Shaunaki Bharne came to this country eight years ago and worked her way into a promising career in the Bay Area as a buyer for a retail giant. For much of that time, she worried her right to work would be taken away by the administration of former President Donald Trump. That threat was recently lifted, but now she’s lost her job because of a Catch 22: She must submit fingerprints to renew her work permit, but the government’s fingerprinting services are backlogged.
“Every time I speak about it I literally end up crying,” she said. “I worked really hard to get that position.”
Bharne, 30, an Indian citizen who lives in Dublin, is not alone in her troubles, which have been building for a long time. She is on the H-4 visa for spouses of workers on the H-1B, a visa intended for jobs requiring specialized skills. After the Trump administration threatened to strip H-4 workers of the right to employment, Bharne and an estimated 100,000 others spent nearly four years worried about the future of their careers and their lives in the U.S.
Now, even though President Joe Biden’s administration cancelled the planned work ban, many of the H-4 visa holders are losing their jobs anyway because of the fingerprinting delays.
Across the U.S., backlogs in fingerprint collection for visa renewals have taken away the right to employment from H-4 holders whose visas were in their final months when biometrics collection centers shut down in the middle of last year during the coronavirus pandemic. These foreign citizens, nearly all Indian women, are allowed to work because they’re married to H-1B holders on track for a green card.
Citizenship and Immigration said an estimate of the number of affected H-4 workers was unavailable, but as of mid-December, approximately 1.3 million visa and work permit applications of various types lacked required biometric collection. Those H-4 visa holders don’t lose the right to remain in the U.S. if their applications were submitted on time but can’t work without an approved visa and employment authorization, which must be renewed every one to three years.
“Women are and will continue to lose their jobs until this is put right, disrupting the lives of their families and the functioning of employers in our districts,” said a letter to President Biden signed by 60 Congressional Democrats, who want the Biden administration to extend H-4 work authorizations for those women while processing delays are resolved.
In-person biometrics collection at 132 sites across the country was shut down between March and June with about 280,000 appointments canceled “to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and ensure employee and applicant safety,” Citizenship and Immigration spokeswoman Sharon Rummery said this month. Collection centers began reopening in phases starting in July with social distancing and fewer appointments. The agency is now scheduling about 10,400 fingerprinting appointments per day, Rummery said.
Sarah Pierce, an analyst with the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, noted that the fee-funded agency is suffering a financial crisis, driven in part by Trump administration policies that cut intake of immigration fees and boosted spending on vetting and enforcement.
Anjali Raveendranathan, a 39-year-old software engineer and technical manager at a San Jose company, said her work permit expired in September. Her employer has given her unpaid leave for two three-month periods, but she worries the company will let her go if she can’t return soon. A letter from her employer to federal authorities, saying the company would be affected financially if she doesn’t return to work, had no effect, said Raveendranathan, a married mother of two.
Shortly after the pandemic started, when the family still had two incomes, she and her husband bought a house and took on a mortgage after renting a two-bedroom apartment. With only one income, she said, “We are draining our savings. I don’t know how long that will go.”
Nidhi Sharma, of Union City, and her husband also bought a house last spring. Sharma, 30, came from India to the U.S. in 2013, earned a master’s degree in software engineering from San Jose State University and has been on an H-4 visa since 2018. In September, she had to stop working for a Mountain View financial-services firm because her employment authorization expired.
“It’s a constant tension. With one person (working) it becomes difficult to manage the finances,” Sharma said. “We have to cut short on many things.”
What is particularly frustrating for Bharne and Raveendranathan is that they are among the many H-4 holders who have already given their fingerprints, often on multiple occasions, during biometric collection overseas at U.S. consulates. In essence, the government is holding up their visas and putting them out of work while preventing them from providing information it already possesses. But Rummery said biometrics can be reused only under limited circumstances.
Even if their fingerprints were collected tomorrow, the H-4 workers said, they’d have to wait months for their renewed visas and work permits to be approved and issued.
Raveendranathan said she wishes the government would waive the fingerprint requirement for now and let them get back to work. Her bosses are anxious, too, she said.
“Every other week they will ask, ‘Is there any news?’ ” she said. “I am dreading that question.”
