Whenever stuff like this happens, the chuds, both inside and outside the WH, start searching for ancient texts that would support their positions. Invariably, there will be the "actually, the INA says ..." crowd in the comments. To these people, I would like to point out laws that have been passed in this century that speak precisely to this issue. The law is appropriately called "American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act of 2000", for which USCIS maintains this page https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-7-part-e-chapter-....
That is completely orthogonal. Whether any non-immigrant visa program should or should not be continued is immaterial. The topic at hand is about adjusting status to permanent residency, for which you need to independently satisfy the criteria for permanent residency. The admin is proposing asking people to go out of the US for their interviews as opposed to an interview in the US. The admin can just as easily deny AOS in the US, but people have more rights in the US and can seek legal recourse. They cannot outside the US.
This sounds quite non-sensical. The statutory pathway is employment based immigrant visas (EB 1 through 5). I don't get why you bring up H-1B into the discussion. If you are looking for congressional intent for this H-1B->EB AOS path, Congress passed AC21 precisely to address this path.
Or perhaps they mean the same thing as was meant by the slogan when it was first coined, around the time of the American Revolution, and the same thing as was meant by the women's suffragists who used it in the late 19th century.
Maybe in some sense "no taxation without suffrage" would be more accurate, but it would be a worse slogan. In any case, "no taxation without representation" is a well known phrase, it's been around for over 250 years, and I don't think much is achieved by nitpicking its wording.
You do have congressional representatives and senators who represent you and your interests and can take action on your behalf just as they would if you were a citizen. I have had decent luck in getting assistance from them despite not being a citizen.
Yes and colonial Americans had personages they didn't choose representing their interests at court so clearly that was not what they meant by it, let alone as members of the British empire their interests were represented by the king the highest position in the land...
To exist is to be taxed. If you exist at all in the US, you will be taxed. You may even be taxed even if you are not in the US. So saying that taxation somehow implies voting ability would be quite absurd. This doesn't hold true anywhere in the world.
When someone says "No taxation without representation!" they don't mean "As a matter of fact, no one ever gets taxed by a government they don't have the power to vote for or against". (If that were true, there'd be no need to demand it.)
They mean "I would like our government to stop taxing people who don't get to vote for it" or "It is unjust for a government to tax people who don't get to vote for it" or something of that sort.
The fact that things aren't already the way you want them to be doesn't make it absurd to demand that they change to be that way.
(You might argument that governments don't give a damn what anyone demands and for that reason it is absurd to demand change. But I think that in fact governments do take notice of what people want, if they fear what the people might do if they don't get it. Whether that's voting them out of office or putting their heads on pikes or anything in between. And they will take more notice if more people are demanding whatever it is, and a large part of the point of saying things like "No taxation without representation!" is to get other people who aren't in the government to sympathize with your cause and maybe start demanding the same thing. So I think it's manifestly not absurd to make such demands, as such. Some particular demands -- "No taxation without $1M/year universal basic income!" -- would be absurd, but this one seems obviously not to be in that category.)
There is a typical ladder here though of non-immigrant/temp visitor, legal permanent resident, and citizen. The main practical distinction bw the last two is the ability to vote and hold office. What concretely is the demand here? That the last two should effectively merge into one? Or is it that everybody along this ladder should get to vote and that citizenship is a separate axis?
The demand is that there shouldn't be anywhere on that ladder where you are expected to pay taxes and aren't given the right to vote.
Is it a sensible demand? I dunno. Some people have thought so. Some other people have thought not. I'm not trying to settle that question; just trying to bring some clarity as to what the issue is.
Not Peter. All your domestic stuff can probably be resolved by a skilled attorney, but travel definitely has risks. You can't do anything if you are denied entry or if your visa renewal is denied. There is virtually no legal recourse.
The specificied purpose of PERM is to to fill a position that otherwiswe can't be filled by a US LPR or citizen..
If you need to hide your job postings on an internal physical caulk board in a basement and post them in only physical copies of The Columbus Dispatch then it should be pretty clear you're not following the spirit of the program. If, even after doing that, you then disqualify candidates for pretty fake reasons and you somehow still have qualified candidates so you pull the position and try again in 6-12 months then you should absolutely fail a USCIS audit and you should lose your privileges for hiring foreign workers and sponsoring people for residency, at least for a time.
Legitimate employers and jobs can't get a visa in the H1B lottery because of widespread visa abuse. People from certain countries (particularly India) have to wait 10-15+ years because of abuse of the system. Fake employers with H1B schemes, bodyshops that really pay below prevailing wage and can keep Indian-born people as effectively indentured servants, spamming the system with H1B applications because they don't really care how many they get.
We're in permanent layoff culture now where pretty much every sufficiently-sized employer will probably fire 5-10% of their staff every year while still hiring people. This is to suppress wages and make people do more work for free. There should be a cost to this.
If you're an immigrant, a completely arbitrary layoff can be devastating. You have a short period to find a new job and if you don't, you have to leave the country. Employers who will do that to immigrants shouldn't be alloweed to hire immigrants.
You can be both pro-immigration and anti-immigration abuse.
You are conflating several unrelated issues. In your previous post, you expressed how you wish PERM worked ("I also think that doing layoffs in the US should disqualify you from doing any PERM or sponsoring any visa for 2-3 years."), to which my response was why have PERM at all. You are still talking about how you wish the world worked. There are a lot of shoulds in your reply. PERM, H-1B, etc. all exist as a carefully brokered compromise bw different factions that want different things. It is the correct amount of broken by design. Posting in a Sunday newspaper is a requirement in the regulations. Everyone is in the right amount of compliance to maintain equilibrium. There are any number of things that could be or should be, but aren't.
There is no legitimate reason to allow body shops to participate in the H1B program. They aren't creating the jobs that need to be filled. They're just parasites who are responsible for the majority of the fraud.
certain employers can use h1bs to fill specific employment needs really well, and have a ton of experience with both sourcing foreign labour and matching it to work that needs doing in the US.
its doing exactly what the program is looking for, filling a labour quantity at the price employers are looking for.
The US government is optimizing for being able to do some volume of technical work, and the the h1 is intended to make sure that the industry isnt limited by labour availability. its not particularly abusive to do that in an efficient way where the same h1b can serve many businesses
the alternative thats coming is going to be moving a lot of the work to india and instead having the local engineers be liasons for where the real work is happening
people in india havw to wait long periods because the green card system of country limits has no per capita normalization, not because of h1 visa abuse. its sheer volume of good people working for american companies in america, wanting to stay in america. Your anti-abuse metrics will bring it down from 15 years to 13 or 14. not a meaningful difference
Nothing will convince me that the likes of Tata and Infosys are a good use of H1Bs. And because they flood the system with H1B applications, other actually valuable positions go unfilled.
If the customers for these bodyshops could save money by outsourcing directly to India, they would've already.
And beyond those big bodyshops you have any number of smaller H1B fraud schemes eg [1][2][3][4].
If you're Indian-born and are waiting 10-15+ years for your green card then you should be mad about these companies because they're making your life more difficult.
> The US government is optimizing for being able to do some volume of technical work, and the the h1 is intended to make sure that the industry isnt limited by labour availability
First, I disagree with this claim. The US government is optimizing to suppress wages.
Second, when there's significant unemployment in the sector then there is by definition availability. It further goes to my argument that the main purpose is to suppress wages.
> If the customers for these bodyshops could save money by outsourcing directly to India, they would've already.
I worked for a company that did this. They had no H1Bs but did have an Indian subsidiary. The problem is you only get the third tier workers who can't make it into the body shops. Plus you have to deal with the time disparity.
>and locals getting priced out by immigrants who work for tech companies basically characterizes the demographic trajectory of my hometown.
That's on the locals. They are being priced out because they don't want to build any housing (NIMBYism) nor do they want to pay taxes on property (Prop 13). Don't blame immigrants for the policy failures of the bay area. These failures extend to all of CA and predate tech immigrants.
