Will 4.24 lakh applicants die waiting for American Green Card? claim in study

More than 1 million Indians are in line for a US green card and 4 lakh of them may die waiting because of the extreme pendency of the process. According to a recent study, the backlog in issuing green cards, which offer legal permanent residency in the United States, has reached worrying levels, with an estimated waiting time of 134 years. states the study by David J. Beers of the Cato Institute. New applicants from India will have to wait a lifetime and more than 400,000 will die before receiving a green card.

The study said that around 424,000 job-seeking applicants would die waiting and more than 90 per cent of them would be Indians. Given that currently half of all new employer-sponsored applicants are Indian, about half of all new sponsored immigrants will die before they can obtain a green card. The severity of the issue is largely due to the annual cap of 7 percent on each country for green cards. Demand often exceeds these limits, leading to a significant backlog.

The Cato Institute study says the backlog in the EB-2 and EB-3 categories of green cards for new Indian applicants is akin to a life sentence. Also, more than a million Indian children in the US are at risk of being separated from their parents due to the backlog. As they wait indefinitely for green cards, the 1.34 lakh Indian children living in the US under the H-4 visa system will be exhausted by the time they reach the age of 21. This would force them to be separated from their parents.