Let Them Stay

Paul MatzkoDr. Muhil Ravichandran has a  PharmD from Rutgers University and works in cancer research. She has lived legally in America for almost her entire life and is a model immigrant. Yet because of America’s broken immigration system, she’s going to beforced to leave her home and take her much ‐​needed talents elsewhere.Ravichandran legally moved to the USA with her family when she was two years old, but when she became an adult she was no longer covered by her family ’s legal status. While in college she qualified for a student visa, but upon graduation she was forced to fall back on the vagaries of the green card system. There are categories of green cards for those with advanced degrees that she could have applied under, yet the wait period for those with Indian citizenship is measured in multiple years, decades, or even —as David Bier oncecalculated—more than a century. Ravichandran didn’t have 151 years (!) to wait post‐​degree.So she got an oncology job and her employer put her name in the H ‑1B visa lottery, a highly competitive sponsored category. But last year there were ~484,000 applications for only 85,000 H‑1B slots, meaning that Ravichandran’s chance of success was roughly 18%. Unfortunately, she was one of the 82% who were rejected. That means she will likely lose her job, have to move out of the U.S. and away from her immediate family, go to a  country where she wasn’t raised, and apply again in the future. If she applie...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs