A green card, officially known as a permanent resident card, is a document issued to immigrants in the US as proof that the holder has been granted the privilege of permanent residence in the US.
Indian IT professionals, most of whom are highly skilled and come to the US mainly on H-1B work visas, are the worst victims of the current immigration system, which imposes a seven per cent per-country quota on the allocation of the coveted green card. Permanent legal residence.
The recommendations of the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (PACAANHPI) are now to be sent to the White House for approval.
If it is adopted, it will bring happiness to the hundreds and thousands of Indian-Americans and people who have been waiting decades for a green card.
A resolution on the issue was moved by eminent Indian-American community leader Ajay Jain Bhutoria during the PACAANHPI meeting, during which all 25 of its commissioners unanimously approved it.
The proceedings of the meeting held here in the national capital were webcast live last week.
To reduce the pending green card backlog, the Advisory Commission asked the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to review its processes, systems and policies and streamline procedures to establish new internal cycle time targets, remove unnecessary steps, Recommended to automate any manual approvals, if any. , improving their internal dashboard and reporting system and enhancing policies.
The recommendations aim to reduce the cycle time for processing all forms related to family-based green card applications, DACA renewals and all other green card applications within six months and issue adjudication decisions within six months of applications received by it. Is.
The commission recommended the National Visa Center (NVC) facilitation of the State Department to appoint additional officers to increase their capacity to process interviews for green card applications by 100 percent in three months from August 2022, and green card Who decides to scale up Visa interviews for card applications and make decisions? 150 percent – from a capacity of 32,439 in April 2022 – by April 2023.
“Thereafter the green card visa interview and visa processing deadline should be a maximum of six months,” it said.
With the aim of making it easier for immigrants to live and work in the country, the commission recommended that USCIS review and decide on requests for work permits, travel documents and temporary status extensions or change within three months.
Of the annual 226,000 green cards available in fiscal year 2021, only 65,452 household preference green cards were issued, leaving hundreds of thousands of green cards unused (many of which were likely to be permanently ruined in the future) and many more households. was unnecessarily set aside.
Bhutoria’s policy paper said there were 421,358 interviews pending in April, compared to 436,700 in March.
The US population has grown significantly in recent decades, but the immigration system has not changed to keep pace, he said. He said the annual level of immigration was established in the early 1990s and has remained largely unchanged since then.
To make matters worse, the method used to calculate the annual number of employment and family-based immigration is highly flawed, and for the past 20 years family-based immigration levels have been set at their lowest minimums each year. While Bhutoria said that thousands of green cards for family members are wasted, they are never used by any individual when they are used to reunite families. could.
“The extraordinary wait times for green cards to be available cause significant hardship for American families waiting for decades to reunite with their loved ones, even if those individuals are already eligible for immigration.
“Family separation takes a terrible emotional toll on families, and it imposes obvious logistical, economic and emotional hardships on families, and the growing nature of the backlog makes the process uncertain and future planning impossible,” he said.
Among other things, the commission also recommended USCIS to expand premium processing for additional employment-based green card applications, all work permit petitions, and temporary immigration status extension requests, requiring applicants to pay up to USD 2,500. Permission was granted so that their cases could be disposed of within 45 days. A stepwise approach.