High-skilled Indians Seek Congressional Help for Green Card

Indian professional living in the United States for several years on H-1B visas urged U.S. lawmakers to remove country-specific quotas for permanent residency. The limitation leads to a backlog of several years, according to the Skilled Immigrants in America group.

The group formed by the thousands of Indians living the United States made the request especially for their children, for whom getting a higher education becomes difficult if their parents don’t have the green card. The children are forced to be on the F1, visa making them international students, which is more expensive and makes them ineligible for most federal aid.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received close to 100,000 green card applications from Indians. Only 10,000 of them are granted a green card every year.

“We are all stuck in this 70 years backlog. Most of us came to this country about 10 years ago,” said Houston-based Harshit Chatur, a key volunteer of the group, PTI reported. He said that he filed in green card application in 2012, but “because I was born in India and due to this per-country limit, I have to wait for 70 years, as per a lot of research.”

The group claims it has 150,000 members and 25 chapters across the country.

“We are legally here, highly-paid, taxpaying and law-abiding. Were we born in some other country, we would have been (US) citizens by now. The amount of positive contributions that we make to this country, (we) just want the Congress to see it and hopefully that will solve this problem,” Anirban Ghosh, the president of the group, said, according to the news agency.

“When I turn 21 years old, I will be in college but I cannot depend on my dad’s visa anymore. I will have to transfer to an F1 visa which makes me an international student here and I lose many opportunities,” Preeti Konduri, 16, who moved to the United States at the age of 6 was quoted as saying.