We did this, sort of. The American (me) founded the company and we sponsored the employee (my partner). It was expensive, but not the numbers quoted in this thread. The catch: it can’t be a “shell company,” it has to be a real business. Everyone we talk to assumes we’re committing fraud: we’re not. That business is my partner’s ONLY source of income, and he has no option to change that while in this country.
There are some other major drawbacks: it’s a pain to establish a business and keep it going. It’s expensive: we bring in money, then we pay his employment taxes, then we pay his personal taxes. There’s not a lot left over. It’s not a path to permanent residency, so “when will they deny the visa extension?” is always a question. (His country, the non-Northern-Ireland part of the UK, is never up for the diversity lottery.) Basically, while you CAN do this, I don’t recommend it based on experience. We decided not to renew his visa this fall and we’re leaving simply because the stress of impermanence is too much.
If I read the wiki article correctly, the quota situation isn’t so bad right now - it took 5 months for the 2010 quota to fill up. But only because there were fewer applicants (i.e. fewer companies are hiring and sponsoring their new employees).
Also, getting an H-1B can be easier in academia because universities and government research facilities are exempt from the H-1B quota. But on the downside, most such jobs require postgraduate degrees.
note that there is one big difference here between your anecdote and his question: the immigrant is not the one starting the business.
what you effectively did was go getting an employment-based non-immigrant visa for your partner. you can probably attempt to get an immigrant visa in this same fashion, but it’d cost exponentially more time and effort (because at that point you have to deal with the Department of Labor and their clearance may not be so forthcoming if you’re running a mom-and-pop outfit and trying to convince them that there’s no US citizen who can do this). at that point, if your partner is of the opposite sex (which I would infer is not the case with you) it’s just easier to get married.
I don’t know about the Netherlands, but I have spent time in Germany. I don’t quite get the freedom of speech argument. I know that in Germany it’s against the law to advocate National Socialism and fascism generally; IIRC there’s similar sanctions against the far left. Germany was still years away from reunification when I was there, and I recall there being two Communist parties in West Germany. One was more or less aligned with the Eurocommunism movement of Western Europe, and was legal, while the other was illegal, I think because they preached violent overthrow of the government. Is it much the same sort of thing in the Netherlands?
I thought everyone in Western Europe had the same kind of freedom of speech we have, allowing for some restrictions around the edges like I’ve described. You have a Queen there, but it’s not like you’ve got to pay her any attention, really, is it?
I’ve researched the subject quite a bit because of my situation. My dad was in the US on an F-1 visa doing his PhD, with my mom as his dependent. She got pregnant and flew back to Korea in order to give birth to me (why Mom, WHY?). Then she flew back with me when I was 4 months old. We lived in the US for around 13 years, during which time my dad finished his PhD, worked for a while on first his OPT and then an H1B, and THEN finally we got our green cards.
Two years after this my dad lost his job and found another one in Seoul. So we all moved to Korea. Even though we’d lived in the US for 13 years, we’d only been there for 2 under our green card, so we were never able to get citizenship, and our green cards were considered invalid after a few years of living in Korea.
After I got my MA at UChicago, I taught for a year under my OPT at community colleges, but once that expired I couldn’t find any legal way to stay in the US. My major is English and the colleges told me, look you’re a great teacher but there’s no way we can justify sponsoring your visa because on paper it looks lke we’re hiring a Korean as a college English teacher. It really annoyed me because I speak English fluently and grew up half my life in the US - I HATED living in Korea and always wanted to come back - yet there was simply no legal way for me to stay and work in the US unless I got married to a US citizen.
It was a very frustrating situation. I was just as qualified as my American colleagues, if not more (I had a lot teaching experience, which most of them didn’t). I know my situation is fairly unique, but it’s made me somewhat bitter. People are always like, well, these immigrants come and take our jobs without speaking English or wanting to learn anything about the US, that’s why we don’t want them here - and here I am, a fluent English speaker, culturally American if nothing else, and still I couldn’t find a legal way to stay. ARGH it still pisses me off.
U.S. immigration regulations can border on the bizarre. I don’t know if they still do this, but my mother has a friend whose daughter spent her junior year of university in Spain. She met a Spanish guy and they became a couple, IIRC they’re now married and living in the States. But first he had to go through the hoops to become a legal immigrant, and it appears that, at some point in the process, should he have left the country for even just a few days, his “residency clock” would have rolled back to zero, or something like that.
A buddy of mine in college was offered something like $5000 from an African ex-girlfriend of his for a marraige of convenience. She was a student at our university and and her education visa was only good during the course of her studies.
This was in Canada - but I’m sure some people do the same thing in the USA. Marraige is the easiest and fastest way to obtain citizenship.
Oh yeah, my friend turned her down. His current girlfriend wasn’t very keen on the idea.
I don’t know if this is still the case but when I was an immigration paralegal in the US in the late 1990s, you were allowed to leave the States while your residency application was pending but you had to first obtain an Advance Parole document. Otherwise, your absence would be interpreted as intention to abandon the application. Initially Advance Parole was granted only under exceptional circumstances (e.g., some relative in your native country died and you had to go home for the funeral) but eventually it was decided to grant these as pretty much a matter of routine for short-term absences. Eva Luna could clarify the current policy if she’s around.
Yep, it’s still true - we don’t even bother giving a reason anymore, and we advise clients filing for green cards who don’t already have a visa type (such as H-1B) that will allow them to travel internationally while the green card application is pending to apply for Advance Parole. After all, one never knows when one will need to travel for a family emergency or such, and it’s not as easy as it used to be to get one on a rush basis.
Heh. In my day an H-1B on its own wasn’t enough, you needed the Advance Parole too. Good to see that there are at least some ways in which US immigration policy is improving.
Yeah, that changed around 1999 - 2000 or so. Of course, if you have a TN, say, or other visa that doesn’t allow for immigrant intent, you are just as SOL as you were before.
I never did understand the point of that whole concept of abandoning one’s green card application. I mean seriously, given what a PITA and how expensive it is to apply for one (especially an employment-based one) in the first place, do they really think people do it if they don’t mean it? Why shouldn’t the default assumption be the opposite?
In addition every major city has its own newspaper, and the political angles of these vary from one end of the spectrum to the other. A good way to find them is to look up the cities on Wikipedia to find out what the newspapers there are, and then Googling for their websites.
The major TV networks have Internet presence, and sometimes allow you to watch complete shows online.
