In early September, the State Department gave exciting news to tens of thousands of highly skilled legal immigrants in the United States who had been stuck for years in visa backlogs, waiting for green cards. On October 1, they would take a big step forward along the path to their documents, a department bulletin said.
Then, just as suddenly and with no explanation, the department reversed course September 25, sending most of the immigrants - including many people from India and China with advanced degrees and professional careers in the United States - back to where they had been in slow-moving visa lines, dashing their hopes and disrupting their lives.
The problem was that immigration officials realised belatedly that they did not have enough green card visas, which are limited by yearly quotas, for all the immigrants they had allowed to apply for them, Obama administration officials said.
"It was a devastating blow for the workers and their families with skills we are trying to retain in the United States," said Lynden Melmed, a lawyer at Berry, Appleman & Leiden in Washington, who was formerly general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security agency that administers immigration with the State Department. Immigrants who were affected filed a federal lawsuit in Seattle, accusing the administration of "arbitrary and capricious action" that cost them millions of dollars.
The bait-and-switch was also a new setback for President Obama's efforts to make fixes to immigration through executive actions he announced last November. His actions to protect immigrants in the country illegally have been held up by federal courts. New guidelines to speed up green card applications for highly skilled workers were another part of his programs.
The turnabout resulted, officials said, from communication failures between the State Department and Homeland Security. After the State Department published its monthly visa bulletin on September 9 under the new guidelines allowing many thousands of immigrants to apply early for green cards, officials did further hurried calculations and saw that under annual limits, not enough visas were immediately available.
"This revision seriously undermines the stability and predictability of our immigration system," Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Michael Honda, both California Democrats said.
Officials at the Homeland Security and State Departments and the White House said they could not comment on the matter because it was under litigation.
Many immigrants caught in the boomerang are on temporary H-1B visas. That program has been under fire from Americans who say foreign workers with the visas displaced them from jobs. But immigrants seeking green cards have been working for some time in specialized fields like science, medicine and technology. They have passed a hurdle requiring their employers to show the Labor Department that no Americans were available for their jobs.
"We have been here years, we have kids here, we bought houses," said Vikram Desai, 33, an electrical engineer from India who has worked on temporary visas for 13 years.
"We consider ourselves future Americans, not temporary workers," said Mr. Desai, a leader of Immigration Voice, a legal immigrants' organization.
But they have been mired in green card backlogs. With a cap of 140,000 employment-based green cards each year, the number of applicants has long exceeded the limit. No country can have more than 7 per cent of the visas, so immigrants from India and China must wait for a decade or more.
On September 9, the State Department notified them they would be able to advance early to the next step: filing a formal application. They scrambled to have medical tests and hired lawyers and document translators, paying thousands of dollars in fees. Many postponed travel; some changed plans to marry or move.
"People made life-altering decisions," said Aman Kapoor, the founder of Immigration Voice, a national nonprofit group. Only a fraction of at least 50,000 immigrants who expected to move forward will now be able to do so.
They are keenly disappointed because they will not receive new benefits that would have come after their applications were filed, while they waited for their green cards. In that period, immigrants can obtain work permits that allow them to change jobs and employers, freeing them from H-1B constraints tying them to the same employer. In some states, their children can attend college at discounted resident rates. They can travel out of the United States more easily.
Sadhak Sengupta, a medical research scientist from India, said that when he heard the first State Department announcement, "my heart was overjoyed." Now he may have to close down his research at the Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence, RI, where he is part of a team developing a treatment for brain cancer using immunology.
Sengupta, also a professor at Boston University School of Medicine, came to the United States in 2002. Working on H-1B visas, he began the green card process in 2010. His team's research advances have attracted patients from around the world to the medical center, Sengupta said. He had plans to start his own biomedical company.
But this year, the federal government unexpectedly failed to renew his H-1B visa. With no green card application, he is scrambling to avoid leaving the United States in December.
"I am so disappointed, I don't have words to describe," Sengupta said. "Instead of hiring workers here, shall I bundle up my research for a cure for brain tumors and take it back to India? Is that what America wants?"
Lawyers said the episode had shaken immigrants' confidence in the system. "It's no wonder people have so little faith in the government," said Gregory Chen, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, "when they can't even count their visas."
Immigrants sent thousands of bouquets to Homeland Security headquarters in Washington on Thursday as a mild-mannered protest.
©2015 The New York Times News Service
