Indian Expats Are Leaving SoCal To Find A Better Life — In India
4 April 2019 12:00 AM IST
Mani Karthik is helping expats on H-1B visas ditch their stalled California dreams for a life of less limbo.
- For decades, California has been a land of opportunity for Indian workers seeking technology jobs, but in recent years, restrictive U.S. immigration policies and economic growth back home have caused many Indian expats to move back to India seeking a better life.
- Four years later, they moved back to Kochi -an Indian port city in the southern state of Kerala.
- Like most Indian immigrants in the U.S., Karthik was here on a temporary visa for foreign workers in speciality occupations called the H-1B. Karthik's employers had filed to sponsor his green card, which would have granted him permanent residency, but after waiting and waiting, his green card never came.
- Currently, the U.S. State Department advises that wait times for green cards for high-skilled Indian workers are upwards of 10 years.
- Those long green card wait times are among several factors prompting some Indian skilled workers to leave California and move back to India.
- In 2015, President Obama issued an executive order giving work authorization to some spouses , if the were married to someone with an H-1B visa who had begun the green card process to become a lawful permanent resident.
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