‘Indians, Chinese to benefit if quotas for Green Cards end’

WASHINGTON : Removing country quotas for Green Cards will cut waiting time for those in queue, mostly Indians and Chinese, and protect them from exploitative employers, but will also lead to them dominating this route to US citizenship, a Congressional research report has said.

At issue is a limit that prevents people from any one country from accounting for more than 7% of the annual intake in all the categories. US grants 675,000 Green Cards, or permanent residencies, in all categories (it goes up to 1 million because of flexibility to accommodate family-linked immigrants).

“Indian (and to a lesser extent Chinese and Filipino) nationals sit in much longer queues of pending employment-based petitions” for Green Card than people from other countries and “consequently must wait the longest”, said the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan government body that supplies research to US Congress, in a December report. At that time, a legislation was before US Congress to remove the country limit, but it lapsed and is likely to be reintroduced in the new Congress that takes charge on Thursday.

The report summed up for legislators the pros and cons of removing the country limits that have long accompanied the debate.

Those in favour have argued, it said, that the wait periods for a lot of them are “excessively long”, 150 years for India by one estimate.

It discriminates against some foreign workers based on their country of origin and leaves them vulnerable to “potential exploitation” by their employers who sponsor the Green Card application and can withdraw it, the report said. The US might be driving away talented people to other countries, specially Indians, because of the waiting period.

Those against have argued “it would substantially reduce country-of-origin diversity and potentially allow a few countries to dominate all permanent employment-based immigration, such as those from India and China”, the report added.

Some 306,601 Indians await their Green Cards, a step away from US citizenship, accounting for almost 78% of the total 395,025 in the category of employmentbased immigration. Most of them are on H-1B visas for highly skilled foreigners. The Chinese are in the second slot with 67,031, but on a different employmentbased immigration route, one meant for investors.