Thousands of unused green cards to expire Oct. 1, creating anxiety for foreign workers

Thousands of unused green cards were set to expire Oct. 1, disappointing many of the foreign workers who were hoping to no longer rely on temporary work visas to stay in the U.S.

There was a surplus of 120,000 employment-based green cards available this fiscal year — on top of the 140,000 the government already had available. But immigration authorities have struggled to process green cards quickly enough, meaning that many of the 1.2 million foreign workers in the U.S. — many of them from India — are left to hope that their work visas, which place restrictions on their ability to change jobs or travel, are renewed.

As many as 80,000 of those green cards are still unused, according to The Wall Street Journal.

On top of that, it’s possible that those extra green cards will disappear entirely after they expire at the end of the day Oct. 1, which means they won’t be allotted for U.S. Customs and Immigration Services to distribute during the next fiscal year.

“It’s a psychological nightmare for the people waiting in line,” Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney representing dozens of immigrants in a lawsuit against the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services over the delays, told The Week. “It’s like walking up to a kiosk and the guy in front of you gets his doughnut and coffee and you get up to the kiosk and they pull the shade down and wheel the cart away.”

The issue can be traced to 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic caused the U.S. to close down its foreign consulates, resulting in fewer green cards than usual being issued to family members of U.S. citizens, The Wall Street Journal reported. Those unused family-based green cards were added onto the following year’s allotment of employment-based green cards.

The added green cards seemed like a way for immigration officials to make a significant dent in the backlog of green card applications. But a State Department official, Charlie Oppenheim, said in a July question-and-answer session on YouTube that he expected the government to still have as many as 100,000 green cards left on the table by the end of September — when they would expire.

The processing time of green cards is a point of concern for Silicon Valley companies in particular, as many of their employees are not only green card applicants, but are relying on their employers to advocate for them or continue to sponsor their work visas.

Companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple had urged federal officials to act before those green cards expire. Google said in September that only 13% of its candidate applications filed since last October have been approved, Axios reported. And last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asking the agency to address the matter.

“The backlogs have created uncertainty for major employers and caused anxiety for our employees and their families who have, in some cases, waited decades to receive permanent residence status,” Cook wrote in the letter.

The potential of lost green cards is also especially pressing for parents who are in the U.S. on work visas — without them, their children will lose legal status when they turn 21.

It’s uncertain when, or if, Congress or the White House will take action to avoid the disappearance of the extra green cards.

The House Judiciary Committee drafted some immigration reforms as part of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, including a provision that would allow every employment-based green card that’s gone unused from 1992 to 2021 to be available for use in the next fiscal year. Another provision would provide USCIS an extra $2.8 billion to reduce case processing backlogs, according to immigration law firm Reddy and Neumann.

But those provisions would still have to make it through the Senate before potentially going into law, a process that could take an indefinite amount of time as the bill bounces between the two chambers, CQ Roll Call reported.

“There are a lot of hard things about immigration,” Jack Chen, associate general counsel at Microsoft, told Axios. “This should not be one of them. None of these green card numbers should have to be wasted or expire at the end of the fiscal year.”

This story was originally published October 1, 2021 at 3:01 PM.