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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..."
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.
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!"