Pune: Indian nationals received almost half the employer-sponsored green cards issued by the US in fiscal 2019, according to data from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), even as the number of applicants whose files have been kept pending has increased sharply.

The US approved green cards to 56,608 of the 64,906 Indians who had applied for permanent residency during its reporting year through September 2019. While 1,352 applications were rejected, another 6,946 cases remained undecided as of September end.

The number of applications from Indians was equivalent to the annual quota of H-1B visas given by the US for those with Bachelor degrees.

The agency received 1,48,415 applications for employer-sponsored green card during the year. Indians were followed by the Chinese with 20,481 applications. The US issued 1,15,458 green cards during the period.

There is no explanation provided by the USCIS on the high number of pending cases, which rose sharply from 239 in the case of Indians in the previous year.

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“In lawsuits we have filed, we have alleged that we see a drastic rate in slowdown in the rate of adjudication, which could be indicative of a concerned policy to slow down applications creating an invisible wall against legal immigration,” said Rajiv S Khanna, managing attorney at immigration law firm Immigration.com.

The I-140 immigrant petition for alien worker is submitted by an employer to get permanent residency for the applicant. This is normally done in cases when the worker is either considered to have extraordinary skills or talent, or if there are no qualified workers for that position in the US. This is different from green cards received under other categories where the beneficiary files the application himself. In the past few years, Indians have been receiving almost half the employer-sponsored green cards barring fiscal 2018, when their share dropped to about 45%. As per USCIS data for the past decade, the number of employersponsored green cards has risen significantly from 57,040 applications in 2009. Within this time period, the number of Indian applicants has increased from 15,060 in 2009 to 64,906 in fiscal 2019.