SPECIAL/GREEN CARD CRISIS
Wait for a Green Card might
last as much as 70 years!
New reports find alarming facts — and suggest solutions — about why America is
failing to retain the best and brightest, reports Aziz Haniffa
Ahighly skilled Indian national spon- sored today for the most common skilledemployment-basedimmigrant
visa could wait 70 years to receive a Green
Card, conclude two new reports.
The reports, released last week by the
Arlington, Virginia-based policy research
group National Foundation for American
Policy, say that exempting international stu-
dents with an advanced degree in science,
technology, engineering or mathematics
from Green Card quotas would keep talent-
ed individuals from leaving the United
States and ‘reap significant benefits to the
competitiveness of US companies and to the
economy overall.’
The reports — one called Keeping Talent
in America and the other Waiting and More
Waiting: America’s Family and
Employment-Based Immigration System —
feature first of their kind estimates of the
wait times for immigrants by country and
category. The estimates are based on exam-
ining data from the Department of State
and United States Citizenship and
Immigration Services, as well as on consul-
tations with attorneys and government offi-
cials.
The majority of employer-sponsored
immigrants tend to be from India and
China, but the wait times are longest for
such foreign nationals because of the per
country limit, which restricts the number of
Green Cards awarded to any one country to
7 percent of a preference category, the
reports said.
By establishing that fewer than 3,000
Indians are permitted Green Cards annual-
ly in the employment-based third prefer-
ence (EB-3) and estimating a backlog of
210,000 among Indian professionals in the
category, the report is able to conclude that
an Indian sponsored today could wait 70
years for a green card. The report concludes
that even if the backlog of Indians in EB-3
were half as large, the wait time would still
exceed 30 years for Indians sponsored today
in the category.
A Chinese immigrant sponsored today in
the EB-3 category could wait two decades.
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
Indian or Chinese immigrant, but there is
no wait for those from other countries.
“It is not in our (America’s) 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 reports. He is the NFAP’s exec-
utive director and has served as head of pol-
icy and counselor to the Commissioner of
the Immigration and Naturalization
Service.
“Absent action by Congress, the situation
will grow worse, creating great hardship
and weakening the competitiveness of US
companies,” he said.
The long waits for employment-based
Green Cards are caused by two primary fac-
tors — the 140,000 annual quota is too low,
and the per country limit. Due to the per
country limit, skilled foreign nationals from
India and China, who generally make up
most of the applicants, wait years longer
than people from other countries.
The issue of wait times for employment-
based immigrant visas is vital because when
employers recruit at US universities, they
generally find one-half to two-thirds of the
graduates in science, math and engineering
fields are foreign nationals.
“Failure to retain these talented individu-
als in the United States means they will go
to work for international companies in
other countries or US businesses will need
to place them abroad, pushing more work
outside the United States,” Anderson said.
“An ability to offer a prized employee a real-
istic chance of staying in America as a per-
manent resident can be crucial to retaining
that individual.”
Stuart Andersen
;Page A10
‘Green Card incentive is essential to our success’
AZIZ HANIFFA
Industry representatives and immigration advocates have
hailed the reports released by the National Foundation for
American Policy that underline why the United States
needs to urgently reform the Green Card process. And, they
are hopeful that the shocking revelations and consequent
recommendations would compel Congress to act to ensure
America’s competitiveness in today’s highly globalized
world, particularly at a time when the US economy
is reeling from almost a double-dip recession and
rampant unemployment.
In a teleconference with India Abroad, Robert
Hoffman, vice president, global public policy,
Cognizant Technology Solutions, and Aman
Kapoor, executive director, Immigration Voice, said
the NFAP reports “present a compelling argument.”
The US, they said, must act urgently with specific
legislation to alleviate this malaise now, instead of
including it in any comprehensive immigration
reform, which seems unlikely anytime soon.
Cognizant, Hoffman said, “As one of the nation’s
leading sponsors of employment-sponsored Green
Cards for well over a decade, strongly supports
efforts to reduce the massive Green Card backlog,
which is fueling a reverse brain drain in the US...
We support measures to reduce the employment-
sponsored Green Card backlog, and restore the
Green Card as an incentive to attract skilled talent
to pursue their professional goals in the US.”
“The Green Card incentive is essential to our (America’s)
success,” Hoffman said. “The competition for innovative
talent is truly global... The hunt for talent has taken us to
20 college campuses in the past 18 months… While we
compete with Microsoft and Google for talent, we are on
the same side in one respect: Our shared belief that the
current immigration system, particularly the Green Card
process, needs fundamental changes to advance US inno-
vation leadership. Skilled immigration reform has been on
the Congressional agenda for more than five years. So it is
no secret that the current system needs improvement. The
reports released by the NFAP show that it is not enough to
simply say that US immigration does not work to advance
US innovation. In fact, it is becoming counterproductive...
Pursuing a Green Card is really a joint investment decision
by the employer and employee; a decision to invest in
developing and realizing professional goals and dreams
here in the US. Sadly, the current immigration sys-
tem is reducing — if not actually eliminating — a
favorable return on a Green Card investment for
the employer, the employee, and most important,
for the US economy.”
Hoffman said the NFAP reports “are just the lat-
est, and perhaps most sobering piece of evidence of
how US immigration policies are making the envi-
ronment for US innovation and job creation tough
as time goes on. These reports further substantiate
conclusions reached last May by the Kauffman
Foundation, which found that tens of thousands of
skilled Chinese and Indian immigrants are return-
ing to their home countries each year.”
He added: “Indeed, if policies remain unchanged,
many of the world’s future innovators will reach a
pretty harsh conclusion: Their chances of getting a
Green Card are somewhere between slim and fat…
Aman Kapoor
Robert Hoffman
