For these children raised in the US, reaching 21 often means losing their country | Opinion

The dispute among Republicans in Washington over whether there should be more or fewer H-1B visas issued to skilled foreign workers has put a spotlight on part of the U.S. immigration system that’s unfamiliar to most Americans.

Shristi Sharma, a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, hopes it will also put a spotlight on her and the more than 250,000 young people caught in the broken gears of the nation’s immigration system. They are the children of parents who have worked for decades in the U.S. by renewing their visas every three years. At 21, the children must get their own visas, or self-deport.

“That’s an issue that most people don’t think is an issue at all because they think we would have already had citizenship at this point,” Sharma said. “But we are the kind of kids that fall through the cracks because most people don’t realize that the green card backlog is causing us to not even be permanent residents.”

The dispute between MAGA leaders and Elon Musk over H-1B visas caught Sharma by surprise, but she welcomes the turn in the immigration debate.

“I’m glad that we are shifting our attention to legal immigration. I feel like every time immigration is talked about in the news and the media there’s a big focus on illegal immigration and how divisive that is,” she said. “But legal immigration is one of the things that can unite everyone because if we can fix that, we can fix a lot of things.”

Sharma, 21, was fortunate to obtain a F-1 visa for international students that will allow her to work in the U.S. for three years. Many of her friends were unable to stay despite having grown up in the U.S.

“So you could have been living in this country since you were three months old but because of this broken immigration system, at the age of 21, 22 or 23 you might be forced to self-deport. Every year about 10,000 kids face that situation,” she said.

The children of long-term visa holders are not temporarily protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). That protection applies only to children brought into the country illegally.

Sharma, who was the valedictorian of her high school class in Iowa, is attending UNC under a merit scholarship that also covers studies at UNC and Duke. At UNC, she is studying computer science and neuroscience while also studying psychology at Duke. She had a summer internship at NASA and hopes to work in cybersecurity for a government agency.

Her parents brought her from India to the U.S. at age 5. She grew up in Iowa, where her father works as a director of accounting and her mother leads a high school science department.

The backlog for green cards has kept her parents from becoming permanent residents and blocked their path to becoming naturalized citizens, instead they have had to rely on temporary visas for decades.

“It’s hanging by a thread,” Sharma said. “It’s very stressful and hard to plan for the future.”

As the U.S. spins its wheels on fixing its immigration policy, it’s losing the benefits not only of skilled workers blocked by the tangled immigration system, but also the benefit of the children they raise in the U.S.

“Kids in my situation, over 90 percent are in STEM degrees and most of us are pursuing disciplines that the country needs right now,” Sharma said. “It doesn’t make any sense of us to be raising kids in our education systems just for them to take those skills and give them to other countries.”

Sharma is the North Carolina representative for Improve the Dream, a national youth-led organization that advocates for the protection of children of long-term visa holders. The group is backing bipartisan legislation that would make it easier for long-term visa holders to stay in the U.S. She is optimistic that such legislation will pass.

Changing immigration law is not about accommodating foreigners, Sharma said, it’s about helping America and those who’ve become part of the nation where they were raised.

“I’m as American as my classmates, as my friends,” she said, “and so most of these people are American at heart.”