In by far the most devastating of proposals that the Trump administration is reportedly toying with on the immigration front, lakhs of Indian
software professionals could face the prospect of returning home if the plan to stop granting extensions to H-1B workers awaiting Green Cards goes through.
A report put out by the McClatchy DC Bureau on the proposal that is still being drafted has already set alarm bells ringing among the Indian tech community, which accounts for more than half of the roughly 1 million H-1B workers waiting for years for their green cards for permanent residency.
Citing unnamed sources, the report said the proposal is being drafted in memos shared top officials within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of President Donald Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” initiative promised during his 2016 election campaign.
The Trump administration is said to be specifically looking at whether it can reinterpret the “may grant” language of the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act to stop allowing extensions for those with pending green card processing. The Act currently allows H-1B extensions beyond two three-year terms if a green card is pending.
“The idea is to create a sort of ‘self- deportation’ of hundreds of thousands of Indian tech workers in the United States to open up those jobs for Americans,” the report quoted a US source briefed by Homeland Security officials as saying.
But there has been no official word yet on the subject. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is under DHS, would not say anything beyond that the agency is “considering a number of policy and regulatory changes to carry out the President’s Buy American, Hire American Executive Order, including a thorough review of employment-based visa programmes”.
If the proposal goes through, it would be “a major catastrophic development”, said leon Fresco, a former senior official in the Justice Department in the previous Obama administration. Fresco estimates that more than 1 million H-1B visa holders, many of them from India, have been waiting for more than a decade for their green cards. And many of them have US-born children and own homes in the US.