Indian-Americans back Trump’s merit-based immigration plan

Team Udayavani, Feb 5, 2018, 9:36 AM IST

Washington: Several hundred highly skilled Indian workers, in long agonising green card wait, from across the US held a rally in front of the White House in support of President Donald Trump’s plan for a merit-based immigration system.

Flying to the US capital from as far as California, Texas and Chicago and driving several hundred miles from places like Florida, New York and Massachusetts, these highly skilled Indians, living in the US for the past several years and in many cases for more than a decade, urged Trump to end the per-country limit on legal permanent residency to eliminate the massive Green Card backlog of highly skilled Indians.

“We are looking strictly for a merit-based immigration. That will bring prosperity and fast economic growth of the US,” Krishna Bansal, national policy and political director of Republican Hindu Coalition, told the rally of supporters. “We are with President Trump for taking the initiative towards a merit-based immigration system,” Bansal said.

The Republican Hindu Coalition is working with the White House and lawmakers towards a comprehensive immigration bill that should include all these things, Bansal added. Giving Green Cards to thousands of highly skilled professionals from India would help them realise their full potential and boost the US’s growth and prosperity, Bansal said.

The participants, many of them software engineers, held banners and posters with slogans like: “Cut Green Card backlog”, “strictly merit-based point system”, “end country limit”, “we need to support legal dreamers” and “We support Trump”. This was one of the rare pro-Trump immigration rallies at the White House.

President Trump last week used his first State of the Union address to push for the merit-based immigration system that admits skilled people, a proposal that could benefit technology professionals from countries like India.

According to the Republican Hindu Coalition, there are nearly 2,00,000 children of legal immigrants-in-line from India, who have never broken the law, but who simply age out at 21 and have to go back because their parents have a 60-year wait to get their Green Card after it is approved.