Group Urges Biden Not To Issue H-1B Till Country Cap On Green Card Is Removed

An influential immigration advocacy group representing Indian-Americans on Thursday urged the Biden administration not to issue the most sought-after H-1B work visa to any individual born in India, till the time the discriminatory country-cap on green cards or permanent legal residency is removed.

The current per-country cap on issuing of green cards in the US has resulted in Indian professionals, mostly from the IT sector, having to wait for decades for their legal permanent residency. Issuing new H-1B visas to more Indians would add to this agonising painful wait for green cards, Immigration Voice said in a statement.

The statement came in response to the Biden administration decision to allow employers of H-1B visa holders to begin registration online for the H1-B Visa lottery, starting March 9th this year, for the fiscal year 2022.

Under the system, over 60,000 additional Indian nationals will unwittingly be lured to enter the United States this year (and every year) to "engage in a life of indentured servitude" where their very existence and the "lives of their families will be completely subject to the whims of their employer, new administrations, or even individual immigration adjudicators having a bad day," said Aman Kapoor, president of Immigration Voice.

The membership of Immigration Voice called on the Biden administration to use its authority under INA Section 212(f) to exclude any new individual born in India who is not currently in the United States legally from obtaining a new H-1B visa for the first time in Fiscal Year 2022, he said.

"Moreover, Immigration Voice calls to stop issuing such new H-1B visas until the discriminatory per county limits on Employment-Based green cards are finally lifted and immigrants from India are no longer treated as indentured servants in the United States," Mr Kapoor said.

In the current system, the only people who benefit are unscrupulous employers, staffing companies across various industries who profit enormously from maintaining the status quo, and immigration lawyers who profit from being able to process the maximum number of immigration applications possible by keeping Indian immigrants tied to an endless line of renewals of H-1B visa applications while also double-dipping to keep the Green Card pool open for people from other countries, he said.

Immigration Voice is a national non-profit organisation with over 130,000 members, who are taxpaying, law-abiding, high-skilled immigrants, that advocates for the alleviation of restrictions on employment, travel, and working conditions faced by legal high-skilled immigrants in the US working as doctors, researchers, scientists, engineers, and other high-skilled professionals at many of America's hospitals, universities and Fortune 500 companies.