
Why am I leaving the American Dream? - virtuabhi
https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/why-am-i-leaving-the-american-dream-4ea455a8f640
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smenyp
It's really sad how hard it is for an Indian-born migrant. The 10 year wait he
cites is the wait time if one had applied 10 years ago. Current backlogs are
much much worse:

[https://www.cato.org/blog/no-one-knows-how-long-legal-
immigr...](https://www.cato.org/blog/no-one-knows-how-long-legal-immigrants-
will-have-wait)

We're talking of a 25-300 year wait for EB2 applicants born in India. This
includes those engineers at the Googles and Facebooks with a master's degree!

This is entirely because of the 7℅ cap on green cards for applicants from any
one country of birth. If literally India splits into two, highly skilled
immigrants from India would get green cards twice as fast. If instead of being
born in India, one we're born in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, it would be no wait
times.

Another point of note is that the h1b has no country cap. What this
effectively does is allows some body shops to hire Indian born employees at
little above h1b min wage (~$60k), sponsor a green card for them, and keep
them as indentured labour for a long long time.

For most immigrants from elsewhere, the challenge is getting sponsored a visa
and then green card sponsorship. For someone from India (and increasingly
China) that is just the beginning of decades long uncertainty!

Skilled immigration in the US is broken beyond despair.

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reacharavindh
Walking the same path. I thought studying here, getting a "skilled labor
visa", and working for a core tech company would put me in a swift path to the
American dream. Slowly realizing that the elusive dream may not even be
something worth the hazzle. It was certainly fun living in the USA during
early years of learning and first job, but there are better places in the
world to settle down and offer my skills to than here.

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rishabhsagar
Have had the same experience, but instead of US, I decided to stay at UK. Most
of my friends chose to migrate to Australia instead.

Lately I have been wondering if I took the right decision to stay back.

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ttul
And with Trump in the Oval Office, just think how many more great people are
going to end up leaving America.

~~~
michaelbuddy
There's been a huge imbalance from where we've been getting immigrants from.
Prior to what 1960s we got a good chunk of them from europe, and immigrants
were admitted because of skill. After that it was all about numbers from
Mexico and a lot of 3rd world locales. And any immigration work IS a zero sum
game, so the highly educated western cultured people and their intelligent
offspring who were destined to go on to do great things in industry were not
admitted nearly as often.

The point of immigration is for future prosperity. And just because a quote on
the Statue of Liberty makes it seem like the United States is supposed to be
some kind of shelter for anyone the world regardless of background, doesn't
mean that's the case.

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rak00n
It's funny how he got stuck at American dream at the end.

