Nearly one lakh employment-based green cards are at risk of being wasted in less than two months, causing outrage among Indian IT professionals, whose legal permanent residency awaited for decades now.
A green card, officially known as a permanent resident card, is a document issued to immigrants as proof that the holder has been granted the privilege of permanently residing in the United States.
Indian professional Sandeep Pawar told PTI that there are 261,500 quotas for job-based immigrants this year, which is much higher than the normal 140,000. Unfortunately, under the law, if these visas are not issued by September 30, they are lost forever, he said. He said the current speed of processing by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, suggests they would waste more than 100,000 green cards, a fact confirmed recently by the Department of State official in charge of determining Visa usage. .
Pawar lamented that if the USCIS or the Biden administration does not act, the 100,000 additional green cards available this year will become useless. The White House did not comment on questions asked in this regard. Meanwhile, a group of 125 Indian and Chinese nationals living in the US sued to stop the administration from wasting green cards.
There are hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants in the US who would benefit from these green cards. He said many of them have been waiting a decade or more to adjust to permanent resident status, but are unable to do so due to a lack of visa numbers available. But this year, if USCIS does its job efficiently and promptly, these immigrants have the opportunity to eventually become permanent residents, something that would otherwise take decades, said Pawar, who is fighting for rights.
Indian professionals waiting for several decades for a green card. Most of the potential beneficiaries, such as I, are from India, a country that is most backward due to inherent casteism and discriminatory practices in the per country quota enshrined in the INA. Many people have spouses, mostly women, who are unable to work till they become permanent residents, Pawar said. There are many children who will be older and will be forced into self-imposed exile, even though this is the only country they know.
If these green cards are not used, the loss is huge and irreparable, he added. IMPACT executive director Neil Makhija, who met with President Joe Biden as part of a delegation, said he urged him to reform immigration laws by eliminating green card caps and quotas and protecting all Dreamers. The efforts included 200,000 children of long-term visa holders. In an op-ed in The Washington Post, David J. Beers, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, alleged that the Biden administration was responsible for this waste of green cards.
Last week, the US government announced that it processed green card applications so slowly that it would reduce at least 100,000 slots from using the annual limit. Without drastic revisions to glacial processing times, President Biden would have presided over the biggest cut in legal immigration in US history and almost no one is talking about it, he said.
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