The U.S. Government defines human trafficking as:
“The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.”
USCIS is unable to fix Green card backlog, quoting congressional inaction and availability of resources as a reason.
On the contrary, they are making it more worse by adding into the decade long GC backlogs with disregard for the workers, who are denied the basic right of job mobility. Only because, corporates need more talented people in such queue and also H1b folks contribute millions, into their billion dollar annual budget in fees. Dual intent immigrants (H1b) are still being brought in huge numbers* from a populous country like India which are subject to annual 7% Green card quotas.
*In 2015 alone, 45000 new India based H1bs were approved and brought into the crushing queue of a million Indian H1bs waiting for their Green cards.
This queue increasing at the rate of 10% every year may lead to chaos in the labour market as well as in the economy. It is possible with a million people in such an indentured servitude state, There can be huge change in the dynamics of labour market. These are talented people in indentured servitude, who are demoralized from moving jobs by law.
The Labour law says, if I140 approved folks move to a new job, they need to start a new labour petition and green card petition once again. Also, the technology skill sets of immigrants get outdated in 5 years and may not be able to pass the labour certification anymore. Combined, it acts as a huge barrier and disincentive to move jobs.
USCIS can at least temporarily stop bringing in more H1b from such populous countries like India into the broken system. But they don’t for the aforementioned reasons. Most of the H1b folks from India were not aware of the decade long wait and the unpredictable system and were coerced in the name of liberty, in return for their skills.But were systematically subjected into indentured servitude and were left to fight for themselves.
Being blind and being instrumental to Human trafficking is same as supporting it and USCIS is guilty of it. With neither an intent to fix the GC backlogs nor an intent to stop adding into the crushing GC backlogs, USCIS is effectively contributing to an illegal act of Human Trafficking, ripe with abuse and denial of basic worker rights.
There is a high possibility, if USCIS doesn’t take corrective actions or stop contributing to the system, before fixing it, it may be prone to lawsuits for trafficking skilled immigrants.
