Low-end immigration

May 14, 2005 11:20 AM

In this post, we decided only people with rare skills can get work visas. This has me wondering, how does the stereotypical immigrant taxi driver/office cleaner/etc get one? Or are they just a stereotype?
posted by cillit bang to Work & Money (13 answers total)

Refugee claims, family class visas and illegal immigration could well account for a significant number of them. But it's worth noting that rare skills are not always what you might think. In Canada, stripping is, or at least recently was, considered a rare skill.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:35 AM on May 14, 2005

Perhaps in some cases those guys are engineers/scientists/whatevers, but they're taking what job they can get. For example, my great-aunt's maid used to be a schoolteacher when she lived in Bolivia, but now she does housecleaning and sends the money back to her family there.

I'm also not sure that the "rare skills" are all that rare. I may be mistaken, but skilled worker doesn't necessarily refer to PhDs and whatnot.
posted by Anonymous at 11:39 AM on May 14, 2005

Visa lottery, illegal immigration, and sponsorship by an immediate family member.
posted by rxrfrx at 11:46 AM on May 14, 2005

In the mid 80's, when I was a cab driver in Boston, the dispatchers used to tell us when and where the INS was checking citizenship, and ask us to pass it along to independant cabbies.

Both that the INS was targeting cabbie hangouts (like the cab pool at Logan) and that my notoriously Southie Irish cab company would warn us implies that there were some cabbies out there without legal status.

A lot of the immigrants I ran in to driving (legal or not, I never asked) were high level professionals back home, who could not get US credentials and/or pass license tests.
posted by QIbHom at 11:47 AM on May 14, 2005

also, some are from former Communist bloc places, and it was easy to get in from there until sometime in the 90s i think. I'm thinking now it's easier to get in from all the ...stans. (and definitely from Pakistan)
posted by amberglow at 11:52 AM on May 14, 2005

It depends on the country you're talking about (Canada, the US and the various EU countries will all have different regs of course) but generally you're talking about asylum cases, winning the visa lottery, marrying a green card holder or US citizen, visas thru family members, old laws such as Morrison and Walsh visas, overstays . . . . most of my friends are immigrants and I'm the only one who's in New York on a work permit.

I'm thinking now it's easier to get in from all the ...stans. (and definitely from Pakistan)

I don't think so, to be honest. I have friends from Pakistan who are in the same boat as me. They may be looked at more leniently than before in asylum cases, but that's a long hard path. There are no "special" visas for most favoured nations.
posted by dublinemma at 12:02 PM on May 14, 2005

If they're immigrants, then they don't need visas.

If they're here on a visa, then they're not immigrants.

/In the USA anyway.
posted by -harlequin- at 12:25 PM on May 14, 2005

I'm no expert but I think IR1, CR1, K1 and K3 are considered "immigrant" VISAs. I believe they all basically allow the person to come to the US before they have completed the entire immigration process. They are for relatives, wives and fiancees of US citizens.
posted by Carbolic at 12:43 PM on May 14, 2005

There are no "special" visas for most favoured nations.
look at the recent Saudi thing tho
posted by amberglow at 12:55 PM on May 14, 2005

The UK is full of Polish scientists picking mushrooms at 75p an hour.
posted by fire&wings at 1:02 PM on May 14, 2005

I'm no expert but I think IR1, CR1, K1 and K3 are considered "immigrant" VISAs

IR1 and CR1 are immigrant visas -- they're for people who've completed the spousal visa stuff. IR1 is for people who've been married more than two years, CR1 for less than that. AFAIK, by the time you get your IR1/CR1 you'll have completed all of the process except for actually obtaining the physical green card (you get the legally equivalent I-551 stamp in your passport when you enter with an IR1/CR1)

K1 is technically a nonimmigrant visa, even though there's clear immigrant intent. You enter on the K1, marry, and then file for adjustment of status based on the marriage. All that the K1 allows you to do is stay in the US for 3 months; if you haven't married (and filed AOS?) by that point, you're out of status.

But both of those are stopping points on the way to a green card. What harlequin basically meant is that if you're an immigrant, you have a green card*, and if you have a regular visa, you're a nonimmigrant. Nonimmigrants include the obvious case of tourists, and also people on NAFTA and other work visas, dependents of people with work visas, and so on. Dependents of people on work visas are really stuck if the work-visa-holder dies, because they have no right in themselves to remain in the US. No doubt lots of legal nonimmigrants think of themselves as immigrants.

Fascinating stuff, but completely loopy.

*And by the time your first green card expires, you probably have enough time in the US to take citizenship if you want it
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:28 PM on May 14, 2005

amberglow,

That seems to be just regularizing the Saudi tourist visa system to those us Euros and the like get, and speeding up applications for H1s etc. Those are visas and work permits Joe Frenchman or Jack Brazilian can get - not programs like Walsh visas which are only applicable to Irish people.
posted by dublinemma at 2:08 PM on May 14, 2005

It's worth mention that in Canada at least, many people who qualify as immigrants due in part to having useful skills often find it impossible to get jobs using those skills. This is because in many fields professional qualifications are required and foreign equivalents are not recognized as such - and places in programs to "upgrade" to the canadian version are hard to come by. This is particularly true of doctors. So there is a good chance they might end up driving a cab. This is pretty silly, but I wouldn't be that surprised to discover that there are similar problems in the US - especially as those training places are likely to cost big bucks.
posted by pascal at 10:51 PM on May 15, 2005