Washington: About one lakh employment-based Green Cards are at the danger of being wasted in but two months, causing resentment among Indian IT professionals whose await legal permanent residency now runs into decades.
A positive identification , known officially as a Permanent Resident Card, may be a document issued to immigrants as evidence that the bearer has been granted the privilege of residing permanently within the US.
This year’s quota for employment-based immigrants is 261,500, far above the standard 140,000, Indian professional Sandeep Pawar told PTI.
“Unfortunately, under the law, if these visas aren’t issued by September 30, they’re lost forever,” he said.
The current pace of processing by US Citizenship and Immigration Services or USCIS suggests they’re going to waste quite 100,000 Green Cards, a fact recently confirmed by the Department of State officer responsible of determining visa usage, he said.
If the USCIS or the Biden administration doesn’t take any steps, the additional 100,000 Green Cards that are available this year are going to be wasted, Mr Pawar rued.
The White House didn’t discuss the questions asked during this regard.
Meanwhile, a gaggle of 125 Indian and Chinese nationals living within the US filed a lawsuit to stop the administration from wasting the Green Cards.
“There are many thousands of gainfully employed legal immigrants within the US who would enjoy these Green Cards. Many of them are expecting a decade or more to regulate to permanent resident status but are unable to try to to so thanks to a scarcity of obtainable visa numbers,” he said.
“But this year, if the USCIS does its job efficiently and promptly, these immigrants finally have the chance to become permanent residents, something which might otherwise take decades,” said Mr Pawar, who has been fighting for the rights of Indian professionals expecting several decades for Green Cards.
“Most potential beneficiaries, like myself, are from India, a rustic that’s the foremost backlogged thanks to inherently racist and discriminatory per country quotas embedded within the INA. Many have spouses, mostly women, who are unable to figure until they become permanent residents,” Mr Pawar said.
“Many have kids who will age out and be forced to self-deport albeit this is often the sole country they know. The harm is both immense and irreparable if these Green Cards aren’t used,” he said.
IMPACT executive Neil Makhija, who met President Joe Biden as a part of a delegation, said he urged him to reform the immigration laws by abolishing positive identification caps and quotas and include 200,000 children of long-term visa holders in efforts to guard all dreamers.
In an op-ed within the Washington Post, David J Bier, a search fellow at the Cato Institute, alleged that the Biden administration is liable for this waste of Green Cards. Last week, the United States government announced that it’s processed positive identification applications at such a slow pace that it’ll come a minimum of 100,000 slots in need of consumption the annual limit.
“Without drastic revisions within the glacial processing times, President Biden will have presided over one among the most important cuts to legal immigration in US history — and almost nobody is talking about it,” he said.
