Hacker Cinema
The New Americans
2003 · Film · documentary · 411 min
Directed by Carlos Aparicio, Renee Tajima-Peña, Susana Aikin, Gordon Quinn, Indu Krishnan, Steve James, Jerry Blumenthal
Four years in the lives of a diverse group of contemporary immigrants and refugees as they journey to start new lives in America.
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Americans generally won't appreciate how scary this can be for those on work visas, particularly when the chances of finding a new job have dropped drastically. Generally speaking, work visas and employment-based green cards are based on the premise that you were unable to fill the role with an American citizen or lawful permanent resident ("LPR"). That becomes tricky for sponsoring such a process if you recently laid people off. There are also more job applicants and it becomes harder to lawfully filter them out to justify your case.
For people born in India, regardless of current citizenship, this may end up terminate a wait for a green card that has been ongoing for 10-15 years, leaving them little choice but to leave the country.
The process is completely arbitrary and deliberately capricious. For example, USCIS randomly audits some percentage (estimated to be ~30%) of applications, ostensibly to stop people figuring out how to game the system (ie by figuring out what USCIS will flag for further review). Now that's fine in principle but the audit (at the time my application was in process) added an additional 18 months. Completely randomly. When the audit happened it simply passed. with no requests for evidence ("RFEs").
Another example: examiners aren't consistent. Your case will be assigned to an officer. That officer might be quick or slow. Two different officers may treat the same application different. For example, one may request a form you and your lawyer think unnecessary while another doesn't. If you proactively include it anyway, that too can lead to delays to explain why that form is in there.
Unfortunately immigrants are an easy political scapegoat and a non-voting one at that. No party seems inclined to truly address these problems. Or it comes up occasionally with a bad bill.
In 2004, PBS had a documentary called The New Americans. I can't really find a way to wtach it online. It follows immigrants from a number of different countries. One was an Indian man (and his family) who got laid off in the dot-com crash (and ultimately returned to India IIRC). I suspect there'll be many repetitions of this in the coming year.
This lack of certainty and security in your living situation can hang over your head for years, sometimes more than a decade. It's stressful and cruel.