The Virtual March on Washington for Immigration | Hacker News Reader

The Virtual March on Washington for Immigration

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31 pointssethbannon12 comments

> "In South Korea, Spain and Switzerland, 80% of permanent visas are used for employment. For Britain, Germany and Italy, it's 60%. For the U.S., it's only 7%. For a skilled worker, it's actually harder to come to America."

As a Canadian expat in the US, dear God is this ever true.

The US doesn't have a skilled immigration program. It has a work visa moonlighting as immigration policy. Any reform of the H-1B program is IMO just band-aids - what the US needs is an actual immigration track for skilled people in the same vein as Canada and Australia.

I guess it's a moot point in our industry though. The tech industry in the US so massively out-pays every other country, and out-performs, that most of us will jump through an awful lot of hoops to be here. For me going back home would mean a 60% pay cut and a life writing bad Java code for big banks.

Comparing such things needs to be done carefully. The fact that for US this percentage is lower may also mean US issues a real lot on non-employment-based immigrant visas and Switzerland does not. I.e. not that it is hard for skilled worker to come to America (I personally don't think it's actually much harder than for other developed countries) but it's probably easier for non-skilled one.

If I recall correctly, EB1 and EB2 visas are skill-based immigration visas. IMO H1-B serves the purpose of allowing skilled workers temporarily in the US

EB1/EB2 are not Visas, they are Green Card filing categories. You typically file for EB1/EB2 while you are on H1-B.

Thanks for pointing that out. But the point that I'm making still holds: there does exist a program to allow skilled immigrants to enter the US

The path to permanent residency is however pretty slow. If you are from India or China and your filing is in the EB3 category, at the rate things are moving now it could take upto 50 yrs

Although this Immigration Innovation act that's going around will apparently get rid of the per-country limitation, meaning the entire world will get to enjoy multi-decade wait times and not just China and India.

the US is where a lot of the interesting innovation happens, latest product launches and technologies are here. I think that has a lot to do with why people want to be here

What exactly do they mean by a "virtual march"? Thunderclap? Really, that's what digital activism has devolved into?

Sort of wondering that as well...clog the "virtual streets" of Washington's network backbone with a civil disobedience DoS?

non-distributed Denial of Service: an activity with the philosophical significance of street protest, almost zero cultural recognition or visibility for your message, and a more severe judicial remedy than actually sneaking a bomb into the server room.

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