All Green Card Applications Will Be Processed In Next 6 Months? US Commission Votes For Fast Green Card Processing

A presidential advisory commission has unanimously voted to recommend US President Biden process all applications for green cards, or Permanent Resident cards within six months.

Green Card holders can live and work permanently in the United States.

The recommendations were made by the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (PACAANHPI).

It will now be sent to the President for his approval.

Proposed By Indian Community Leader

If it is cleared, it could bring much awaited relief to hundreds of thousands of Indian Americans waiting for years, some even decades, to get permanent residency in the US.

The proposal was put forward by eminent Indian American community leader Ajay Jain Bhutoria during the meeting of the PACAANHPI in Washington DC. 

All its 25 commissioners unanimously approved the proposal.

Proposal Points

The commission proposed that the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS): 

• Review their processes 
• Establish new internal cycle time goals by removing redundant steps
• Automating any manual approvals
• Improving their internal dashboards and reporting system 
• Enhancing policies

Reduce Processing Time

The cycle time for processing all forms related to family-based green card application, DACA renewals, and all other green card applications should be reduced to six months and issue adjudicate decisions within six months of application received by it.

Hire More To Process More 

Also in its proposal was that the National Visa Center (NVC) State Department facility hire additional officers to increase their capacity to process green card application interviews by 100 per cent.

Another is to increase Green card application visa interviews and adjudicate decisions by 150 per cent by April 2023.

Review Within Three Months

In order to make it easier for the immigrants to stay and work in the country, the commission wants USCIS to review requests for work permits, travel documents and temporary status extensions or changes within three months and adjudicate decisions.

It recommended USCIS to expand premium processing to additional employment-based green card applications, all work permit petitions, and temporary immigration status extension requests, allowing applicants to pay USD 2,500 to have their cases adjudicated within 45 days in a phased approach.

Criticism Of The System

Bhutoria opined that the immigration system has not changed to keep up with the substantial rise in the US population in recent decades.

He highlighted in a policy paper the disproportionate figures of the family preference green cards issued against the available green cards.

Only 65,452 family preference green cards were issued in FY 2021 out of the annual 226,000 green cards available.

Human Suffering

This left hundreds of thousands of green cards unused, keeping many more families needlessly separated even though those individuals are already qualified to immigrate right now.

This takes an emotional toll on families and imposes clear logistical, economic, and emotional hardships on them.

“The growing nature of the backlogs makes the process uncertain and future planning impossible,” he added.

Most Affected

He also criticized employment-and-family-based immigration for being deeply flawed.

Lack of reforms have led to family-based immigration levels being at their absolute minimum every year for the past two decades.

Indian IT professionals, most of them living in the US on H1-B work visas, bear the brunt of the current immigration system which imposes a 7% cap on each country on allotment of the coveted Green Card.