The Hindu Business Line : Waiting period for Green Card may trigger Indian techies' return

The waiting period is triggered off as there is a pent-up demand in the employment based immigration visa category with a lot of pending labour certifications being cleared.

New Delhi , Sept. 21

INDIAN workers, including tech professionals, will now have to wait longer - up to eight years in certain cases — for a Green Card, with the US State Department's latest visa bulletin introducing a waiting period for Green Cards under the employment-based immigrant visa category.

"In the last three to five years, there was no backlog in the employment-based immigration visa category. Now a waiting-period of up to eight years has been introduced in certain categories including EB2 (Professions Holding Advanced Degrees or Persons of Exceptional Ability) and EB3 (skilled workers and professionals)," said Dr Arun C. Vakil, a US Visa and Immigration consultant from Mumbai.

He said the waiting period was triggered off as there was a pent-up demand in the employment based immigration visa category with a lot of pending labour certifications being cleared. "In such cases the process moved onto the next stage involving filing of i140 form for a Green Card. It is a problem of excess demand versus supply," he said.

The Immigrant visa categories for the US have numerical caps, and visas for different categories are allocated until the cap is reached. When the demand outstrips supply, a "cut-off date" gets reflected in the monthly visa table. The `cut-off date' means that the dates for visa availability of that particular category have "retrogressed."

"Cases - where the priority date or the date of filing the application falls within the cut-off date - are considered active for grant of visas," he said.

According to the latest bulletin, cut off dates for India have been fixed at August 2002 for the EB1 category, November 1999 for EB2 category and January 1998 for EB3 category. This means that anyone with a priority date (date of filing) later than this will have to wait until new dates are announced and their priority date becomes active. The worldwide level for annual employment-based preference immigrants is at least 1,40,000.

"In case of tech workers, those looking for legal permanent residency have to apply for the Green card 90 days prior to expiry of the H1B. Now, with the increase in waiting period, these people will have to continue or extend their old status or leave the country in case their existing visa expires," he said.

However, according to the IT industry association, Nasscom, the waiting period would have no impact on IT companies. "The tendency to go for a Green Card was strong among tech professionals in 1999-2000 when as many as 80-85 per cent of H1B holders would apply for a Green Card. But this proportion has come down to 20-25 per cent now. This is due to the large number of job creation in India, improvement in infrastructure and higher savings back home. So they are returning to India anyway," the Nasscom Vice-President, Mr Sunil Mehta, said.

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Waiting period for Green Card may trigger Indian techies' return