What’s India’s policy for American tech immigrants? Do they have the equivalent of an H1B? Is it easier to become a resident with fewer strings attached after a fewer number of years?
India allows naturalization after 11 years of residence, all of which can be on time-limited visas. India also appears to grant work/business visas as renewable on a 5 year basis https://www.startupindia.gov.in/content/sih/en/international.... So you can become a resident after 11 years and ~3 visa renewals - you don't need to become a permanent resident first, and indeed, based on a cursory search India only grants permanent residence (without citizenship) for a few reasons that don't seem related to work-immigration. But you still have a clear path to permanent residence through naturalization.
In the US you can be naturalized only if you are already a permanent resident. The issue I'm mentioning is from converting from a temporary visa (like H1b) to a permanent residence (Green Card). It's subject to something called the Green Card quota. If you have an H1b and technically qualify for getting a GC, you can become subject to the quota and remain on the H1b indefinitely. More info: https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-visa/h1b-visa-extension/
Effectively this means you can stay in the US forever on H1b as long as you keep getting the visa renewed, but it's hard to switch jobs because of all the bureaucracy involved, and you don't have a path to citizenship until you get a GC.
While the plight of Indian nationals is undeniable, arbitrary and capricious, I would strongly suggest not citing figures like "Indians must wait 150 years" because it simply won't engender any sympathy at all from anyone not already sympathetic because it's a patently ridiculous claim. People don't live 150 years. Even if they did they don't work for 150 years.
This is a case where simplistic mathematical extrapolation and hyperbole is really (IMHO counterproductive. It actually reminds me of this [1].
> figures like "Indians must wait 150 years" ... it's a patently ridiculous claim.
The wait time is patently ridiculous, not the claim. There is no hyperbole here. The reality is stranger than fiction. The wait time for a green card has been described as lifetime [1], 50 years [2], 150 years [3][4], and 195 years [5].
I agree that people don't live 150 years. But that is how long they need to 'wait' for a green card as per the current system.
Is your argument that the law does not explicitly state that "Indians must wait 150 years for a green card" and therefore the 150 year expected wait time is not true?
The wording of the law does not matter as much as its effect. The law can be weasel worded to seem like it is intended to save baby seals while in practice resulting in a sinister outcome.
> Only half of the original [million] Indian applicants are expected to receive an actual green card.
Whoever wrote that understands this. You do not. There is no 150 year wait time. Either you will die or the people in front of you will die. Somebody is still getting a green card and if you average those wait times it won't be 150 years.
The Newsweek article puts "150 years" in the title without ever substantiating it. Neither does the next one.
The truth here is bad enough. A million Indian nationals in queue. ~10,000 applications approved per year (from the last link). Using hyperbole ("Indian nationals must wait 150 years for green card") undermines the very real and justifiable complaints about the current system.
This is an argument that needs to be fought and won in the court of public opinion in a country that quite famously does not care about immigration at all (other than doing all it can to prevent it). There is enough of an uphill battle to get people to care. "150 years" turns a slim chance into none.
I appreciate you digging into this subject and I will try to respond in good faith as I see it.
I think we are reading 'wait time' differently.
Neither I nor these articles are saying that the average wait time is 150 years.
There is still some lucky Indian out there who applied for his green card in say 2013 who is going to get it soon.
The 150-year wait time applies to the poor Indian soul who applied for one in say 2020, after graduating even let's say top of his class with an MS from MIT in 2019 and is now working on an H1B on cutting-edge AI systems at Tesla.
This latter sucker will never receive a green card in his lifetime because he will die long before he ever gets to the front of the 'Indian line'. As you correctly point out, the '150-year wait time' to him is meaningless and rhetorical and really just means it is not possible.
And the wait time for the guy graduating in 2024 may be 200 years, and that for the guy graduating in 2027 may be 250 years, and so on. The math just gets more arbitrarily untenable.
It is like if the Google search engine, by decree from CEO Sundar Pichai, decided it will only process 1000 search requests per hour from Australia. Well, that would pretty much make Google search unusable for Australia. Yes, by your reasoning, some Australian search requests will always be processed, but the vast and ever-increasing majority will starve.
And when the Australians complain that Google is being unfair to them, the Googlers and say the Norwegians and the Kiwis will gang up against the Australians and self-righteously scream: "get in line like the rest of us!", not really knowing, or knowing but preferring to ignore, that the Australian line is set up to starve by design.
By the way, to make this slightly more interesting, the 10,000 applications approved per year you refer to apply to all family members of the individual requesting the green card. Which means if there are 1,000,000 professionals in the queue, and each professional in the queue has 3 other members in their household, say a spouse and 2 kids, then only 2,500 professionals may be processed for that year, and not the banner headline of 10,000, making the unprocessed queue even longer and longer and longer every year.
And if that is not enough, the agency in charge of processing these applications claims it is 'understaffed', and so if it has 10,000 applications it is approved to process in a given year, it will only process 5,000 applications and precious approvals for the other 5,000 applications will be 'wasted' and 'lost forever' because there is no legal provision to recover them.
Note that advocacy groups have been pushing for legislation to fix this since at least 2011. But there are many powerful interests who benefit greatly from a large group of servile tech workers. And those interests have access to politicians who can hold up such inconvenient legislation indefinitely in exchange for easier and generous fundraising, making for a very profitable quid pro quo.
To the people stuck in this queue, watching this system play out raises feelings similar to that of the little kid on the playground where two larger bullies have grabbed a ball he wanted to play with and are now tossing it to each other just to taunt that little kid. And that kid has pretty much no recourse.
To add, when such a grievance in described in detail, it is hidden by the HN censorship machine. I suppose we should just stick to praising new Stripe products.
You forgot to also ask, how many Americans actually want to immigrate to India? I'll answer that for you since you seem to have more questions than answers: close to zero.
Out of curiosity I looked into the numbers for this. As of 2017, there were 700,000 Americans in India. As of 2018, there were 4.2 million Indians in the US. Dividing by population, that means ~0.2% of Americans are in India and ~0.3% of Indians are in America.
