WASHINGTON: About 100,000 employment-based Green Cards are at the risk of being wasted in less than two months as the federal agency responsible for their issuance faces huge backlog owing to Covid-19. This has caused widespread resentment among Indian IT professionals whose wait for legal permanent residency now runs into decades. A Green Card, called the Permanent Resident Card, is a document issued to immigrants as evidence that the bearer has been granted the privilege of residing permanently in the US.
This year’s quota for employment-based immigrants is 261,500, far higher than the usual 140,000, said reports. If these visas are not issued by September 30, they will go waste, according to sources.
The current pace of processing by US Citizenship and Immigration Services or USCIS suggests they will waste more than 100,000 Green Cards. This has also been confirmed by the Department of State officer in charge of determining visa usage. If the USCIS or the Biden administration doesn’t take any steps, the extra 100,000 Green Cards that are available this year will be wasted.
The White House is yet to respond to the issue. Meanwhile, a group of 125 Indian and Chinese nationals living in the US filed a lawsuit to prevent the administration from wasting the Green Cards. There are hundreds of thousands of gainfully employed legal immigrants in the US who would benefit from these Green Cards. Many have been waiting for a decade or more to adjust to permanent resident status but have been unable to do so due to a lack of available visa numbers.
In an article in The Washington Post, David J Bier, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, alleged the Biden administration is responsible for this waste of Green Cards. Last week, US announced that it has processed Green Card applications at such a slow pace that it will come at least 100,000 slots short of using up the annual limit.“Without drastic revisions in the glacial processing times, President Biden will have presided over one of the largest cuts to legal immigration in US history - and almost no one is talking about it,” he had said.
