“I feel like my brain is rusted all these years locked up in a golden cage,” says Pratheepa who was a physics teacher in India and has been waiting for 7 years to get her Employment Authorization Document in the U.S. She may not have to wait too long to get back her sense of self and independence starting May 26. The U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Service announced Feb. 24, thateffective May 26, H-4 dependent spouses of H-1B visa holders who have applied for green cards, could apply for a work permit.
History of Struggle
The step that has been in the making for years, comes after years of advocacy and petitioning by activists and H-4 visa holders like Meghna Damani of Jersey City, N.J, whose documentary, Hearts Suspended, first covered by News India Times, set the ball rolling ten years ago; or Rashi Bhatnagar from Austin, Texas, who started a blog that allowed thousands of H4 visa holders to vent and join the campaign to change the system; as well as attorneys like Washington, D.C.- based Shivali Shah, who discovered how big the problem was when most of the serious domestic abuse cases that her non-profit in North Carolina dealt with a decade ago, were women H4 visa holders .
The USCIS estimates that with its new rule a flood of 179, 600 applicants may send in applications for EADs starting May 26. A large percentage of them will be Indians as the H1-B visa holders are largely Indian. After this first year, applications are expected to drop to 55,000 annually.
Finalizing the H-4 employment eligibility was a part of the immigration executive actions President Obama announced in November 2014. USCIS Director Leon Rodríguez announcing the new regulation conceded that apart from helping U.S. businesses retain highly skilled workers if their spouses are also allowed to work, it would improve the quality of life for affected families. Apart from the potential financial benefit however, the EAD would significantly improve the lives of H4 visa holders whose anguish is apparent from the title and content of Bhatnagar’s Facebook and blog “H4visacurse.”
Losing Identity
Words like lonely, depressed, no confidence, dependent, frustrated, wanting to leave, pepper the hundreds of blog entries on H4visacurse. Bhatnagar, 31, a journalism major from Delhi University who worked with Media Transasia in India, has been on an H4 visa for 6 years. Her site received hundreds and then thousands of messages from H4 visa holders, and the groups formed by activists like her drove petitions to the White House, met with USCIS officials, and sgarted Twitter campaigns, to change things. The IT savvy Bhatnagar has coded the responses on her site generating a credible data base that also allowed her to do a 2014 survey based on 400 respondents from several countries, a majority from India. It shows 96 percent of H4 visa holders are women, 83 percent are between 26 and 36 years of age, 53 percent have Masters degrees and 42 percent are graduates. Around 61 percent have been on the H4 visa for 1 to 5 years and another 21 percent have been waiting for 5 to 10 years. Eighty five percent plan to leave the U.S.
“It is very lonely and depressing just to stay idle at home for months together,” says software engineer Ramya (no last name).
“I am loosing (sic) my hopes about my future, can’t dream for future goals and totally going into a stage of depression,” blogs Lavina Varghese, a registered nurse in India who says she doesn’t have a penny in her hands to spend on her own and her prospects for landing a job even if she goes back to India are slim. Pooja Upathyay describes her plight with the words “No confidence … depressed … loneliness … Dependent.”
“If the same frustrating feeling continues, we both are planning to return to India where I can work and my career won’t be spoiled,” says Deepti (no last name) who has a B.Tech degree and worked in IT for 5 years in India before coming to the U.S. and who says her depression and frequent outbursts are destroying the marriage.
Neha Mahajan of North Brunswick, N.J., an English major and an H4 visa activist told News India Times “all her youth,” i.e. the last 7 years on the dependent visa, had been lost and that the USCIS announcement is wonderful news. After arriving here 9 years ago and finding, getting numerous rejections, she realized there was no way she would get the EAD, and began volunteering with a major South Asian film festival in New Jersey. She couldn’t get student loans to study further because she had no Social Security Number. “I cannot wait to apply for the work visa, but am also scared. I don’t know who will give me a job,” she says. Ironically, she says, “I grew up very independent and coming to the U.S., that’s what has been taken away from me.” Nimita Naik, 33, of Cleveland, Ohio, an MBA from University of Bombay, says she even reached a point where she thought, “If it’s your freedom you have to give up, then maybe its time to end the marriage,” and that she should return to India and “do something with her life.”
Documentary film-maker Damani said her marriage almost broke up, she went into depression and had suicidal thoughts. She trained as a life coach first to help herself, and now helps others, practicing the Buddhist Lotus Sutra, that she says taught her to “change poison into medicine.”
Spousal Abuse
Several H4 visa holders News India Times interviewed for this article said their marriages and families had suffered because of their visa status. But arguments and fights between couples does not equal the plight of physically and mentally battered women on H4, who attorney Shah says are rife and hidden victims of this visa. When she started her organization, Kiran, in North Carolina, to help battered South Asian women, she found a big proportion of those needing help were H4 visa holders, which she thought may be explained by the concentration of H1-B visa holders in the technology corridor of Triangle Park in Raleigh, N.C. She went on to study 7 other South Asian women’s organizations around the country and found the same phenomena even though these were not IT cities. “Anywhere from 30 to 75 percent of their clients were on H4 visas. The numbers were alarming everywhere.”
Ten or fifteen years ago, non-profits working with battered women harbored a bias against taking on “middle-class” H4 clients. “They are only middle-class if their husbands give them that status, but in all other ways they are destitute,” Shah says. If a relationship is good, an H4 spouse may get an allowance to run the home or buy a few personal things, but that is not the general case. “I once went to meet a woman at a restaurant and she freaked out when the cab driver wouldn’t give her a receipt because she had to give it to her husband,” Shah recalls. Another woman who asked for her help had a husband who was away working during the week and shut off the heating system, in Boston. She had to sleep at her neighbors because it was too cold, and sometimes eat in other people’s houses, with her 3-year old son because the money the husband left for food ran out.
Today, more non-profits are paying attention to H4s now.
The next challenge is to make sure that when the actual regulations for EADs come out they don’t put all the power in the hands of the husband, Shah fears. Lawyers should be able to independently apply for H4 spouses instead of waiting for the go-ahead from the H1-B spouse. “The new regulations must address this issue.”
Even though she is excited, even ecstatic about the May 26 changes having dealt with so many cases of H4 spouse abuse, Shah articulates the fear and frustration of her clients. “This H4 has been a thorn in the side of women for the life of this visa. I want to see the recognition that there is existing abuse, it’s not a hypothetical.”
Exploited by Companies
Some of the problems for H4s arise because of their high qualifications which lead to a somewhat naive belief they will land them a job soon enough on U.S. shores. Not happening. In some cases spouses on H1-B visas are less qualified than the H4s, which strengthens their belief that they could easily get a job in the U.S. once they are here. Also, the H1 B visa holder is a bigger catch in India than someone with a green card. An H1B can get his spouse to the U.S. almost immediately whereas a green card holder’s spouse can take years to get papers cleared.
When H 4s arrive they realize there are many upspoken and previously unknown barriers. Even if you get a job, the employer has to be willing to sponsor you, and this applies even to those with IT qualifications. For women already in an abusive marriage, it becomes a bigger problem.The blog H4visacurse shows H 4s who are nurses, engineers, and IT specialists.
In the face of impediments to getting work, H4 visa holders have resorted to working under the table as it were, being paid less than minimum wage, and encountered employment abuse. Activists say a number of Indian or Indian-American owned companies here exploit H4s, according to activists. “They get incomes but not what was promised,” says Shah.
Limitations/ Challenges
The May 26 regulations are far from a panacea for all the ills of H4. Those eligible include certain H-4 dependent spouses of H-1B nonimmigrants who have the necessary Form I-140, the immigrant petition for alien worker; or have been granted the H1-B visa under existing laws that allow them to stay on beyond the six-year limit. The DHS rightly hopes that this opening up from May 26, will not only reduce the financial burden that currently lies on just one earning member, but also reduces “personal stresses” for those waiting to get green cards. Wait time for green cards is constantly being pushed back from year to year, sometimes taking 10 to 15 years to procure one.
In the bigger picture, the May 26 regulation will bring U.S. immigration policies more in line with laws of other countries that compete to attract similar highly skilled workers, a problem the Obama administration has acknowledged repeatedly.
At the individual level the H4 is not just about being able to work or not. Expectations are high. “We can now get a Social Security Number, have our own bank account, have our names on ownership documents for a house, or on my husband’s retirement account. Those things matter,” according to Naik who says it has been a long journey. “This is the 21st Century and I feel like I’ve been living in the 18th,” Mahajan notes. “This is America for god’s sake, not a village in India.”