Indians with pending EAD applications stand to benefit with extended validity tenure
(This story originally appeared in on Apr 05, 2024)
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has temporarily increased the automatic extension period of expiring Employment Authorisation Documents (EADs) – aka work authorisations, for certain ‘renewal’ applications, from the current maximum of 180 days to 540 days.
Asylum-seekers, H-4 visa holders (spouses of certain categories of H-1B visa holders) and green card applicants are required to hold a valid EAD, else they face a job-loss or employment gap. Given the lengthy processing times by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the extension-rule will ensure that work authorisation documents are not rendered invalid while their application is pending.
According to the USCIS, while processing times have reduced significantly over the past year, if the 540-day automatic extension rule was not announced, nearly 8 lakh EAD renewal applicants would have faced a lapse in their employment authorisation and nearly sixty-eighty thousand American employers would have been negatively impacted. Immigration experts point out that hundreds of EAD applications of Indian spouses of H-1B visa holders are caught in the processing backlog. They add that another group that will immensely benefit are Indians who have applied for green cards and must periodically renew their EADs, while they face the decades-long wait for their green card.
An Indian-national H-4 visa holder, hailing from Hyderabad, who works in Silicon Valley, told TOI that had it not been for
