WASHINGTON – Skilled professionals from India who are sponsored in the most common skilled employment visa category could wait as long as 70 years to receive a green card, according to one of two reports released Oct. 5 by the National Foundation for American Policy, an Arlington, Va.-based policy research organization.
The report recommends that by exempting foreign students with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and math from green card quotas, the U.S. could keep talented individuals from leaving the country and “reap significant benefits to the competitiveness of U.S. companies and to the economy overall.”
“It is not in our interests to have the most important characteristic of an immigrant to America be the ability to wait a long time,” said Stuart Anderson, author of the two reports.
“Absent action by Congress, the situation will grow worse, creating great hardship and weakening the competitiveness of U.S. companies.”
The executive director of NFAP, Anderson was head of policy and counselor to the U.S. Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service from August 2001 to January 2003.
The majority of employer-sponsored immigrants are from India and China, but wait times are longest for these two countries due to country limits, which restrict the number of green cards awarded to any one country of origin to seven percent of any preference category.
The study determined that fewer than 3,000 Indians are permitted green cards annually in the employment-based Third Preference (EB-3) category. By estimating a backlog of 210,000 of Indian professionals in EB-3, the report found that a professional from India sponsored now could wait up to 70 years for a green card.
The report said even if the backlog of Indians in EB-3 were half as large, the wait time would still be over 30 years for Indians.
An immigrant from China sponsored today in the EB-3 category could wait 20 years, the reports said. Immigrants from other countries would likely wait five years or more.
In the EB-2 (Second Preference) category, the wait times are six to eight years for a newly sponsored immigrant from India or China, but there is no wait for those from other countries.
Anderson pointed out that the issue of wait times for employment-based immigrant visas is crucial, because when employers recruit at U.S. universities and colleges they generally find one-half to two-thirds of all graduates in STEM fields are foreign nationals
“An ability to offer a prized employee a realistic chance of staying in America as a permanent resident can be crucial to retaining that individual,” Anderson said.
The report recommends increasing the 140,000 annual quota and eliminating the per country limit for employment-based immigrants.
The “recently introduced bill H.R. 3012 would eliminate the per-country limit within four years,” the report said.
Eliminating the per-country limit would reduce the typical wait for Indians applying today in the EB-3 category from 70 to 12 years, the report said.
“An exemption from employment-based green card quotas of at least 25,000 or 50,000 for international students who graduate with an advanced degree in science, technology, engineering and mathematics from a U.S. university would further reduce the backlog and wait times, producing an even larger impact if combined with making available up to 326,000 employment visas unused in previous years,” the study said.
Adding an “exemption of at least 50,000 for advanced degree STEM graduates would eliminate the backlog in the employment-based Second Preference and make the category current within three years,” the report added.
The second report showed that the wait times to sponsor close family members for immigrant visas are in many cases extremely long.
A U.S. citizen petitioning for an adult son or daughter from Mexico can expect to wait about 18 years. Some U.S. citizens petitioning for a brother or sister from the Philippines have waited more than 20 years. In November 2010, the State Department had a waiting list of more than 4.5 million close relatives of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.
The reports, “Keeping Talent in America” and “Waiting and More Waiting: America’s Family and Employment-Based Immigration System,” are based on data from the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and interviews with attorneys and government officials. They can be found on the NFAP Web site at www.nfap.com. NFAP’s advisory board members include Indian American economist Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University and former U.S. Senator and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.
