Good point, but then would you lose your status even if your h1b ended? Wouldn't the pending GC petition be enough to keep you in status?
It happened to me, I lost my h1b a few weeks after filling for my GC and I had no problem staying in the country. It was a GC via marriage though, rules ma be different for employer sponsored GCs
>It was a GC via marriage though, rules ma be different for employer sponsored GCs
Rules are indeed different for Employment based green cards. Marriage based green cards don't have a limit while the number of employment based Green cards that can be given out in a year is fixed ( in total and within that there is a 7% cap on how much each individual country can receive)
People stuck this way from India & China aren't even able to file for GC's. You can only file for a GC if your country's date is "current" (which is not the case for marriage based GC)
Their only legal basis to stay in the US is the H1-B which they can keep on renewing because they have an approved I-140. In my current situation, i have an approved immigrant petition and i will have to continue to get H1-Bs approved
till i get current (which current projections are about 40-50
years). I've been in the US for a decade and it will be many many decades before i can remove the dependence on the H1.
The math is simple - there are about 400K Indians with approved immigrant petitions. And across 2 categories the maximum number of green cards that Indians can receive in a year is about ~6K. Each petition is roughly 2 green cards
So if an Indian gets an immigrant visa approved today in 2020 , they're looking at wait of 800/6 (133) years even be able to file for a green card.
One thing is a lot of Indians got GC's in EB-1 in the last decade(2000-2020). There were some Indian IT outsourcing firms that promoted people to higher roles for EB-1 GC purposes and then demoted them after they got GCs. Thousands of people got it(thanks to mind boggling levels of office politics), now the EB-1 queue is flooded due to his abuse(fraud?). EB-1 used to be current, now the wait is again in a few years(<10).
Part of the problem here seems to be at least to some extent everyone(us Indians) flooding these queue's while native population keeping these quotas fixed(to control they don't change their society too much).
One also needs to realize there will always be limits to these things. Now given every one wants to come to US, they can't accommodate everyone. There will be limits. Limits to number of H1B's, limit to yearly GCs. What should the limit be? 6K, 60K, 600K? How much?
Imagine India doing this. We recently passed laws to restrict immigration. For some reasons we expect to shut doors to everyone, while simultaneously expecting the whole world roll out red carpets for us.
You do loose status after 60 days in case of employment based green card applications which are approved but the so called priority date is not current. For 100s of thousands of people these priority dates will take literally decades to become "current".
Considering the backlog for green cards if you're from india/china, there are _tons_ of people in this situation.