hand written and hand stamped. The receipt letter for the Adjustment of Status (hand written) refers to a "Crate #" and I have no doubt that there is indeed an actual crate involved.
The INS website has some half-assed proposals for restructuring it's operation, but none go nearly far enough. I think the document processing of the INS should be privatized. A company like EDS would be happy to streamline and automate the data collection and verification part of the application process, leaving only the decisions to the INS. In fact I believe that the immigration part of the INS should go to the State Department, which already handles visas and does a decent job, leaving the border patrol and adjudication in the hands of the Justice Department.
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
Ok, people, we all know this sucks and all, and we'd hate to see Linus deported and blah, blah, blah.
r -ass day. Tell them about the problem. Yes, you red-blooded Americans who can or will soon be able to vote. Even you skilled immigrants who can not yet vote have some influence, since most politicians like to have friends with the tech crowd (people with money) and besides, you could be voting before too long if all this paperwork gets cleared, should you desire to become full citizens.
How about we do something about it? The legislature has the power to reform the system, but they won't do it if they think it's more important to be declaring a national standing-on-your-head-and-blowing-bubbles-out-you
Before you go running off spamming your local representatives, please remember a few things:
1) Be polite.
2) Write a real letter, don't expect hyperlinks to explain themselves, as a recent story on slashdot revealed that our Senators and Representatives may not be very adroit with e-mail, and they may be seeing it on paper. Or, if you can bring yourself to it, snd it snail-mail. They read those things.
3) Don't dis the U.S. It won't be received kindly.
Now, here are your links:
To find and contact your Congressional district representative, go to http://www.house.gov/writerep/
For a full list of Senators and their websites/e-mail addresses, go to http://www.senate.gov/contacting/index.c fm
So let's stop standing on our heads, blowing bubbles out our asses, and help these people out.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I'm a British Citizen - and I was invited to come to the US - I didn't ask to come. The large defense company I work for couldn't find anyone in the US to do the job I do. Not at any money. I have an unusual skill set - and I'm very good at what I do.
So, I negotiated a good salary - and flew over with my family, having been told that my Green Card would take between a year and eighteen months to arrive. That seemed pretty reasonable.
To start with, my job was stimulating - but jobs change. Now, I find my work is stifling to my creativity and I need a change.
I've been waiting for SIX YEARS for my Green Card - and as far as I can tell, it's still about a year away. I strongly suspect that my employer has deliberately dragged it's heels to string out the process.
Meanwhile, I'm stuck in the same job - I can't get promoted - the company cannot change my job title because that would put the application process right back to square one.
I'm still working for the exact same salary that I had the day I came here. My company has no incentive to give me a pay rise (even though they rate me 'exemplary' in my annual reviews) - because they KNOW I can't change jobs.
I could go back home to England - but I have a house, two cars and my son (who was just three years old when we arrived) has now turned nine. He has (necessarily) been brought up as an American kid so he would fit in with US schools - and it would be grossly unfair to force him to change.
This is why they call it 'GreenCard Jail'.
The situation won't improve because Green Card
prisoners don't have a vote - so there is little incentive for government to put money into fixing the problem.
What is happening to me right now is (in effect) slavery. A slave who has enough to eat, a comfortable place to stay - and even a nice car - is still a slave. This is a matter of freedom - not pay.
www.sjbaker.org
I'm all for INS reform and efficiency, but I'm not for open borders.
Why's that? Because I'm a selfish bastard. In the US we enjoy a a high standard of living based on a morally repugnant history of extreme exploitation of human and natural resources and I'm not about to give it up by expanding the pie. During our expansion, we used cheap labor from wherever we could get it, especially immigrants to build infrastructure and manufacturing. As we enter an increasingly service economy, the need for such cheap labor to spur growth has diminished significantly. It is far more efficient in a global economy to exploit immigrants before they emigrate by building production facilities in their country of origin.
What we still need in the US are highly skilled workers. I don't care where they come from and I don't care if they "take my job." Frankly there is no such thing as "taking my job", except perhaps in extremely highly specialized fields which are in decline anyway. H-1B is bad not because it takes away jobs but because it creates an artificial market where the worker is not free to persue the best salary in presumably the most productive position.
Don't think of the US as a benefactor. We never have been an never will be. Think of the US as the Microsoft of the world. We have extreme monopoly powers which we exploit for phenomenal profits and control. Everybody hates us, even our "partners." We're living high on the hog now, but we'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes (except esr of course, since he has a gun).
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I have no problem with people coming to the U.S. from other countries either for education or to work, then going "back home."
Example: Abi, journalist I know from Nigeria, came to the U.S. and worked his way through a PhD in Mass Communications driving a cab. Now he's back home, infested with our American ideals - which may be flawed but still have a lot of good in them - and he is *not* going to put up with a corrupt military dictatorship.
Think of Abi and others like him as a human version of GNU-style "viral marketing." Think of the Chinese government telling its citizens that life under the Chinese system of government is better than life under the American system while thousands of Chinese who have studied or worked in the U.S. busily say otherwise based on first-hand knowledge.
Think of the Indians who have lived in the U.S. and go home with ideas of how things can be done differently in their country and work for change, not necessarily to make India into a clone of the U.S., but to incorporate the best of both cultures into something new and potentially better than either of the originals.
Mexico? Legal or illegal, a Mexican immigrant who sends money home is helping to raise the standard of living in his home village or barrio to the point where, someday, his sons or grandsons won't have any reason to go to the U.S. to earn a decent wage.
I am not saying I don't want people from Mexico or China or Egypt (or Finland) to be frozen out of U.S. citizenship, just that the ones who stay here for a while, then go "home," are also worthwhile. If nothing else, they are likely to be better friends of the U.S. than their neighbors who have never worked and lived here.
- Robin