Beyond The American Dream

Indians in the Us have struggled with H-1b renewals and decade-long Green Card queues for a few years now, living in constant uncertainty. What next for them, and how can India attract this talent back?

- Pankti Mehta kadakia

Praneetha Korlepara moved to the US in 2008 once she got married, to join her husband, who had lived there since 2003. With a BTech degree and no master’s, she had scant job options while the country was struggling through the recession. An employer would have to sponsor her visa. However, her husband’s company had promised a Green Card filing by 2009. Anticipating this, Korlepara enrolled into a master’s programme, dipping into savings, and sacrificing on travel and socialising in their early days of marriage.

“By the time they filed the application, it was 2011. I had graduated,” she recalls. This meant that she was now on the post-study Optional Practical Training (OPT ) visa, which runs on a time limit. Two years later, she was pregnant with their daughter, and her husband, who works in biomedical, decided to switch companies for better growth— he joined an early-stage startup. “A month after my daughter was born, he was given a two-month notice and laid off,” she says. “We were truly stuck; his H-1B visa would run out soon if he didn’t find another job.”

Luckily, he did just before their deadline ran out—but in a remote part of Indiana (many-core health care jobs are outside of cities), where even a ride to the mall was an hour and a half away. “We accepted a pay cut and moved there, in the peak of winter with a month-old baby, because we had no choice,” she recalls. “I was going through post-partum depression and matters didn’t help. I was so stressed, I couldn’t feed the baby, and she would keep falling ill.”