Green card blues are here to stay |
Having imposed a visa ban on seven countries with Muslim majorities and supported plans to restrict the issuance of H-1B visas, the Trump administration is turning its attention to closing the United States “golden door” to legal migrants. Two leaked memoranda indicate the White House is planning to restrict immigrant applicants and existing migrants. The focus: those migrants likely to need or who already receive welfare benefits. In parallel, two senators have tabled a bill that would slash the number of legal migrants into the country by roughly half and cut the issuance of green cards. This bill does not have the endorsement of the White House. However, all these pointers indicate a strong political momentum towards some sort of restriction on legal migration into the US that could manifest itself tangibly in the coming months. The large numbers of Indians who hanker for residency and citizenship in the US have reason to be concerned. Indians are the single largest inflow of legal migrants into the US having long overtaken Mexicans and staying above Chinese the past few years. The Indian-American community is now the largest Indian diaspora in the world – and the most successful measured by education, income and political integration.
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