Indian professionals will wait longer for USA green cards if 100,000 are wasted
This week, a group of Indian and other professionals pursuing work-based U.S. permanent residency visas, or green cards, filed a lawsuit seeking that their place in line for the cards be held beyond the end of this fiscal year. A green card enables the holder to work and live in the U.S.
Unused green card quotas expire by the end of the fiscal year, which ends in September. Also, those who are asked to apply this year will lose their place in line, if they do not get a green card by next month and, then, have to re-apply in the following years..
In fiscal 2021, the number of green cards to be issued to professionals rose to 260,000, up from the 140,000 issued each year previously. The number increase is because unused family sponsored green cards from fiscal 2020 were allotted to professionals in 2021. .
In the first half of fiscal 2021, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency which issues green cards, approved only about 45,000 applicants.
The slow processing is due to the manual sorting of a flood of applications, which have to be sent by postal mail - not via an online portal; shut downs of locations where applicants could get finger printed, due to COVID-19 restrictions; and a shortage of funding and staff at the USCIS.
Even if the agency speeded up processing in the second half of this year, more than 100,000 green cards for professionals could be wasted this fiscal year, which ends next month.
There are over 1.2 million foreigners awaiting green cards. The current wait for Indians, who make up half of all applicants, exceeds 15 years. Each year, Indians are eligible for only 7% of the green cards issued, which is the maximum quota allotted to each country.
“Yet the extra green cards have given Indian applicants a once-in-a-lifetime chance to far exceed that 7 percent threshold this year because there are not enough other applicants to use them,” Cato Institute’s David J. Bier notes in The Washington Post.
Indian professionals, who are seeking approval of their green card applications this year, are eagerly awaiting the outcome of the lawsuit.
Hildingur Mahanti is a New York based software engineer awaiting a green card. He volunteers as a leader of Immigration Voice, a group with more than 32,000 followers on Twitter, which is “working to alleviate the problems faced by legal high-skilled future Americans.”
He is among those hoping that President Joe Biden’s administration will make it easier and quicker for Indian and other professionals to get green cards.
This morning he tweeted, “…Need folks to keep the pressure on Congress to get it done…”
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