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The client’s name has been changed to protect his family’s privacy.
The Call I Couldn’t Take
It was one of those mornings that leaves no room to breathe. I was on a call with a client when my phone began to buzz. I couldn’t step away, so I sent a quick text: In a meeting. Will call you right after.
The phone buzzed again. And again. Whoever it was could not wait. Then a text lit up the screen, and I stopped hearing a word anyone on the call was saying. Raj Kumar has passed away.
I asked my client for a few minutes and dialed back with unsteady hands. On the line was the man who, years earlier, had first introduced me to Raj. His voice was thin. His friend was gone, he said. Raj’s wife had just called to tell him.
I sat at my desk for a long moment, holding a phone that had suddenly become very heavy.
The Man Behind the Petition
Raj was what people should picture when they imagine the quiet backbone of America’s technology industry. He was an ERP specialist who worked long hours, said little about himself, and let his work do the talking.
I remember the day he brought me to a company that had never sponsored an H-1B worker. Its founders were seasoned business people, not easily impressed. They told me Raj was one of the most gifted IT professionals they had ever known, that he had worked wonders on the product they were building. Whatever it cost, they said, they wanted him to stay.
I think of that conversation whenever I hear people talk about H-1B workers as if they were interchangeable. Raj wasn’t. The people who worked with him knew it, and they were willing to spend years and thousands of dollars to keep him here.
A Life Measured in Visa Bulletins
Raj had lived in America for most of his adult life. He came as a student, earned his master’s degree, and then spent years on an H-1B, searching for an employer willing to begin the long climb toward a Green Card.
People who have never seen that climb imagine a form and a fee. The reality is a gauntlet. Before anything is filed, the employer must test the labor market: ads on a government job portal, the company website, a job board, two Sunday editions of a major newspaper, a professional journal, a notice posted at the worksite.
Only then does the PERM application go in, and the waiting begins. More than a year for that approval. Then the I-140 petition. Then, for someone born in India, eleven to fourteen years before the final adjustment application can even be filed, and as long as four more before it is decided.
Raj carried every step of that road with him, because his daughters were on it too. Both were American citizens, born here, and both were still in elementary school. They had never known another home; India was a faraway land from their grandparents’ stories.
Every call from Raj circled back to the same question: how much longer? Our last conversation was no different. He called to check on the status of his application, and I told him what I always told him: not to worry, it would be approved soon. I believed it, and I was right. It was only a few months away.
Had Raj lived to see his I-140 approved, the law would have left his family a narrow door. Under a provision for surviving relatives, his wife could have asked to carry the case forward and file for her own Green Card once the dates became current, if she could hold some status other than H-4 in the meantime. But Raj never reached the I-140. When he died, the door closed with him.
Permanent
I called Raj’s wife to offer my condolences and asked about the girls. She told me she would take them back to India, where her parents could help her raise them. Without Raj, she had no status of her own and no way to stay.
Then I asked about the last rites. She told me it would be a burial.
I paused. Hindu tradition is to cremate, and I gently asked why she had decided otherwise.
Her answer is one I will carry for the rest of my life. Raj had always wished to be a permanent resident of the United States, she said. The paperwork never came through while he lived. So she had decided that in death, at least, his wish would be granted.
He would rest in American soil. Permanently.
And his daughters, the only Americans in the family, would be the ones to leave.
She told me one more thing. Someday, if the girls ever come back to America, they can visit their father’s grave.
I had nothing to say. I am not sure there was anything to say.
The Email
Most Americans rarely stop to consider what a Green Card means to someone who wasn’t born here. It is permission to stop bracing for the next renewal, the next layoff, the next policy change. It is the right to raise your children in the only home they have ever known.
Every month, as the visa bulletin nears, families across America refresh the same web page. For days beforehand, the talk at dinner tables is the same: will we make the cutoff this time?
A few months after the funeral, an email arrived in my inbox. Raj’s PERM had been approved.
On any other day, I would have forwarded it within minutes. Approvals are the quiet joys of immigration law. We live each client’s journey alongside them; they celebrate one Green Card, and we celebrate every single one. This time, the man it was meant for was gone.
I texted Raj’s wife to let her know. By then, she and the girls had already left the country. She never wrote back.
I called my staff and shared the news. We stayed on the line for a while and remembered Raj: how quickly he would have called, how happy he would have been.
Some approvals come too late to matter. And yet his wife was right. No backlog, no retrogression, no change in the law can touch the status Raj holds now. He rests in the country he chose, a permanent resident of the United States. Forever.
Raj is not alone. In 2020, the Cato Institute found that the backlog for skilled immigrants had passed one million people, and estimated that more than 200,000 Indians in that line could die of old age before their green cards arrive. By 2023, its estimate had roughly doubled. Behind each of those numbers is a family like Raj’s.
It does not have to be this way, and Congress has come close to fixing it more than once. In 2019 and 2020, a bill to lift the per-country limits passed the House, and then the Senate in a different form, but the two versions were never reconciled. In 2021, the House passed a measure that would have let families who had waited more than two years with an approved petition pay a fee and receive their green cards without waiting for their dates to become current. In 2022, a bill was introduced to let people stuck in line file their green card applications early and work while they wait. None of them became law.
Until one does, protect your family with what the law allows today. If you are on an H-1B and your employer is willing to sponsor you, don’t wait for a better year or a better job. Start the labor certification now. An approved I-140 is not a Green Card, but it is real protection: it locks in your place in line, lets you extend your H-1B beyond six years, and gives your family a footing it would not otherwise have.
Raj’s PERM was a few months from approval. Don’t let yours be a few months too late.
Beyond every visa bulletin, there is a family waiting. Let’s not keep them waiting forever.
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