Biggest issue facing Immigrants coming to U.S.A is the cumbersome process and time required for getting a Green Card or Permanent Resident card.One particular section of immigrants I want to highlight in this blog are skilled workers who come to U.S on H1b visa and work for High Tech companies all across United States.H1b workers usually apply for Employment based Green Card and unless they are lucky this process usually takes at-least 5 years.However bigger problem with Employment based Green Card is you have be employed with same company for major part of application process.
USCIS issues ~ 120,000 Green cards every year to skilled workers, now I don’t won’t to go into details of how and where those get allocated but do like to mention that there is a quota for each country and therein lies the problem.
No, No, No I am not proposing that USCIS should ban the quota system and make it available for everyone who wants one as that would be even more dangerous since it would create more problems of unemployment here in U.S which is already tottering under wheels of high unemployment rate.
But what I propose is something very simple to remove the current limitation for H1b workers set at 6 years and let them be as long as they want provided they renew their visa every 3 years.
This will be a win-win situation for everyone.
Now let face it many of us so called “permanent residents” or Green Card holders in United States had filled for Green card application due to the fear of uncertainty that once we reach our 6 years limit on H1b we will have to quit jobs and unwillingly go back to our country of origin.
Above proposal will help H1b visa workers by letting them stay here as long as they want without having to worry about 6 year limit set on their visas but mostly and fore mostly it will help USCIS and US treasury as it will not only ensure increase in revenue coming from H1b applications renewals every 3 years but also there will be huge drop in backlog for GC applications as only genuinely interested people will apply for it.
I feel all the immigrants are here for one reason or another either have better life style or better job or to make money or some kind of opportunity which didn’t exist in our homeland and given a chance they would like to return to their roots and retire peacefully.
