8 lakh Indians in US green card backlog list, 84,675 kids will age out due to long wait

8.15 lakh  Indians holding H-1B Visa are in the green-card backlog list, most of their  children will age out owing to the long wait, risk family separation.

An estimated 8.15 lakh  Indians holding H-1B Visa are in the green-card backlog list in the US. It will take approximately 84 years for most of them  to get through the process.The worst will be the cases of their children who number 11.57 lakh, a majority of whom will age out before getting a green-card, leading to a family separation.

According to a study conducted recently by David J. Bier, an immigration policy analyst with   a US-based think-tank Cato Institute, 1.36 lakh children from Indian families fall in the backlog of this particular category and 84,675 of them (or 62%) will age out without getting a green card.

The US issues only 1.40 lakh green cards a year  for employment-based applicants and there is a 7% per country cap. This restrictive policy poses great challenges to  Indians holding H-1B visa  who out number applicants from other countries.

According to the findings, employment based green card backlog from India (EB-2 and EB-3 skilled category) has reached 7.41 lakh in April 2020, with an expected wait time of 84 years.

The report also said that almost quarter of the current applicants will die even before reaching the destination of receiving permanent residence or green cards. With U.S fix country caps that limit immigrants of any single birthplace to no more than 7 percent of the green card cap unless they would otherwise go unused and given that Indians and Chinese apply in large numbers, these two countries have been top on the list.