A top US lawmaker from the Republican Party is pushing a bill to remove “arbitrary” country quota for acquiring green cards and incorporate "merit" into consideration.

The lawmaker argues that the fixed percentage quota puts high-skilled immigrant workers coming from countries like highly-populated India or China at a disadvantage. India and China together contribute to 40 percent of world's total population.

The 'unfairness' of green card issuance

The green card grants a foreign national a legal permanent status for living and working in the US. But the current cap on green cards does not consider the size of the country’s while assigning the quota. Therefore, an immigrant from a country like India with 1.3 billion people, stands much less chance of getting a green card than a fairly smaller country like Greenland with a population of around 56,000.

"Right now, there's a mother in Greenland whose unborn child will be able to obtain permanent residence in America before someone from India who is already here and have been working here for years. That's absurd and it's wrong," said Republican Congressman Kevin Yoder in the US House of Representatives.

The current situation

The Congressman underlined that when same percentage of green card quotas are issued to each country without any regard for their size, it forces high-skilled immigrants from larger countries to wait as much as three times longer than others.

According to Yoder, the existing process has resulted into over seven lakh highly skilled Indian workers living in the US on temporary work visas.

Recent media reports highlighted that an Indian working in the US under H1B visa has to wait for a Green Card for 12 years on an average due to the backlogging caused by the ‘arbitrary’ Green-card quota.

From 2004 to 2016, every fiscal the US gave less green cards to newer arrivals and more to people living in the country on temporary visa such as the H1B visa, as per a study published by US-based Pew Research Center.

Another Pew study of 2015 showed that about 36,318 Indians on temporary visas attuned their status to permanent residency while 27,798 Indians, who were new arrivals, received green cards.

The question of merit

The new law, which is aiming to reform existing legal immigration system, is expected to ease the resultant backlogging in the employment-based green card system.

The new law, called the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, presently has 230 Congress members backing it as co-sponsors while more than 100 members from each of the political parties are in support of it.

Kevin Yoder has become the new chief co-sponsor of the act which, according to him, will turn the system on its head to come up with a more effective “first come first serve merit based legal immigration system”.

In his speech, Yoder pointed out how immigrant workers who contribute considerably to American economy and are currently raising their children as “Americans”, are denied many basic rights that come with the green card. It is also counter-productive for the US economy as these merited individuals cannot switch jobs or start their own business in the country.

With inputs from PTI