If your primary point of "this is garbage" is because it's funded by labor unions, you've got bigger problems than your flawed logic.
If tech companies were less focused on H1-Bs in particular, and were simply advocating for more high skill workers to be given green cards, I'd have an easier time taking them at their word. But they're not. They only want people admitted under terms that strip them of negotiating power, and there's no publicly defensible reason for that.
I mean, the optics are just terrible. In the long run, I don't see how this doesn't come back to bite the companies involved.
For employment-based green cards you generally have to get PERM labor certification (where the sponsoring employer literally advertises your job and has to show that there aren't American citizens/green card holders who can do it). That takes a while on its own (weeks, generally months).
Then depending on your education/experience, you get a date which corresponds to your position in an immigrant visa queue. The more education/experience you have the higher the queue you can sit in, and it's done by birth country (not citizenship). There are separate queues for China, India, Mexico, Philippines, and "everywhere else." If you have a graduate degree, significant job experience directly related to the US position, or some skill the lawyers can pass off as highly rare/sought after, you might end up in the EB-1/EB-2 queues which are quite short (if you entered the queue today you'd already be at the front). In which case the processing time might only be a few weeks/months.
Or you could end up in the EB-3 queue (bachelor's or equivalent experience a.k.a. many software engineers). Right now people who entered the queue 2 years ago are at the front if they're not from China/India/Mexico/Philippines (http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy...), 4 years ago for China, and 11 years ago for India.
Once you get to the front of that queue, you need to "adjust status" which means a physical exam, fingerprinting, and other busy work none of which appear to be based on country of origin. You could end up here for a few months or over a year, it's hard to know until you find out what USCIS service center is processing your case and can look up historical data. Until you get to the end of this you're technically still bound to your employer though there are some loopholes. Adjustment of status can take sufficiently long that the government passed a law in 2000 allowing green card petitions in this state to be fully portable across employers after 180 days.