Back in 2015, when Anirban Das, set up Skilled Immigrants in America (SIIA) as a Facebook group, it was mainly to create awareness among Indian professionals, who were waiting on H1-B work permit extensions for their green cards or lawful permanent resident status in the US.
“My employer had just filed my petition and I realised that I could be waiting indefinitely for a green card. It was a shock and I also realised that there was very little awareness on this huge backlog issue and many of my friends assumed they would get permanent resident status soon,” says Das, president and founder of SIIA. The problem, he highlights, is the country- specific quotas on green cards, which impacts Indian professionals in the US.
Almost 70% of the 65,000 H1-B visas, which are temporary work permits for foreign workers in specialty occupations, are given to Indians every year. SIIA, with a 1.5 million members has since become the voice of Indian engineers, doctors, investment bankers and STEM PhDs who live in the shadow of uncertainty.
Thanks to several campaigns run by the organisation, the fact that the most talented professionals from just one country have to wait for decades to receive green cards is now widely recognised by several law makers and mainstream advocacy groups in the US. “For Indians, it’s the harsh reality of their country of birth coming in the way of their green card and creating awareness about this is the first step towards redressal. We need to spread awareness on this among American lawmakers and even ask the Indian government for help,” says Netra Chavan, an immigration consultant based in the Silicon Valley.
Ashwin Pande, an IT professional from Ohio, has been waiting ion the green card queue for five and a half years and is a human face of the crisis. From having to file for H1-B extensions to tough questions by immigration authorities after trips overseas and the uncertainty faced by his wife and son who have dependent status, the causes for worry are plenty.
"Changing jobs can be a problem; it means we would go right back on in the green card queue,” rues Pande.
However, for thousands of Indians waiting ion green card queues, there is a ray of hope around the new immigration bill, being dubbed as – the US Citizenship Act 2021, – which was introduced in the US Congress on February 18 by President Joe Biden’s administration. “If this takes effect it will be a godsend for all the Indians who are caught in the hopeless employment backlogs. It would raise the worldwide count of employment-based immigrants from 140,000 to 170,000 and add to the ceiling, unused visas from fiscal years 1992 through 2020.
The bill also attempts to reforms the employment-based system by not counting family members from the relevant categories and STEM PhDs, and also eliminating numerical limitations for people with approved visa petitions waiting for more than 10 years. Significantly, it eliminates the country caps for employment-based immigrants,” Cyrus Mehta, a New York- based immigration attorney.
But, as he points out, the million-dollar question is whether the bill will be passed by a closely divided US Senate. Even though immigration reforms seem on top of the agenda for President Biden’s administration, for those on green card queues the wait continues, for now.
The SIIA continues to work on raising awareness on the issue of green card backlogs over the plast few years. “We have organised several representations to US Congress members and senators and state government representatives to explain the issue and seek their support. The CATO Institute, a policy think tank and the US Congressional Research Service (CRS) have conducted detailed research on the impact of the 7% green card country cap on Indian professionals, some of whom have wait periods of up to 150 years to get green cards,” says Das.
Last December, there were hopes that the Fairness For Highly Skilled Immigrants bill, which eliminated country caps, would be passed and provide relief to Indian green card hopefuls. However, even though the bill was passed by the Senate, the differences between the versions passed by the House of Representatives earlier and the Senate in December 2020 could not be reconciled before Congress session ended.
For those like Shiv Ariyakula, a finance professional in Florida, who now closely follows immigration bills in the US House and Senate, green card- related reforms are top of mind but he feels that there have been too many setbacks along the way. “All the bills in US Congress that could bring relief have so far ended in disappointment for us. How long do citizens of only one country keep waiting amidst such uncertainty,” asks Ariyakula, who went to the US in 2005 for a master’s’ degree and is now stuck on the green card queue since 2009.
That the Biden administration is attempting to go in for sweeping immigration reforms through the new bill is making several Indians wary uneasy— immigration lawyers and policy experts we spoke to feel that there’s a bigger chance of simple reforms going through, one issue at a time. Manjunath Gokare, an immigration lawyer based in Atlanta, Georgia, feels that since there’s broad consensus among Democrats and Republicans on the issue of removal of green card country caps, it should not be linked to other larger immigration problems such as undocumented migrants.
“This has been discussed threadbare several times and most law makers agree that the overall numbers are inadequate and the per country cap is unfair. However, unless the Democrats work with the Republicans to amend the law, the Biden administration’s new reform proposals will remain a non-starter,” he fears.
Will the ambitious US Citizenship Act 2021 remain mere rhetoric or will it bring the much-needed relief for thousands of green card hopefuls? One and a half million Indians in the US will be eagerly waiting for the answer.
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