>>> It is in every way a demeaning and torturous process. You get treated like second class human beings and are forced to fight and prove you deserve something others were simply born with
Did you have a very bad experience with US immigration? I've been dealing with it for a couple of decades, from non immigrant visas to GC and while its definitely a pain in the ass, it hasn't been anything like that^.
There's a lot of waiting, and a lot of uncertainty and anxiety but it was never personal for me or anyone I know.
There was just a few days ago an AMA by a US immigration lawyer filed to the brim with stories of rich tech workers in all sorts of ridiculous scenarios at the hands of absurd US immigration policy and personnel.
Personally I got married due to visa issues and then had to leave the US for a year and a half (spent in London) until we got the greencard. This and all the paperwork and the shitty way they talk to people at the border is nothing compared to the other people I know that either couldn’t work (or their spouse couldn’t work) due to the visa type OR they were slaves of their employers til they got their greencard. Fuck US immigration.
That being said I’ve heard my country (France) isn’t that much better when it comes to handling immigration.
The way that immigration is handled by many countries is just as bad, if not way worse. So when pointing the finger, many need to also look at the immigration policies of their own countries, to get a balanced perspective.
My experience matched yours, and I am not Caucasian, but I completed mine well over a decade ago and it was a normal application.
I believe immigration policy has had a major change around seven years ago for the worse. This is anecdotal, but one of my uni friends is a from an allied country (S Korea) and he had a terrible experience. I don’t remember all the details, but the process seems years longer now and they treated him like he was an enemy spy even though he’s been here for decades prior, has published several papers, and likely has no connections with anything sketchy. Most people would have just said fuck it and went back home. Thankfully, he endured and is now tenured as a CompE prof.
Imo the US is likely no longer reaping the benefits from the brain drain due to the new draconian policies for legal immigration. It is a dumb (or even racist) overreaction when you lump in even people from allied countries in light of the chip war
The only thing I can say is that yes I had bad experiences with them. The kinds of scrutiny and restrictions they put on me made me feel like a criminal even though I have not even a speeding ticket in this country. I am not comfortable saying anything else.
May I ask what is your birth country? From what I know, it depends a lot on where you come from.
the us immigration system is deeply dehumanizing. The presumptions, control, classism, the authoritarian language, the implication that access to some perfect garden is being granted, that the lucky recipient will never want to leave...
it's like some performative piece of propaganda, that you' must participate in, enthusiastically, in order to get the reward. (permission from the state to enter "it's" borders.)
at a prior company, a coworker was a young, single, pakistani male. the company was remote-first, did company meetups twice a year. About 30 or 40 people, maybe.
Anyway, every time he entered the USA, we'd lament together about the litany of indignities he'd suffer at the hands of various authorities. It was sort of like filling out a bingo card.
I did a lot of apologizing, and explaining how xenophobia has been baked deeply into american institutions.
As the US citizen partner to an immigrant who now has their green card from our marriage, it was anything but simple. It is definitely the simplest way, by far, but it is not simple. It was very eye opening to me to see the journey from the inside.
I'm a natural-born US citizen and it has repeatedly been a serious pain for me. One such case... I was managing a team that was hiring someone away from another company. That person was in the US on an H-1B visa. When we put in the application to transfer her visa, the government responded with an RFE (Request For Evidence). They wanted evidence that we truly needed her skills, that we couldn't find a US citizen with the same skills, and that we weren't just a staffing agency (the last one was silly - the company is a household name in the US with a large engineering org and no connection whatsoever to staffing).
Our immigration lawyers' first advice was to rescind the offer as it wasn't worth the work unless the new hire was truly exceptional. This was at a time when RFE success rates where at an all time low (our lawyers told us to expect a 90% chance of failure). We believed she was worth it, so we decided to move forward. The lawyers also told us that we only get one shot - there is no second chance or appeal. So you must provide overwhelming evidence.
It consumed my time for weeks, making all kinds of other things fall behind, all with no guarantee of paying off. And she was riddled with stress throughout the process. The lawyers gave me a laundry list of tasks to do. I ended up producing ~100 pages of documentation about what the team did, what she would do in a typical day, examples of what her work product would be, how it was connected to the company's business, and why it required a graduate degree in mathematics. Some of that was difficult as our lawyers said I couldn't reveal the nature of our proprietary algorithms because these documents are treated as private. On top of demonstrating that it required a graduate degree, we had to demonstrate why a US citizen with nothing more than a high school education could not do the job (and evidence that a PhD in math was needed was not enough according to our lawyers).
Part of it involved me spending two hours being interviewed by a math prof from a top US university. The first hour was convincing him that I knew enough math to know what I was talking about (kind of like my first math final in 30 years). Then explaining enough about the systems the team worked on to convince him that it required an advanced math degree. Luckily he was fascinated by our problems/solutions and every idea he brought up about approaches to try were things we had already incorporated or ruled out. Helping him understand why they did / did not work ended up being pretty convincing.
After we supplied our RFE response, we waited for another month or two. Luckily her transfer was approved. She started a week later and I'm glad we put in the work - she was amazing.
To tie it back to the article, two years later she left to move back to China because she wanted to have kids and she didn't want them exposed to the overt racism that she faced in the US (especially the horrific behavior she faced in the weeks leading up to lockdown). And going back was no easy task. She applied for jobs at ~20 companies there. She received two offers and took one of them in Beijing. When she got there, she learned that they had over 1,000 applicants with PhDs for the single position she filled. It's hard to imagine that level of competition. We wouldn't have had to go through the RFE pain if so much talent were available in the US. But she was happy to face that competition to raise her kids in China.
Did you have a very bad experience with US immigration? I've been dealing with it for a couple of decades, from non immigrant visas to GC and while its definitely a pain in the ass, it hasn't been anything like that^.
There's a lot of waiting, and a lot of uncertainty and anxiety but it was never personal for me or anyone I know.