Breaking the Visa Backlog 109
bart_scriv writes "As anyone who has dealt with H1-B visas can attest, the process can be a nightmare of long lines, waits and inexplicable delays. In this interview, the State Department's Tony Edson discusses what's being done to speed up and expedite the process, ranging from procedural changes to the use of new technology."
What is an H-1B? (Score:2, Informative)
The H-1B is a nonimmigrant classification used by an alien who will be employed temporarily in a specialty occupation or as a fashion model of distinguished merit and ability.
http://uscis.gov/graphics/howdoi/h1b.htm#what/ [uscis.gov]
so many ways to rebut/mock this... (Score:3, Informative)
2- what defines 'ability' of a model?
3- what about distinguished merit and NO ability models like XXX (insert your own answer)
etc...
Re:How about this? (Score:3, Informative)
Not only did the company have to spend on the order of $4K or so on the process, I was paid the same salary as my colleagues PLUS an international service allowance; I was around 15-20% more expensive than my colleagues. I'm sure if the company could have trained a US worker in sufficient time they would have because it'd have saved them quite a bit of money.
Re:I don't mind the wait if it's done right... (Score:2, Informative)
Having been through it (Score:5, Informative)
Take for example this. The US Embassy in London rejected my APPROVED visa application (it was an extension to a visa, and the INS in the United States had approved it, and all the embassy was required to do was to stick a new visa in my passport) because one of the forms was "out of date". So I downloaded the new, up to date form off their website. I couldn't believe it when I looked at it - it was absolutely identical to the old form, except the date at the bottom was different!
On a previous application, they rejected my application because the company I worked for hadn't filled out the form right (according to them; according to our international assignments department, generally they find a formula that works with the forms - and the forms will be processed OK by the Embassy for about 6 months, and then without warning they start rejecting them. Then they have to to-and-fro in a trial and error process until the Embassy begins accepting the forms again. And about 6 months later, the forms start getting rejected again - rinse and repeat). I had to go to London, sit in the Embassy for 4 hours.
The Embassy itself was quite interesting. You sit in this large square room, and at the end are a bunch of bank teller style windows. There is a delicatessen-style number system. You are given a ticket and wait until your number is called. Of course, prior experience with the Embassy means that you know for sure if you miss your number, they will NOT call it out again and you will be sent away - so it's incredibly difficult to do something like read a book to pass the time just in case you miss the number. There are these 'newspapers' they leave too, I think they were called "Going USA". The first half of this paper is devoted to how great the USA is (land of opportunity etc., it seemed mainly to be stories about people who wanted to immigrate to run gas stations), and how awful your home country is by comparison. The second half of this paper is dedicated to telling you how you will never, ever get a visa! So anyway, my number was called. The question?
"How long have you been working for this company"
"3 years so far"
"That's fine" (stamp stamp). "You'll get your passport back in about 3 days"
They could have asked me that over the phone rather than incurring the cost of going all the way to London, waiting 4 hours, and then sending me away.
The Embassy is probably even worse now. I've heard that the ones in India will reject your application unless you turn up in a business suit (but that's just hearsay, I can't substantiate that). They have all sorts of petty bureacratic rules they won't tell you - they just reject applications with nothing except a very vague reason, and you have to keep retrying until you satisfy them (and even then, after a few months, forms that were completely satisfactory are suddenly unsatisfactory with more vague reasons for rejection).
Then there's the obvious bias. An Irish friend of mine actually got naturalized as a US citizen. He's a doctor. There was a family in front of him for one of the interviews done by the INS. They got given a real grilling - not in a private interview room, but in front of everyone in the waiting room. When he got there? "Oh, Doctor Smart, yes this is acceptable" >stampstamp. It seemed like if you were a doctor, you weren't subjected to the INS Dehumanization adn Demoralization Programme.
Re:Here comes the chorus (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, and the Japanese don't know how to manufacture anything that isn't junk, as we all knew back in the 1960s. OK, maybe they could make decent, cheap pocket transistor radio, but not big things like cars.
they wouldn't need to send people here to make money.
This is completely wrong. They send people here to make money because we live in a place where labor is dear and they live in a place where labor is cheap. The problem is that they are starting to look for work at home, because home can no compete with the US.
Furthermore, no innovator is an island. You need a people (skilled) to turn an innovation into a business. Which is the point: you keep the skilled positions here. Finally you need infrastructure: banking, marketing and dsitribution, research institutions, venture capital etc. If the state of these things in the 1970s US was on a par with 1970s India, you wouldn't have had a computer industry develop here, no matter how many geniuses we had.