Diamondeye wrote:
How does any of this have anything to do with it NOT being a loophole?
Loophole generally refers to a rare case of a few people gaming the system, not what is essentially standard procedure where almost everyone uses it.
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They don't have to do the job search every single time which greatly reduces those costs - assuming it actually DOES cost 5 figures to do it; I have no idea where that number comes from. Furthermore, maybe you missed the article about companies actively discouraging and getting rid of American workers?
The article is talking about employers hiring H-2s, they weren't going to sponsor them for residency in the first place and without such sponsorship, they're not actually immigrants.....that's why it's called a "nonimmigrant" visa. The vast majority of people that get permanent residency in the US through employer sponsorship do so by getting an H-1B, E-1, or L visa first.
It's going to cost at least $10,000 to have your company have an immigration attorney do the paperwork for the labor petition and the I-140, run the required ads, and interview any candidates that respond to these ads.
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Surely you can see that it does not actually take that long, since we do not, in fact, have wide varieties of Visas going totally unused? You also may not be aware of it but there's such a thing as "long-range planning" and "forecasting".
Whether or not nonimmigrant visa categories are going totally unused is irrelevant unless employers actually want to sponsor people on these visas as permanent residents. Also, as I explain down below, H and L visas are the only relevant visas that are actually eligible for permanent residency sponsorship in the first place.
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Aside from the fact that you keep trying to explain to me how visas work despite the fact that I was required to learn all of them - and still have the manuals at hand - what you don't seem to understand is that E visas don't prevent you getting a green card by any and all means; it's just that there is no means that pertains to the E visa.
A "change in status" means that some external factor has come into play. For example, if you were to come here as a single adult on an E visa, meet a girl, and get married you could petition for a change in status because now you're the spouse of a US citizen. The E visa never enters into it.
The reason USCIS does not take much action on those obviously-fraudulent oaths by the way is because it's very hard to actually prove what your intent was at the time of the oath beyond a reasonable doubt.
In any case, all you're demonstrating is that our entire system is set up to not be to the benefit of the country.
http://www.americanlaw.com/dintent.htmlIn fact, E visas actually are supposed to prevent you from getting a green card. The Immigration Act of 1990 only recognizes H, K, L, and V visas as being valid for dual intent, you are not supposed to be allowed to seek permanent residency while here on any other visa. USCIS allows E visa holders to seek permanent residency based on the fact that the E visa definition doesn't have the line where it requires that the alien have a foreign residence that they have no intention of abandoning. This really is what you would call a loophole and the rationale is extremely dubious, I'm not sure if it would hold up to actual scrutiny.
Every single person that is present in the US on a nonimmigrant visa that wants to be sponsored for permanent residency has to file for a change in status, you have to change your status from nonimmigrant to immigrant. Seriously, assuming you are already present in the US, this is a baseline requirement of the process. It doesn't matter if you want to change your status because you married a US citizen or because your employer filed for a labor certification, you have to file for this yourself if you want the permanent residency. Since E visas should not recognize dual intent, you should have your E visa revoked the second you attempt to file for change in status, followed by them deporting you, but USCIS just isn't enforcing this.
The only people that don't need to file change in status is the people that aren't in the US at all and were somehow being sponsored for a job without getting the temporary work permit first. However, this rarely happens because, like I said before, very few employers are going to want to file for a labor certification, do the required ads, wait for the labor cert to get approved, then file for an I-140, wait for that to come back, and then hope after some number of years have passed that the person they filed all this for still actually wants this job.
I realize it is hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that all those H and E visa holders that had their employer file a labor petition and filed for change in status immediately after arriving lied when they said they had no intent to immigrate, but the fact remains is that most of them did, and under the assumption that the laws would actually be enforced, none of them would be allowed to immigrate.