But for those children, who have spent most of their lives and been educated in the US, no clear path to citizenship exists.
That’s the situation facing IU students Lay and Khushi Patel, who have lived most of their lives in Lebanon, Ind.
They moved with their parents to the US as children, and their parents own and run a hotel here.
The siblings said most of their friends growing up didn’t understand that obtaining a green card wasn’t a matter of getting in line and asking.
“You can grow up in America completely legally," Lay said. "But then once you turn 21, you lose that freedom. And when I was in high school, I had a lot of my peers asked me, 'Why don't you get in line to become citizen? It must be that easy, right?' But that's not the case at all. Most people are unaware of there not being a pathway to citizenship for youth who grew up here."
Lay is a senior at IU, and Khushi a sophomore.
Lay was a dependent on his parents' long-term work visas before aging out at 21. Now, he is on a student visa.
Khushi, still under 21, remains a dependent, but expects to follow in her brother’s footsteps aging out.
She wants to go to medical school and become a doctor. She said lack of status in the US limits opportunities, since she can’t apply for most jobs and internships.
“I realized that I can't even go work at the nursing home like my friends are doing, go help at the hospital, or do an internship," she said. "There's just so many opportunities that are already getting taken away from me, not because I wasn't qualified to do the job or get the experience. But I'm not even given the chance to apply.”
Roughly 200,000 children of long-term visa holders face aging off of their parent's visas. And if they don’t plan to attend university, their options to remain in the US with their families are even more limited.
Khushi was a member of the Lebanon Youth Council, which worked with the mayor. She doesn’t want to leave the community where she has invested herself.
Even though their parents work and own a business here, and Indiana is where they’ve grown up, their parent’s work visas mean they are international students.
And Lay said that classification comes with challenges. One stipulation of an F-1 student visa is proving ties to your home country.
“However, for us, we've grown up in the US, and this is where our home address is," he said. "So it's hard to prove that we're not going to remain here after we graduate, or that we even have ties to the country that we came from.”
Lay isn’t sure what he’s going to do when he’s finished with school and no longer on student visa. He’s looking at other visa categories, and hopes to get an employer to sponsor him for the H1-B lottery. But odds for getting picked in the lottery hover around 23 percent.
He’s an economics and cinema major with minors in finance and political science, and wants to work someday in DC on immigration reform.
He and Khushi were both in DC this spring, lobbying for the America’s Children Act. The legislation would provide a path to citizenship for children who:
- were brought to the US as dependents on their parents' visas
-have lived in the US for 10 years
-have graduated from an American university
Lay and Khushi with U.S. Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.)
They met with lawmakers, including senators Todd Young and Mike Braun, asking them to sign on to the legislation.
Christie Popp is an immigration lawyer here in Bloomington. She said the act would protect those who fall into the categories it addresses, but the categories are very specific.
She’s not confident the act will pass, and says she wants more visas to be made available.
“If Congress allowed there to be more visas available, then we wouldn't have these long waits," she said. "And there would be no risk of young people aging out. So I think that is a more important legislative change is just for Congress to add more pieces so that there aren't these issues of aging out.”
Lay and Khushi hope the act is passed by congress by December, when Lay graduates. They believe it would benefit Indiana and the country as a whole to keep children educated and raised here.
“It doesn't make sense for well-educated kids that have been raised in this country, brought up by the American education system to leave to go to other countries and use all their potential there when they could be benefiting their home, what is truly their home, for themselves,” Khushi said.
