Washington: US President Donald Trump has proposed to end the visa lottery system in favour of reducing backlogs of highly-skilled workers, a plan which may benefit thousands of Indian IT professionals who are currently having several decades of waiting period to get their Green Cards.
If passed and signed into law, such a move is expected to significantly reduce the backlogs for highly skilled immigrants from India.
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme, which the Trump administration wants to terminate, awards up to 50,000 individuals per year a visa for a green card, which allows permanent residency and is a path to US citizenship.
Mr Trump has been against diversity visa as he believes that this does not attract the best and the brightest to the US.
In recent past, several of the home grown terrorists including prime accused of New York terrorist attacks came either on diversity visa or chain migration.
“Eliminate lottery and reallocate the visas to reduce the family-based ‘backlog’ and high-skilled employment ‘backlog’,” according to the White House framework on immigration reform and border security released by the Trump administration.
