“The American dream is no longer alive,” said an Indian origin doctor in Pennsylvania, who is one of the 300,000-plus Indian immigrants awaiting legal permanent residency under an employment-based visa.

A 45-year-old Dr. Tarkeshwar Tiwary, a pulmonologist at a hospital in central Pennsylvania, is among the nearly 50,000 licensed Indian physicians working in the United States, and he says he feels invested in his rural community of 20,878.

But the wait for a green card, a pathway to citizenship, is becoming too long to bear.

"What was promised to me was that if I intend to immigrate, I will be immigrating in a reasonable period of time," Tiwary said. "If I had gone to any other country, like Canada or Australia, I would have been a citizen much, much earlier."

Indians nearly wait for up to 151 years for employment-based visa applications.

One common route to permanent residency is through an H-1B dual-intent temporary visa, under a "specialty occupation."

Indian nationals comprise three-quarters of all H-1B visa holders - a majority in computer-related occupations - but a 7 percent per-country, per-year limit on employment-based preference green cards has exacerbated wait times across all professions.

"[Wait times have] been increasing since 2003-2004, where there was a big jump and USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) basically stopped processing them for a couple of years," said David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at CATO Institute. "It's taken off, increasing up to a decade for people who applied 10 years ago. And that's with serious attrition too. Lots of people have given up."

Tiwary’s kids - a daughter entering high school and a son at the University of Pittsburgh - have spent a majority of their lives in the U.S. and "think to themselves that they're American," but will lack any viable employment options in the country as they enter the job market. That is unless Tiwary's luck changes soon.

By Sowmya Sangam