Her summer before starting high school, Shristi Sharma secured the kind of internship that thrills an ambitious teenage coder living in rural Iowa. It was at a local tech business, and Sharma was eager to flex her emerging computer science skills in the real world. Plus, the job paid, not an insignificant perk for a 13-year-old.
But then her father sat her down for what she’d later call “the big visa talk.”
“He’s usually such a big proponent of everything I do,” she said. “But he was like, ‘Shristi, you can’t take this job. You’re not American. You’re on something called an H-4 visa, and your life is going to be different from your friends.’”
The message was a gut punch, and as she went through high school, she came to understand just what “different” meant.
Now 19, Sharma is a sophomore computer science major in a dual program at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is also one of roughly 200,000 so-called Documented Dreamers, young people who came to the United States as children but who can’t work, can’t get financial aid, and aren’t guaranteed a future in the country that raised them.
They use the word “documented” to distinguish that they were brought to the country legally, distinct from traditional Dreamers who arrived in the United States as children without documentation and might be covered by the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, policy.
“The U.S. has poured so many resources into me, and I want to give back, but I can’t,” Sharma said. “It definitely stings a lot when you’re treated like a foreigner in your own country.”
Born in the Indian city of Kolkata, Sharma moved to the American heartland at the age of 5 with her mother and 10-month-old sister, Antariksha. Her father, Suresh, had settled in Iowa several months earlier on a student visa. In time, both her parents obtained work visas, and Sharma found her footing in Fairfield, population 9,400. She learned to read at the local public library and spent winter days sledding in town with her sister. She enjoyed road trips, which she recognized as a particularly American experience. Her mother, Asha, was a science teacher at her high school.
When college approached, Sharma had two scholarship offers: one from the Duke-UNC program and another from the University of Toronto. She picked the United States, and today, she is part of a burgeoning student movement that demands Documented Dreamers be allowed to stay.
Mastering the immigration maze
From an early age, Documented Dreamers master the ins and outs of a byzantine immigration system to map out how they can live in the United States past their 21st birthdays.
To the U.S. immigration system, most Documented Dreamers are technically H-4 dependents on their parents’ H-1B visas. First granted in 1990, H-1Bs are a popular high-skilled work visa employers request to fill specialized jobs. And most go to workers from one country: India.
In recent years, Indian nationals have received around 75% of the several hundreds of thousands of H-1B visas approved by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Over the latest fiscal year, which ended in September, the government approved approximately 7,700 new and continuing H-1B visas in North Carolina.
The spouses and children of H-1B workers are considered H-4 dependents. In time, some spouses obtain their own work visas, but the children remain H-4s until one of three things occur: their parents’ visas expire; their parents get permanent resident green cards, which gives their dependents green cards as well; or the children turn 21 and lose their H-4 status. When that happens, the children may have to leave their country, their college classes, and their families behind.
According to the Cato Institute, more than 10,000 people age out of green card eligibility each year. Sharma knows several friends who have left. The threat of self-deportation, the term documented dreamers often use, looms over them like a “ticking time bomb,” says Fedora Castelino, an 18-year-old who grew up in Apex and now studies pre-med at the University of South Carolina.
Born in Mumbai, India, Castelino left before her first birthday, and by the age of 6, her family had settled in the Triangle. As a member of Apex Friendship High School’s engineering academy, she was driven to land internships before her parents delivered their own version of the life-altering “big visa talk.”
In theory, the U.S. immigration system is designed to allow the children of H-1B workers green cards through their parents. During the 1990s and much of the 2000s, the wait for employment-based green cards for Indian nationals wasn’t long. That’s no longer the case.
Due to country-of-origin quotas and processing delays, green card applications from high-demand countries like India and, to a lesser extent, China are severely backlogged. According to the U.S. Department of State, the current wait time for Indian applicants is more than 10 years, with people who applied in 2012 just now getting their green card applications considered. Some anticipate wait times will continue to stretch longer as more people apply.
So even when the H-1B parents apply for green cards as soon as possible, as Sharma’s father did in 2014, the children are still in danger of aging out.
Losing Documented Dreamers is an issue that disproportionately impacts families in the tech-heavy Triangle, says Rishi Oza, an attorney at the Brown Immigration Law office in Durham.
“Why would we not want these kids to stay here?” Oza asked. “We raised them in our communities. They played on our soccer teams and have gone to our ballet studios. We’ve educated them in our school system. They’re American in every sense except for where they were born.”
From an H-4 to an F-1 to a possible H-1B
Upon turning 21, many Documented Dreamers finish their undergraduate degrees on F-1 student visas and move on to higher degree programs. Those who study STEM fields are then permitted to work for three years through what’s called Optional Practical Training, or OPT. While on OPT, their employers can apply for them to receive H-1B work visas, which are awarded through a lottery.
It’s a multiple-step process with no guarantees. Sometimes F-1 applications hit snags. The H-1B lottery is highly competitive, with around 30% of lottery registrations selected in a given year. All Documented Dreamers can do is know the rules and advocate for them to change.
“No 10th or 11th graders should have to do this,” said Sashank Sabbineni, an N.C. State University senior from Charlotte who is majoring in biochemistry. “They shouldn’t have to read immigration law in their free time.”
Sabbineni, who turned 21 in October, said he was fortunate to have received a green card through his parents last year. Otherwise, he believes he would have had to return to Andhra Pradesh, the state in southeast India he left when he was 6.
“It feels like either the child gets really lucky and gets a green card through their parents, or they have to self-deport,” he said.
Documented Dreamers who age out wouldn’t necessarily have to return to their birth countries — they can try to obtain visas to another country — but as Sabbineni pointed out, options can be limited for 21-year-olds who haven’t completed college.
Along with Sharma, he is North Carolina’s co-liaison at Improve the Dream, a youth-led nonprofit advocating for Documented Dreamers. Castelino serves as the group’s liaison for South Carolina, and all three have made multiple trips to Washington, D.C., to speak with top legislators.
“Every time we feel down, like something goes wrong or someone with political power says something that doesn’t support what we are going for, we kind of remember that we have this age limit,” Castelino says. “We have until 21 to do what we want to do and have this freedom in America to express our views.”
Bipartisan reforms before Congress
Started in 2017, Improve the Dream has pushed the plight of Documented Dreamers onto lawmakers’ radar, said Rep. Deborah Ross, a Democrat who represents large parts of Wake County.
“Over the last five years, they raised their voice, and within the last two years, they’ve been tremendous advocates,” she said.
In July 2021, Ross introduced the America’s Children Act, which would give H-4 children who have lived in the United States for at least 10 years work authorization and grant them permanent residency once they earn a degree from an institution of higher learning.
The bill has 44 cosponsors in the House and 11 in the Senate, a mix of Democrats and Republicans including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican who represents Sharma’s home county in Iowa.
Immigration has proven to be an intractable policy issue in Congress, but Ross is hopeful it can pass during this fall’s lame-duck session after the political heat of the midterms is over.
“There are a number of Republican senators who understand that we have a narrow window to get things done on the things we do agree on, and that narrow window would be between Nov. 14 and Dec. 16,” Ross said, though she also acknowledged “it might not come to be because it’s a victim of the toxic politics of immigration reform.”
Another legislative option is an amendment Ross and two colleagues proposed to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would grant Documented Dreamers who have been here at least eight years work authorization and end age-outs by allowing them to stay as their parents’ H-4 dependents until they receive green cards.
The NDAA is considered a “must-pass bill” that Congress is required to act upon. That the status of Documented Dreamers may be considered a matter of national defense stresses the stature of the science and technology fields these students often enter.
“We are going to deport them to countries we compete with,” Ross said. “That makes no sense, and it’s contrary to our American values.”
‘For an America where we belong’
If not the United States, Sharma doesn’t know where she’ll spend most of her 20s or the rest of her life. But the thought is never far from her mind.
“Especially now, after seeing a few friends have to self-deport this year, it’s becoming more and more real,” she said.
Sharma remembers aspects of Kolkata, her birth city, like living with grandparents and slipping away from her mom so her aunt and uncle could spoil her with desserts. She also remains fluent in Hindi and can understand the local languages of Bengali and Marwari.
But starting a life and career in India is difficult to imagine. The country’s work culture, she says, differs greatly from the United States, as does the role of women in society. And she worries about her sister Antariksha, now a high school freshman, who left India as an infant and speaks incomplete Hindi.
If Sharma can’t live in the U.S., she says she would first consider Canada or somewhere in Europe.
Until she arrived at Chapel Hill, Sharma assumed she and Antariksha were alone. Then, during her first semester, Sharma penned a poem on their Documented Dreamer experience, entered it in a contest run by the advocacy group Indian American Impacts, and won a trip to Washington D.C. where she linked up with Improve the Dream.
The poem chronicled her life to that point, a journey through an American childhood that was both unique and quintessential. She writes of early striving:
The airport is cold, but Iowa is colder.
Gone is the humid monsoon smog, replaced by the frigid snowstorm chill.
We persist
Mummy and I learn English.
We sit in the public library
I read Amelia Bedilia, Frog and Toad
Mummy reads lips, adding words and phrases to her dictionary
She swaddles my baby sister.
And of her gradual assimilation:
Day by day, we start to learn.
We learn that Iowa has many seasons — all in the same day,
Why football doesn’t involve feet, and
How long it’s appropriate to keep Christmas decorations up.
We sing American songs, road-trip American places, learn American history, adopt American values.
Of racing against the self-deportation clock:
Three years left to become a permanent resident
Age-out, and I’m forced to leave
To go back to a country I haven’t lived in, for over 13 years.
I have never envied a green document so much
I keep reading the post.
And lastly, Sharma writes of the Documented Dreamers:.
They say there are over 200 thousand of us
I start following them
I read other’s stories. I reach out to them.
We connect, we listen, we share, we support
Together, we advocate.
For an America where we belong
For an official status that finally declares:
We are Americans too.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.
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This story was originally published November 16, 2022 6:00 AM.
