A presidential advisory committee unanimously voted for recommending President Biden to process all applications for green cards or permanent residency within six months. Here’s everything you need to know.Â
The move will help thousands of Indian-Americans
A Green Card is a document issued to immigrants to the US as evidence that the bearer has been granted the privilege of residing permanently in the US. The move will also please thousands of Indian-Americans. Indian IT professionals come to the US on H1-B work visas. They suffer in the current system that imposes a seven percent per nation quota for which imposes a seven percent per country quota on allotment of the Green Card.
The new recommendations of the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (PACAANHPI) will soon be sent to the White House.Â
The proposal was moved by Ajay Jain Bhutoria, an Indian-American community leader, during the recent PACAANHPI meeting. All the 25 commissioners unanimously approved it. Additionally, the commission recommended that the National Visa Center (NVC) hire additional staff for increasing the processing capacity by 100 percent in three months from August 2022 and increase Green Card applications visa interviews and adjudicate decisions by150 percent up from the capacity of 32,439 in April 2022 by April 2023. “Thereafter Green Card visa interviews and visa processing timeline should be a maximum of six months,” they stated.Â
Green Card processing issues
The new policy will also make it easier for immigrant communities to stay and work in the US. The current policy’s waiting period is excruciating. Several people have been waiting for years if not decades to get a Green Card. In the 2021 fiscal year, US authorities issued 65,452 family-based Green Cards out of the annual allotment of 226,000. This leaves thousands of unused cards, leaving several families to stay apart without reason. Additionally, the commission is also recommending the USCIS expand premium processing for employment-based Green Card requests, work permits, and temporary immigration extensions. This will allow applicants to pay $2,500 for fast-tracking applications.
“To make matters worse, the method used to calculate the annual number of employment-and-family-based immigration is deeply flawed, and has led to family-based immigration levels being set at their absolute minimum every year for the past 20 years, while hundreds of thousands of green cards for family members go wasted, never used by any individuals when they could be used to reunite families instead,” said Bhutoria. “Family separation also takes a terrible emotional toll on families, and it imposes clear logistical, economic, and emotional hardships on families, and the growing nature of the backlogs makes the process uncertain and future planning impossible, he added.
