1. transcript
  2. More visa woes for high skilled workers in the US

More visa woes for high skilled workers in the US

By apalazzo on July 6, 2007.

If you haven't heard, on July 2nd the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency placed a hold on visas for highly skilled foreign workers. Yes the US government is so crippled, it can't even manage to process the paper work for foreigners it wants to keep in the country. Over lunch I learned that the government maxed out its quota for this year. Why did the government let this happen? I thought that they needed highly skilled foreigners. Link to the USCIS press-room. Link to the press release.

The state of affairs is so bad, Microsoft is planning to open a software development center in Canada to avoid all the US immigration problems.

In a related note, Loling Song, a researcher in our department, has been waiting for 2 years for her green card and may loose her grant from the National Cancer Institute if she doesn't get her work permit soon. She's sued the officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI in US District Court in Boston last week. Read the article in yesterday's Globe.

And it looks like lawyers will get involved in other cases as well.

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"Over lunch I learned that the government maxed out its quota for this year."

this tidbit was actually explained in the IHT article you linked to. A bit of a snafu between the State Dept. and Immigration. oops.

In fact, regarding your blurb about Microsoft, the problem is not the US Immigration. It is that the demand for green cards has become so high from China and India in recent years the current quota has not been increased accordingly to accommodate that demand. Getting a green card in Canada is a trivial one month process compared to the 2+ year process here. Perhaps if we didn't have such a high influx of illegal immigrants every year we could raise the quota for legal highly skilled immigrants.

this tidbit was actually explained in the IHT article you linked to

What's funny is that the original paragraph long article from the International Herald Tribune was replaced by a longer article from the NYTimes (which owns the IHT). And yes this longer article explains the whole situation.

The more you learn, the more the whole green card situation seems crazy.

I don't think that the Microsoft deal is all the US government's fault. Part of it is a societal and cultural difference, where many overseas people are just more comfortable living in Canada than the US...

I hear this all the time from foreign-born healthcare workers up here.