Trump proposes ending visa lottery to clear green card backlogs
In a move which might favour skilled Indian IT professionals in the US, President Donald Trump has proposed to end visa lottery system in favour of reducing green card backlogs of highly skilled workers. If Trump's proposal is passed by the Congress and codified into law, thousands of skilled migrant workers in the US might see a significant reduction in green card backlogs.
Trump wants to end the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme, also known as the green card lottery, is a lottery programme started in the 1990s for allotment of green cards. The programme annually awards over 50,000 applicants a visa for a green card. The visas are allocated geographically to nationals of countries which have sent 50,000 or less migrants to the US in the last five years combined.
18 countries won't be affected by proposed visa lottery ban
Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, Columbia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, South Korea, UK, and Vietnam aren't eligible for diversity visas as they sent over 50,000 migrants to the US in the last five years.
Trump has his reasons for scrapping the visa lottery programme
President Trump has long been critical of the visa lottery programme and has held that it fails to attract the best and the brightest to the US, and even poses security risks. In the recent past, several home-grown terrorists, including the prime accused in the New York terror attack, were found to have arrived in the US through a diversity visa or chain migration.
How the move can help Indian migrant IT professionals
Thousands of highly skilled Indian IT migrant professionals have several decades of waiting period or backlogs on their green card applications. If the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme is indeed shut down, it would mean concentration of resources and manpower towards clearing the aforementioned backlogs- something which could be of massive help to Indian workers stuck in limbo over their green card applications.
