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Washington: About 1,000 highly skilled legal immigrants, including many Indians, rallied at Capitol Hill to protest long delays and vast bureaucratic backlogs in the US immigration system, and called for more permanent visas.
On Tuesday, the immigrants, including doctors, medical technicians and computer engineers from India and China, came to Washington from as far as California to participate in the protest rally. They carried placards and wore T-shirts emblazoned with American flags to call on Congress to provide more permanent visas for highly educated immigrants and more resources for the overburdened immigration system.
They said the plight of foreigners living in the US legally had been unfairly eclipsed by the polarised debate over illegal immigration that led to the defeat of an immigration overhaul in June.
The immigrants, who are living in the US on temporary student or high-skilled employment visas, said they were nearing despair with waits lasting as long as a decade to obtain visas giving them permanent residence, known as a green cards, New York Times reported.
Sridhar Narra, an India-born physician who participated in the rally, said his efforts to gain a green card had lasted almost eight years, including a two-year forced separation from his wife, also from India.
After coming to the US in 1999, Narra, 34, has practised medicine under a special visa for doctors who serve in areas where medical personnel are scarce. He has worked with low-income and uninsured patients at a clinic in Benton Harbor, Michigan, fulfilling a five-year requirement, and applied for his green card two years ago.
“I’ve been waiting, law abiding, tax paying,” Narra was quoted as saying. “How long is long enough?” he asked.
Despite soaring demand from immigrants and high-tech businesses, an annual limit of 140,000 on employment-based green cards has not been altered since 1990.
A study published in August by the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City found that 1.1 million highly skilled immigrants and their family members were languishing in backlogs in 2006, waiting for green cards.
Temporary visas for immigrants with special skills, known as H1B visas, are limited to 65,000 a year, plus 20,000 visas for immigrants who earn advanced academic degrees in the US.
The Kauffman study reported that some immigrant professionals were becoming discouraged by the prospect of bureaucratic delays. One in three new skilled immigrants working here said they were uncertain whether they would stay on, according to the study, conducted by researchers from Harvard, Duke and New York University.
This has raised the possibility of reverse brain drain, as immigrants who came to the US for advanced studies might decide to return to their home countries.
“A genuinely new phenomenon. It is a significant thing to have foreign-born people, who are notoriously hard to organise, organising themselves,” Paul Donnelly, a consultant to American Families United, a legal immigrant advocacy group, told the New York Times.
Temporary immigrants who want green cards must obtain a Labour Department certification that no American workers are available for their jobs. It can take over a year to get that certification.
And in a June report, Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles green card applications, found that more than 100,000 FBI background checks of immigrants, also part of the application, had been in process for over a year.
— IANS