Washington, Oct. 03, 2005
Ashok Malhotra
NRI (non-resident Indian) wives after marrying her
husband who is on H-1B in USA are increasingly frustrated
because US Govt. does not allow spouses and dependents
to work. Immigration laws say extending work authorisation
to dependents would take jobs away from Americans.
Most of the wives have MBAs, accontantants, other
professional degrees and work experience in India......
Read :
Immigrant Wives'
Visa Status Keeps Them Out of Workplace
By S. Mitra Kalita
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 3, 2005; Page A01
Some rooms are empty, most walls are bare, but the
mantel in Hanuma Samavedam's new Loudoun County home
seems conspicuously crowded. There, amid family photos
and knickknacks from her native India, sit the academic
medals and trophies she racked up in a previous life.
She turns to them often to remember what it was to
feel proud, purposeful, independent.
She arrived in the United States in 2001, riding
the coattails of her husband's H-1B visa, a guest-worker
program for highly skilled professionals like him
-- not that Samavedam wasn't. In India, she earned
an MBA and worked as a finance manager at an accounting
firm. But once she married, U.S. immigration policy
put her in a different category: dependent.
For thousands of women like her, the word defines
more than visa status. It defines them.
"When I came here, everyone said with my qualifications,
I would get a job," Samavedam said. "I had
a very good impression of America, that there are
equal rights for women. ... It's not that I feel lonely.
I feel unnecessary."
While spouses of diplomats and business executives
can legally work in the United States, those married
to computer programmers and software engineers --
the job descriptions most often associated with the
H-1B visas -- cannot. According to the State Department,
nearly half a million such visas have been issued
in the past four years, while about 300,000 visas
have been issued for their dependents.
"Having a trailing spouse in today's day and
age is not dealt with," said immigration lawyer
Elizabeth Espin Stern of Baker & McKenzie LLP.
"We've neglected these individuals and their
families. It is an arrogant stance and an insensitive
one."
Since the mid-1990s, as the tech industry successfully
lobbied Congress to increase the number of professional
visas, hundreds of thousands of guest workers have
entered the United States, mostly young men from India
and China. In what has become an almost formulaic
journey in the United States, the workers tend to
arrive single and return to their homelands to marry,
bringing their wives back to the United States on
the H-4 visa issued to dependents.
In Samavedam's case -- in which her horoscope and
that of Raghu Donepudi were matched, their family
backgrounds compared, and their personalities deemed
compatible after a 15-minute conversation -- immigration
status never entered discussions.
"That topic never came up. He said he had an
active life, that he played golf, cricket," said
Samavedam, whose hair parting is streaked with red
vermillion powder to show she is married. "When
I told him about my life in India, he said here it
would also be the same."
Instead, she discovered a world initially confined
to their Stamford, Conn., apartment. As Donepudi left
at 7 a.m., Samavedam tried to stay asleep so she wouldn't
have to face a day "sitting idle," as she
describes it. She rattled off how she kept busy: CNN,
an afternoon nap, elaborate homemade meals, several
immigration Web sites.
Nearly five years later, she lives in a spacious
house in a South Riding development, but the routines
remain the same. The recent birth of a son, Madhav,
helped break the monotony, but Samavedam said her
desire to work remains strong. She said she dreams
of having her own money and of juggling day care drop-offs
with morning meetings.
"Her career has already vegetated for four years,"
said Donepudi, whose application for a green card
is among a backlog of 300,000 cases in the Labor Department.
"We're living 50 percent of our full potential."
Some dependent spouses have been able to find employers
to sponsor H-1B visas for them. Those work visas allow
holders to stay in the country for up to six years,
at which point they must return home or have their
employers file green card applications. Once they
have received green cards, workers and their families
can live and work in the United States freely, but
getting a green card can take years.
Advocates of more restrictive immigration laws say
extending work authorization to dependents would take
jobs away from Americans. Christopher S. Bentley,
a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services,
part of the Department of Homeland Security, said
that he empathized with the immigrant spouses but
that they entered the United States knowing their
status would be temporary and dependent.
"It's a choice they made," Bentley said.
Lawyer and immigrant advocate Shivali Shah, who surveyed
70 H-4 visa holders, found that all but one of them
would work if they could. And dozens of interviews
with respondents revealed high rates of depression,
isolation and loneliness. "The H-4 visa is taking
some of the brightest women in India and turning them
into housewives here," Shah said. "Their
lives as professionals would have thrived in India
but here, they are just somebody's wife. Not being
allowed to work is skewing the power balance of the
marriage."
As the co-founder of Kiran, a South Asian women's
organization in North Carolina, Shah observed that
an unusually high number of battered women seeking
help were on dependent visas. Last year, she launched
the survey with the hopes of using its results to
lobby on their behalf. The dependent women, battered
or not, have few advocates, Shah said. Immigration
lawyers represent employers or workers, and other
organizations tend to rally behind poor, undocumented
migrants.
"Your most productive years for work out of
college were spent e-mailing all day and collecting
recipes from the Internet and waiting for your husband
to come home so he can take you grocery shopping,"
she said.
Some women are so unhappy that they'd rather leave
the United States -- and their husbands. After Brazilian
native Marselha Goncalves married a Frenchman on an
H-1B visa, she felt her world shrink down to the walls
of their Arlington apartment. Night after night, Bruno
Margerin found his bride on the couch crying. They
bickered over stupid things like how much salt she
had put in dinner.
To save the marriage, Margerin told his wife -- who
had a master's degree in international peace and conflict
resolution from American University -- to get as far
away from him as she needed to find work.
Goncalves accepted a job this year in Haiti with
a division of the United Nations.
"I'd rather be in a place where the two of us
can work," she said during a recent visit to
Arlington. "The hardest thing for me is to be
apart. But here, I don't feel fulfilled. The Food
Network cannot be the highlight of my day. We live
in a capitalist world, so for you to be recognized,
you have to get a paycheck."
Some women work illegally, while others fill their
time on Web sites and listservs for dependent spouses,
where they can swap recipes and status reports on
green card applications. There is even a Yahoo group
for dependent spouses in Dallas.
To combat the silence of suburbia that seemed so
at odds with the bustling, crowded India she left,
Bindu Reddy went to the library and volunteered at
a school when she arrived in the United States. Sometimes
the former special-education teacher browsed job listings
on the Internet, knowing that few schools would sponsor
her work permit.
She says she still wonders what would have happened
if she had not immigrated. She probably would have
opened her own school by now. Her house would probably
dwarf the Germantown two-bedroom apartment she calls
home.
Before coming to the United States in 1998, the Reddys
lived in London -- where spouses like Bindu are given
work permits.
Like Samavedam, Bindu Reddy has been waiting years
for her husband to get his green card so she can begin
to have choices again. In a region where economists
estimate that a family of three needs to earn $47,000
to $62,000 a year to get by, the Reddys, like many
U.S. families, would like two incomes to earn money
for savings or extras, such as dinners out or DVDs
for the boys.
"We feel not for ourselves but for our kids.
They ask us, 'Why can't we move?'" said Reddy,
who has a master's degree in special education. "My
son asks me, 'When are you going to work? I want to
go to day care, too.' Sometimes I shout at him for
saying that, and I feel bad."
In the case of India, where matchmakers do not hesitate
to ask potential mates details about their salaries,
skin color, even weight, observers say women's families
are getting more inquisitive about immigration status.
Because of a robust Indian economy and advances they
have made in the workplace, fewer Indian women want
to leave to become housewives, said Murugavel Janakiraman,
chief executive of BharatMatrimony Group, a global
matchmaking service.
"In the late 1990s, the people were more interested
in going abroad and wanted a foreign groom. They were
not really concerned about whether they could get
a job," Janakiraman said in a phone interview
from the southern Indian city of Chennai. "Now
they prefer to be in India."
Mostly via e-mail, Hanuma Samavedam keeps up with
news of former colleagues and the various job opportunities
they are finding in India. Some have been promoted
two, even three, times since she left. She acknowledged
the education her son will get in the United States
and the job opportunities for her husband. But she
wondered aloud whether her sacrifice is worth it.
"I became a housewife here, but my mind wants
to work," she said. "If I get a job today,
I will like this country, too."