Skilled Indians may have to wait for 70 years for Green Card

WASHINGTON: Professionally qualified Indians may have to wait as long as 70 years to get their Green Card in the US, a new study has said, amid growing concerns that the present country-specific quota policy poses a major hurdle in attracting talent from countries like India and China. "Our system for allowing employers to sponsor skilled foreign nationals for permanent residence (a green card) is plagued by inadequate quotas that result in years of waiting and frustration," the Washington-based National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) said in a report. An October 2011 NFAP study analysed the employment- based green card backlog and produced findings that should give pause to policymakers. The study concluded: "A highly skilled Indian national sponsored today for an employment-based immigrant visa in the 3rd preference could wait potentially 70 years to receive a green card." Many skilled foreign nationals from China have been waiting 6 to 7 years and can expect to wait additional years, it said. In the EB-2 category, second employment-based preference, skilled foreign nationals from India and China may wait six years or more, the study said. "The two factors that have caused the long waits for employment-based green cards are: the 140,000 annual quota, which is too low, and the per country limit on employment- based preference categories, which restricts the annual number of green cards for immigrants from one country to 7 per cent of the total. This, the NFAP analysis noted, means that skilled foreign nationals from India and China, who make up most of the applications, wait years longer than nationals of other countries. A number of lawmakers, policy makers and politicians here have been demanding removing this country-specific cap on the Green Card as well as on H-1B category of visas. "We must stop telling American companies that they cannot hire the high-skilled workers they need. By making it difficult for them to obtain temporary and permanent visas for high-skilled workers, the federal government is slowing growth and worse, promoting the outsourcing of American jobs," New York Mayor, Michele Bloomberg, said early this year. "Caps on green cards are set by countries, so Iceland actually gets the same number of visas as India. That may be fair to those two countries, but it's certainly not fair to American business and to Americans," Bloomberg said. "We should end these arbitrary limits and end the cap on the high-skilled H1-B visas. Let the marketplace decide. It's basic free-market economics, and both parties ought to be able to get behind it," he had said.