The current green card lottery system would end soon and all those 55,000 green cards will be reallocated to hi-tech skilled workers with graduate degrees. This would be very good news to the foreign nationals doing their masters in STEM degrees.

Lamar Smith, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the U.S. Representative for Texas’s 21st congressional district, has also been supporting the legislation to grant green cards to those who pursued advanced degrees. Smith mentions this should be implemented for the degrees which fall in the STEM fields (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics).

A letter was sent to the legislature last week by a large group of companies (Includes companies like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, IEEE, etc.) favoring the bill to grant green cards for advanced STEM degree candidates. The letter includes “These are highly educated professionals who will create jobs wherever they settle, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere”.

Most of the foreign national with advanced degree fall under EB2 category. They most likely would have to work for the same company, stay in the same location, not change their job designation which could affect the job status, etc. There is no exact estimate on how long green card processing could take, for each case. It differs from case to case, year to year and location to location. The following graph gives a overview of pending I-485 for Indian Nationals

Lamar Smith mentions in one of his statement that “The U.S. cannot afford to train these foreign graduates in the U.S. and then send them back home to work for our competitors.” There has been numerous number of bills generated since years, to grant permanent residency or grant employment-based green cards to the foreign graduates, but the decision has never been taken, because of the frequent changes over the Immigration policies.

We have already heard recently from Mitt Romney, Republican Presidential candidate for the U.S. who calls for stapling Green Cards for those who would pursue advanced degree graduation in the U.S. For more information about Romney’s proposal could be found at http://h1bwiki.com/mitt-romney-staple-green-cards-with-advanced-degree/

The legislation likely wants to restrict granting green cards only to those who physically attended and earned advanced degrees. There might be some cases where a candidate could earn the degree by taking online classes and the legislation does not want to accept these kinds of cases.

Every year, U.S. takes lottery to award 55,000 green cards on a random basis worldwide. All the countries are not eligible to participate in this lottery though (India and china are not eligible). This is the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program. The legislation wants to end this program and allocate these green cards to the advanced degree holders.

Although, there will be restrictions on the university on the type of university that qualify. This is to prevent the diploma mills, those universities who allot degrees with substandard or no academic study and without recognition by official educational accrediting bodies. Some bills also proposed to restrict those universities that already have federal research funding.

The U.S. allocates 140,000 employment-based green cards every year, but they limit to 7% for each country. This is the reason why countries like India and China have to face a long wait time to get their green card approved.

A bill referring to removal of per-country cap for green cards has been won at the legislature voting last week, but this has been put on hold to add some restrictions on the H1-B use. It is highly expected that this bill would be passed sometime this year. This would definitely be good news for countries like India and China, whose citizens currently face a long wait time.