U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services released new data May 11 confirming anecdotal evidence that H-4 visa holders with work authorization are overwhelmingly women from India.
The data was released in response to a congressional query and reports numbers from when H-4 EAD was first implemented in 2015 – by the Obama administration – to the first quarter of fiscal year 2018, which began Oct. 1, 2017 and ended Dec. 25, 2017. In total, almost 85,000 women and 6,000 men currently have H-4 EAD. More than 33,000 women and 2,000 men have successfully applied for extensions.