More than 4L Indians may die awaiting job-based US Green Card: Study

More than 10.5 lakh Indians are in the queue for an employment-based Green Card, and 4 lakh of them may die before receiving the much-sought-after legal document of permanent residency in the US, says a new study.

A Green Card, known officially as a Permanent Resident Card, is a document issued to immigrants to the US as evidence that the bearer has been granted the right to reside there permanently. The per-country caps are numerical limits on the issuance of Green Cards to people from certain countries.

Indians bear burden

The employment-based Green Card backlog reached a new record of 1.8 million cases this year, according to the study by David J Bier of the Cato Institute, an American libertarian think tank.

About 1.1 million of the 1.8 million cases in the backlog are from India (63 per cent); nearly 250,000 are from China (14 per cent), it said. The backlog consists of immigrants who are waiting to receive Green Cards, primarily as a result of low Green Card caps for employer-sponsored immigrants and investors.

Since no country may receive more than 7 per cent of the Green Cards (the country caps) unless they may otherwise go unused, the 1.1 million cases from Indians in the backlog bear most of the burden of the broken system, the study said.

New applicants from India will face a lifetime wait, and more than 400,000 will die before they receive a Green Card, it said.

The process starts when an employer files a petition for a worker. If no Green Card is available under the caps, the petition is wait-listed until a spot opens. Finally, a worker may file to adjust their status to permanent residence (the Green Card application) when a Green Card cap spot is available to them.

There’s a similar staged process for investors and employment-based “special immigrants”, including Afghan interpreters as well as, strangely, abandoned immigrant children.

The math

In March 2023, 80,324 employment-based petitions were pending, representing about 171,635 people with spouses and minor children of the workers included. Another 1.3 million were waitlisted, and 289,000 were pending adjustment of status applications, the study said.

There were also some employment-based immigrants waiting for immigrant visa adjudications at consulates abroad, but the State Department provides no information about the number of these cases.

There are also some petitions in the backlog filed on behalf of the same person, leading to some double counting. Then, there is a backlog of 123,234 permanent labour certification applications, which is the start of the employment-based Green Card queue.

Over half of the backlog is in the EB-2 category for employees of US businesses with advanced degrees.

Another 19 per cent are in the EB-3 category for employees with at least a bachelor’s degree. The EB-4 category for “special immigrants” (Afghan and Iraqi interpreters, others with various US government affiliations, and abandoned children) is about 13 per cent. Another 6 per cent are for EB-5 major investors.

For new applicants from India, the backlog for the EB-2 and EB-3 categories (which are combined because applicants can move between them) is effectively a life sentence: 134 years. About 424,000 employment-based applicants will die waiting, and over 90 per cent of them will be Indians.

Given that Indians are currently half of all new employer-sponsored applicants, roughly half of all newly sponsored immigrants will die before they receive a Green Card.

The Chinese in those categories face an astounding 17-year wait. The wait times for Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans in the EB-4 category are similarly long waits.

Legal immigration nearly impossible

The Biden administration recently changed how it implements the country limits for the EB-4 category such that the Northern Triangle countries and Mexico will likely see a significant increase in Green Cards at the expense of the number for “other” countries. However, even if these countries receive all the Green Cards going forward, they would still face multi-decade waits.

The employment-based backlog comes on top of the 8.3 million case backlog for the family-sponsored system, the study said. These astounding backlogs and massive waits underscore that legal immigration to the United States is nearly impossible, the study said.

Even to get to the point of entering the backlog takes an enormous amount of good fortune, and the lucky few that make it through the labyrinth face the daunting prospect of never actually receiving Green Cards in decades or even their lifetimes, it said.