The Hindu Business Line : Visa powerless

All those who view the US as the land of their dreams, where opportunities abound, should read the story of Dick Whittington and his cat. Poor Whittington thought the streets of London were paved with gold only to discover that Britain's stones were as hard as anywhere else. "The situation in the US isn't quite like that," says Dipanker Ghosh, medical researcher, "It's actually worse." You may have the brains and the ability to labour without complaint, so what stands between you and the prosperity that any glossy on America always showed? The green card, of course.

As the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) reached its limit for fiscal 2008 petitions on the first working day (April 2, 2007) of the opening of H-1B visas, millions of applications remain unattended to.

People enter the US to work at different skill levels. For every legal entry there is a type of visa made available by the US. The H-1B visa was devised to allow employers to hire highly skilled and talented professionals on a temporary basis in various fields such as IT, medicine, research and other professional areas. And the US does allow employers to file for permanent residency — green card, for their employees on non-immigrant H-1B visa.

These areas are termed high skilled to differentiate them from unskilled and semi-skilled workers. H-1B visas for the IT field require a minimum two years' experience with qualifications such as an engineering degree (BE, ME, BTech, MTech) or a degree in computer applications (BCA, MCA). An H-1B visa holder is termed a non-immigrant temporary resident worker. But those who want to become permanent residents have their employers apply for a green card for them. "Students on the J1 (student) visa need to get an H-1B visa to start work," explains V. Balachandran, software professional.

Voicing concerns

USCIS statistics say there are 271,000 applications waiting for visa numbers (the last stage of the green card process) and as per the Department of Labour another 350,000 applications are at the first stage of the green card process. Some of these applications are pending since 1999. And these figures do not count family members. Conservative estimates say there are more than half-a-milion applications pending in the heavily backlogged employment-based system. Most of these applicants are doctors, engineers, research scientists, physicists, assistant professors, biologists and software professionals.

It was to help find feasible solutions to this problem that Aman Kapoor, a software analyst, founded the Immigration Voice (www.ImmigrationVoice.org) portal. A voluntary, non-profit organisation, it represents the interests of over a million people who contribute to the national economy of the US and works to alleviate the immigration problems faced by high-skilled foreign workers in that country. It acts as an interface between immigrants and the legislative and executive branches of the government. "We work towards eliminating procedural hurdles by interfacing with the government branches that formulate policy. Our efforts are founded by contributions in the form of $20 per month," says Kapoor.

The National Foundation for American Policy, in a report titled `Legal Immigrants: Waiting Forever', has said that the wait for a green card among skilled workers and professionals has worsened considerably in the past few years, with the current waiting period exceeding five years for a newly sponsored applicant.

And this wait is expected to get longer unless Congress revises the numerical limit on employment-based immigrant visas. Since it can take five years or more for a US employer to sponsor a skilled foreigner for permanent residence, the availability of H-1B visas is important, as otherwise skilled foreign nationals, particularly graduates from American universities, cannot work or remain in the US.

The green card is the `green' signal for things as simple as finding work for spouses and getting scholarships for children from State schools. Patricia McDermott, a manager at Keane Inc, which has an estimated 225 sponsored employees "in limbo" waiting for green cards, says the wait extracts an enormous "human cost" on individuals and their families.

Those waiting cannot buy a home or travel freely; most of them can't transfer positions and their spouses cannot work either. This also harms innovation, as those with new ideas cannot go on to start new companies or gain venture capital, as in the past.

"A green card process spans multiple years, anywhere from 6-12 years. This is unfair and unjust towards the people who contribute towards innovation and competitiveness every day. We came to the US through legal channels, contribute to the innovation and competitiveness, pay taxes, contribute to the economy and still get penalised for playing by the rules," says Kapoor.

Immigrant value

The immigrant, especially the Indian immigrant, contributes significantly to the US economy. In 1999 a groundbreaking report titled `Silicon Valley's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs', on the economic contributions of skilled immigrants to California's economy, observed that Chinese and Indian engineers ran a growing share of Silicon Valley companies started during the 1980s. It concluded that foreign-born scientists and engineers were generating new jobs and wealth for the Californian economy. It also said that those who returned to their home countries to take advantage of opportunities there were building links to the US and spurring technological innovation and economic expansion for California.

A UC Berkley School of Information study titled `America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs' states clearly that Indians have founded more engineering and technology companies in the US in the past decade than immigrants from the UK, China, Taiwan and Japan combined. Of all the immigrant-founded companies, 26 per cent have Indian founders.

It seems like living in the freest society in the world but with no freedom of movement. And yet these individuals contribute a lot to the national economy and innovation. Most of our members work in large corporations like Intel, Sun, Microsoft and Oracle." And yet they have this terribly long wait for the green card. "How would it benefit anybody in the US if the next Microsoft, microchip or biotech company or the next big idea is created outside of the US, in some other country in the world," asks Kapoor.

Case studies

Neha Shah, a software professional in Fremont, California, came to the US in 1998 and is currently on her seventh year of temporary work visa (H-1B visa). "My company filed for my permanent residence in 2001. In 2002, due to some problems the company was going through at the time, it could not answer in time inquiries from the Department of Labour. My petition was downgraded to a non-expedited version in December 2002. In August 2003, my employer withdrew my petition application and a new one was filed. After that my company based in California was merged with another company from the east coast in early 2006 and I was asked to move to the east coast office. The other option was to take my severance package and leave. I don't have time to find a suitable job that pays well for a one-income family, offers good health insurance for my medically fragile child and pays new visa petitions from scratch. This translates to only one option — uproot from where we exist and be forced to move 3,000 miles away on the east coast," says Neha.

Aparna Suripeddi, an IT specialist in Bellevue, WA, came to the US in 1999 with her husband on a dependent visa. She got her H-1B in 2000 and started working. She filed a separate petition for her green card, which is pending since August 2003. "In 2004 my husband quit his job because my son went through an open-heart surgery and we needed someone to be home to take care of him. Now my husband cannot work as he exhausted all his time on temporary visa and is now on H4 dependent visa. He wants to move back to India to be able to work. We are not ready yet to lose my job so I have to keep working here in the US and take care of my two-year-old daughter while my husband moves back to India with my four-year-old autistic son. I would prefer my son to stay here as I think the education system in India is not equipped to handle autistic kids. If I could only take my permanent residence petition one step forward, my husband could work again and we could all live here together," she says.

Deepa Singh, Computer Analyst with Sun Microsystems in San Jose, California, graduated with a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2001, when she was 23. She kept her job through several layoffs in three years. "In July 2004 my company turned profitable and my employer petitioned for my permanent residence. However, due to shortage of green cards stemming from quota-based restrictions, the petition did not go anywhere. In early 2006, another application was filed through the new system known as PERM, which was designed by the Department of Labour for faster processing of petition's first step. In December 2006, I got the first two stages of green card cleared. Now, the petition is just sitting there until it's my turn in the queue. Each year, USCIS grants only 140,000 green cards set by Immigration laws under employment-based permanent residence programme and it will be another 3-4 years before my petition moves forward. I am not able to change jobs for the last five years and will also not be able to do so in the next 3-4 years. I cannot accept promotions that change my job description, because such a change would require me to start the green card process all over again. I have a lot of great ideas for entrepreneurship, and was even approached by funding companies and angel investors for starting an online venture, but I can't start my own company or be a founding partner until I am a permanent resident. I feel like I have wasted five of my most productive years in this limbo," says Deepa.

Bill of despair

The recently introduced Durbin-Grassley Bill will totally subvert the H-1B programme, warns Aman Kapoor of Immigration Voice. "Although this bill is unlikely to be debated in any committee, a key staffer of the bill sponsor told us that portions of this bill would be pulled out and introduced into the comprehensive immigration reform as amendments. In fact, this bill was again introduced as an amendment to a bill in the US Senate recently. The way it is going, it is possible that a portion of the Durbin-Grassley Bill will pass in the near future," he says.

The bill intends to drive down the usage of the H-1B programme without actually lowering the quota by simply making it impossible for applicants to meet the terms and conditions. Worrying aspects of the bill include prohibition of consulting or placement of employee on H-1B, harsher requirements on employers intending to hire anybody on H-1B, requirement to post a job on DOL (Department of Labour) Web site for 30 days, written oath from employer, investigations and audits for employer hiring employees on H-1B and many other such stringent requirements.

Explaining the implications, Kapoor says, "This could have far-reaching consequences for US and Indian IT industry. Immigration Voice opposes this bill as it is discriminatory and imposes many `non-practical' conditions and strings on the H-1B programme. This bill is designed to hurt the business model of companies of Indian origin (especially companies like Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Satyam, among others) without actually mentioning the names of people from any specific country in the bill."

One in five persons of the Indian-American community is waiting for a green card. So this bill has the potential to drive out 1.1 million highly skilled legal immigrants, majority of whom are from India.

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Visa powerless