Two identical pieces of legislations backed by top companies from the Silicon Valley, such as Google, have been introduced in the US House of Representatives and Senate to end the per-country limit on green cards. If passed, the legislation could benefit thousands of Indian professionals waiting to gain permanent legal residency.
In the Senate, Republican Mike Lee and Democratic presidential aspirant Kamala Harris introduced the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act — a Bill that would remove the per-country cap for employment-based green cards.
An identical Bill — Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act (HR 1044) — was tabled in the US House of Representatives by Congressman Zoe Lofgren and Ken Buck, Chair and Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, with the co-sponsorship of a bipartisan group of 112 Congressmen.
If passed by Congress and signed into law, the legislations would benefit thousands of Indian professionals on H-1B visas whose current wait time for permanent legal residency is more than a decade.
Having a green card (officially known as a Permanent Resident Card) allows a person to live and work permanently in the US.
According to some recent studies, some categories of those Indian professionals face a wait of 151 years under the current system, which imposes a country cap on people who get green cards.
The US currently makes140,000 green cards available every year to employment-based immigrants, including many who first come here on temporary H-1B or L visas. The existing law, however, provides that not more than 7 per cent of green cards can go to nationals of any one country — even though some countries are more populous than others.
Because of this 7 per cent limit, for example, a Chinese or Indian post-graduate may have to wait half a decade or more for a green card, much longer than a student from a less-populated country.