The Other Dreamers.

• Author: Block, Daniel

They came here legally. Most are college bound. So why is the U.S. kicking them out?

Disha Kanekar came to the United States from India when she was six years old. Her mother had just gotten a job as an IT consultant near New York City, so the family relocated to New Jersey.

At the time, Kanekar didn't understand why they had moved. "I was just a little kid," she said. Her attention was instead focused on typical childhood activities--going to school, playing, making friends. She knew little about her family's immigration status, let alone her own. "I just made a home for myself here," Kanekar, now eighteen, told me. "I never thought I would have to go."

But, after graduating from high school this past summer, she found herself with little choice. Kanekar's parents came to America after her mother received an H-1B work visa, which is given to skilled, college-educated immigrants. Kanekar, in turn, has an H-4 visa, given to the children and spouses of H-1B holders. While her visa doesn't expire until she turns twenty-one, it also doesn't allow her to work here. College is the obvious alternative, but even though she has lived in the U.S. for two-thirds of her life, many American universities treat kids like Kanekar as "international" students, who are ineligible for the same levels of financial support.

For Kanekar, that would mean paying more than $45,000 a year to go to Rutgers, a public university five minutes from her home in Edison. For her family, that's too expensive. So, this fall, she went to study in Canada, where college is more affordable. "It's been really hard," she told me. We spoke in early August, several weeks before she left. She was in the middle of saying good-bye to her friends. "This is the last summer I'm going to spend with them before I see them in God knows how many years," she said.

Kanekar is one of more than 90,000 young Indian immigrants who are on temporary H-4 visas, according to experts' estimates. They are caught in a bureaucratic nightmare. Their most realistic and viable path to permanent residency is through a parent getting a green card. But the U.S. caps the number of employment-based green cards it gives out each year at 140,000, and no nationality can receive more than 7 percent of those green cards.

This has created an enormous backlog for Indians, who make up more than half of H-1B recipients. Their principal green card path now stretches on for more than fifty years.

Roughly half of today's Indian H-4 kids will age out before their parents receive a green card, says David Bier, an expert on immigration at the Cato Institute. This boots them out of the queue; even if their parents do eventually get green cards, they themselves will not. Unless they transfer to a new kind of visa, they can't stay in the country legally. And unlike in the case of the undocumented Dreamers, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) does not protect H-4 children from deportation.

As the backlog builds, the problem will grow worse. "Eventually, it will get to the point where 100 percent of [Indian] H-4S will be aging out," Bier said. This means that many young adults who have grown up in the U.S. must make a painful decision: They can try to prolong their stay, typically by getting student visas and then trying to win work visas of their own; or they can leave the place they call home.

The situation is deeply perverse, even by the current low standards of American immigration policy. By design, the vast majority of H-1B holders have at least a college...