According to the
State Department, some employment-based applicants who have been waiting since June 2008 from China and since April 2010 from India only just became eligible to apply for a green card this month. Wait times among family-based applicants are even longer.
The bill — introduced by Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Lee, and known as the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act — is an attempt to address those backlogs, raising the cap for any country to 15 percent for family-based green cards and doing away with it entirely for employment-based green cards.
The bill would effectively send nationals of India and China, who have been waiting for years for a chance to apply for green cards, to the front of the line, meaning that other countries would likely see increased wait times, including Canada and Argentina. Wait times would even out over time once the backlog for Indian and Chinese nationals is cleared.
Indian and Chinese nationals would not take up all of the available green cards in the short term: At most, 85 percent of available green cards could be given to them in the first year after the bill is passed, rising to 90 percent in the second and third years.