This statement comes after the Biden administration tried to increase H1-B lotteries worldwide, but forgot to consider the conversions of these lotteries. The Green card cap limit for Indians is very low when compared to H1-B visa intakes. This would result in unequal conversion rates from H1-B to permanent residencies which would force people to go back to their own country.
The influential immigrant group representing the American Indians on Thursday urged Biden officials not to issue a highly sought-after H-1B work visa to any Indian-born person until the limit on Green Cards wasn’t removed or increased.
The current cap for each country in the issuance of green cards in the US has led Indian professionals, especially those from the IT sector, to wait for decades for their legal recognition. Issuing new H-1B visas to many Indians will add to the painful waiting for green cards, Immigration Voice said in a statement.
The statement comes as a result of a decision by Biden management to allow H-1B visa-eligible employers to register online for the H1-B Visa lottery, which starts on March 9 this year, in the 2022 financial year.
Under the program, more than 60,000 more Indian nations will be unknowingly drawn into the United States this year and the years to come.
Members of the Immigration Voice have asked Biden officials to not allow any new Indian-born person who is not currently in the US to obtain a new H-1B visa for the first period of the 2022 financial year.
Immigration Voice is a non-profit organization with more than 130,000 members, taxpayers, law-abiding, highly skilled immigrants, it said. The organization advocates for a reduction in employment, travel, and working conditions facing high-skilled immigrants in the United States “70 percent of those new visas are issued to workers from India,” the Immigration Voice said. As mandated by Congress, each year, the US issues 85,000 new H1B visas. Of these, approximately 70,000 new visas (or nearly 60,00 visas) are issued in India.
The organization says this “discriminatory and absurd” cap on the number of Indians who can legally reside annually has caused a backlog of more than a million people waiting for green cards, and the waiting period has grown to 436 years.
“Most of the Green Card backlogs are women and children, who will eventually die in this backlog. Needless to say, the limitations of each country in the green card-based system are, in fact, 100 percent.
“It means that if the mother of Deputy President Kamanga Harris had come to the United States today, under such a scheme, she would not have received a Green Card in her lifetime. “The life course of Shyamala Gopalan’s daughter would have been completely different if she had been more concerned about her mother’s expulsion, rather than living her life as an American,” one of the members said.
This pressure from a responsible organization in the U.S serves as a ray of hope for many Indians waiting for a solution to this problem.
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