The interesting part here is he finally got his green card after 18 years only because he married an Australian citizen and wasn’t blocked by the county quota anymore.
Imagine how frustrating it must be being qualified, living in the country for decades and still blocked from residency all because you were born somewhere, it’s something you have no control over
I know a professor of computer science at arguably the best cs program in the world who is an Indian citizen and was only able to get a green card because he is married to a citizen of a western european country. The system is completely fucked for Indian and Chinese citizens. Absolutely egregiously so.
This is one of the reasons why I find the "just wait in line" argument so disingenuous. If it takes a world expert in a high importance topics literal decades to get a green card then there simply isn't a legitimate path available to people.
> If it takes a world expert in a high importance topics literal decades to get a green card
For what it's worth, sounds like the professor would have qualified under the EB1A/B scheme, which even for Indians is "Current". The qualifications are not very hard to meet for someone working as a professor, or even a postdoctoral researcher.
I mean, anywhere you immigrate to, you have less rights than someone born there despite the fact that they didn’t do anything to get that citizenship.
It’s pretty atrocious though that people born in India have to wait in line for decades or, like that person and many of my colleagues, have to marry someone who is not born there, while all the French people I know in the US got their green cards in 1-5 years.
Immigrants understand they have less rights and if they want to go there or stay permanently they have to earn their place through whatever qualifications the host country mandates.
The primary complaint here is the massively different waiting period for the same employment based green card category (qualifications) between a potential immigrant born in India (multiple decades) versus let’s say Germany (maybe a year). It’s an immutable qualification.
One is a developing country of 1.2B people with limited opportunities. The other is 80M people with high living standards. There aren't even that many French greencard seekers so the quota goes unfulfilled almost every year. Meanwhile, Congress has instituted hard limits on greencards that India and China have the largest share of and manage to hit the limits every year, for decades.
This is a big reason to have children who are american citizens. The children can then pay several tens of thousands of dollars once they're adults to sponsor their parents. Two decades is a shorter wait.
Yep, unfortunately this is a known strategy so if one is pregnant and trying to go to the states (like a vacation or business, unrelated to birth) immigration will give you a ton of shit.
Imagine how frustrating it must be being qualified, living in the country for decades and still blocked from residency all because you were born somewhere, it’s something you have no control over