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Indian applicants may have to wait longer for green cards, according to the latest data from the US immigration agency. A total of 369,322 applicants who have approved work visa petitions are awaiting availability of visas in the EB2 and EB3 categories (for professionals and skilled workers).
Technology firms use EB2 and EB3 categories to sponsor immigrant worker visas. Applicants are granted a green card or permanent residence on these visas.
Speaking about the US immigration website’s data on pending applications for green cards, LawQuest’s Poorvi Chothani said The Economic Times“That just tells you how many people are waiting for their visa numbers to get a green card.”
“They have not provided the number of family members attached to these primary applicants, which is important because visas granted to family members count towards the maximum allowable for each country each year. So we’re looking at several decades of waiting time,” the managing partner at LawQuest said ET.
Applicants have an approved Form 1-140, the first step for a work-based green card. After the forms, Indian-born applicants “have to wait a few years for their priority dates to become current. Once the dates become current, the final green card step, the issuance of the immigrant visa, may take several more years due to USCIS processing delays,” immigration.com managing partner Rajiv S. Khanna told the newspaper.
In the first two quarters of FY22, from October 2021 to March 2022, Indians filed the most I-140 petitions, according to data released by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
The immigration agency received 37,719 applications for this period, while in the same period 25,274 were approved. However, even after these applications are approved, it does not mean that they have been issued green cards.
The immigration agency this year eliminated in-person interviews for several applications to speed green card processing.
“Interviewing all job-based applicants was a practice instituted by the Trump administration that adds several years to green card processing. “Historically, US work-based green card applicants rarely had to go through in-person interviews,” Hanna said ET.
Last fiscal year, about 80,000 green cards went unused due to processing delays.
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