Indian-American groups are calling for an immigration campaign with regard to issues that affect the Indian diaspora, including the usage of H-IB US visas by Indian technology firms and the increasing backlog of visas for families. The call came at a recent immigration seminar in New York organized by the South Asian Council for Social Services, the Kerala Centre and the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin.
Participants want to see grass-root actions to support the executive actions taken by President Obama in November last year. Although immigration reform seems to be stalled at the moment, these executive actions were created in a piecemeal style intended to improve the immigration system of the United States as a whole.
Participants also want to see the development of a fair way of reducing the enormous backlogs for Indian nationals in a number of US visa classifications. The backlogs have caused long separations for many families, despite the fact that family unity is one of the most important tenets underlying immigration law within the United States.
The seminar pointed out that agencies such as US Homeland Security and the Labor and State Departments are heavily scrutinizing specialty occupation work and H-IB non-immigrant professional US visas, and suggested grass-root efforts should be undertaken to make the US government understand that these tech visas are used by other countries besides India to prevent reverse discrimination.