June 18: In case you’ve not guessed from the headline, Athulya Rajakumar’s case is one among around 200,000 children and young adults of immigrants on work visas who are in danger of being ‘self-deported’ when they turn 21 and the Green Card application filed by one or both of their parents is not approved, before then. They would have to go back to their country of origin – even if they’ve grown up in America as an infant. Or, they could try to stay as an international student on an F-1 visa (collecting one degree after the other just to stay on in the country – paying exorbitant full tuition fees in most cases), or at best, hope to get a job on an H-1B visa (which companies are increasingly shunning because of the extensive paperwork and uncertainty of it all), and then doubly hope and pray that once a job offer does come, they get through the critical lottery process for the limited number of work visas on offer.
For Indian families who are in the throes of a broken immigration system in the US, it’s their worst nightmare come true. The nightmare started perhaps a few years after they applied for a Green Card. The initial hope became apprehension, turned into acute anxiety, and years on, morphed as deep anguish, as their children who were born in India, grew older, graduated from high school, started college.
President Trump had been accused of separating children of undocumented immigrant families at the border. Children ‘aging out’, being forced to self-deport on a plane, to a country they hardly know, is yet another form of cruel separation – in a legal garb, though. It’s equally traumatic. Once these 21-year-olds are self-deported, they would have to go back in line of the Green Card process. Their parents would have to again file for a Green Card for them.
In Rajakumar’s case, the irony is that her parents finally got a Green Card last year, but by then she had already ‘aged out’, turned 21.
The Wall Street Journal reported: “Athulya Rajakumar grew up in the Seattle suburbs, taking dance lessons and competing on her high-school debate team. Last year, she received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. But Ms. Rajakumar might soon need to leave the country she has called home since age 5, when her mother moved the family from India for a job at Microsoft Corp. Her legal status ends in December, and the 23-year-old said she sees little choice but to self-deport to India.”
“I don’t have a support system there, and I’m not a native speaker,” Ms. Rajakumar said. “I genuinely don’t know what to do.”
“Each year since 2018, about 10,000 children reach adulthood and split off from their parents’ immigration cases, said David Bier, an immigration research fellow at the Cato Institute. “We’re educating these kids from the time of grade school through college graduation, and still forcing them to leave the country,” Mr. Bier said. “It’s an accident of a broken system—no one will defend it because no one came up with it.”
“Indians make up 82% of the green-card backlog, and immigration researchers estimate that an Indian applicant applying for an employment-based green card today can expect to wait 80 years.
“When Ms. Rajakumar turned 21 about two years ago, the visa attached to her mother’s case automatically expired. She was able to remain on a student visa, allowing her to finish her studies and work for a year after graduation.
“She had hoped to win the lottery for a coveted H-1B visa—the same work visa her mother held for nearly two decades. That would have put her back in the ever-growing line for a green card, but given her years to remain in the U.S. legally. This spring, she lost the lottery.”: WSJ
In my last newsletter, I’d highlighted a column by an Indian working in Phoenix, Vivek Soni, who too fears the same fate for his two daughters as what the Rajakumar family is going through right now. Read his column: ‘We applied for green cards 9 years ago. Soon, the wait could tear apart my family’.