The new proposal recently made by the US President Donald Trump to end the visa lottery system is in favour of the skilled workers. The proposal is expected to reduce the backlogs of highly-skilled workers. The new plan might benefit thousands of Indian IT professionals currently have been waiting for decades to get their green cards.
If the proposal is passed by the Congress and becomes a law, the green card backlogs for highly skilled immigrants from India is expect to drastically reduce.
According to the White House framework on immigration reform and border security released by the Trump administration, “Eliminate lottery and reallocate the visas to reduce the family-based ‘backlog’ and high-skilled employment ‘backlog’,”
The Trump administration wants to terminate the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme, under which up to 50,000 individuals are awarded green card, every year. The green card allows permanent residency and is a path to US citizenship.
Trump believes that the program is clearly against diversity visa and does not attract the brightest and the best skilled workers to the US.
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In recent past, too many terrorist, including the prime accused of New York terrorist attacks entered the country either via chain immigration or diversity visa.
The programme is one of the ways that green cards are issued under the Immigration and Nationality Act, under which the 50,000 immigrants receive green cards each year from countries with low rates of emigration to the US. The other significant sources of green cards are employment-based immigrants, family-sponsored immigrants, people granted asylum and refugees.
Eligibility for diversity visas that are allocated geographically, include nationals of countries from which 50,000 or fewer immigrants entered the country over the last previous five years combined. However, immigrants from any one country may not receive more than seven per cent of diversity visas issued annually.
Immigrants from 18 countries are not eligible for diversity visa. The countries include: Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Pakistan, South Korea, Bangladesh, Canada, China, Dominican Republic, Haiti, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Philippines, the UK and Vietnam. These countries have sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the US over the previous five years combined.
