Fort Collins – Manajit Sengupta studies clouds – how they can be used to forecast hurricanes, how they may relate to global warming, how to predict their formation over a battlefield. In the post-Katrina world, Sengupta’s expertise would seem to make the 39-year-old Indian national a highly prized immigrant.
Colorado State University, which helps fund the Fort Collins institute where Sengupta works on a temporary visa, thinks so highly of him that it is sponsoring him for a type of permanent visa that is available only to “outstanding researchers.”
Even so, Sengupta can expect a years-long wait for a visa that would allow him to stay and expand his research. With the economy humming, so is the demand for visas for skilled workers such as scientists and engineers. But Congress caps the number of visas available to them.
That leaves people like Sengupta in long- term legal limbo.
After 10 years in the U.S. on temporary and student visas, he feels at home here. He’s bought a house and is raising a U.S.-born daughter. But his immigration status means he can’t change jobs, apply for certain government grants or adopt a child, as he and his wife would like to do.
“I have this feeling: Am I wanted here, or am I trying to push myself on this country?” he says.
The immigration debate swirling through Congress this summer is mostly about low-skilled illegal immigrants. Largely ignored are the highly skilled legal immigrants who help keep the U.S. a technology leader, even as U.S. students struggle with math and science.
Congress allows the State Department each fiscal year to issue 65,000 temporary employment visas – so-called H-1B visas – that allow skilled workers to stay in the U.S. for up to six years.
But H-1Bs for the 2007 fiscal year ran out last month, five months before the fiscal year even begins and just weeks after the government began taking applications.
For now, Sengupta is staying put as he continues his research on a weather satellite called Goes-R, the latest-generation Geostationary Operational Environment Satellite, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration plans to launch in 2012.
The government anticipates it will use Goes-R to monitor fires, dust storms, air quality in the national parks, fish populations and the health of ocean coral, among other things.
From a squat office building on the edge of the Colorado State campus, Sengupta is developing the science to forecast clouds hours before they form. Because lasers can’t see through clouds, bombing missions over distant battlefields are often aborted when they run into overcast skies.
A physics major in his native Calcutta, India, Sengupta applied to U.S. graduate schools in 1995 to study radiative science, which looks at how the Earth’s heat is redistributed by clouds. Three universities offered tuition waivers and research assistantships.
He chose Pennsylvania State University after a professor there called to invite him to join his research team as an $18,000-a-year assistant.
Three years ago, he moved to Fort Collins for his current $66,000-a-year research job at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, or CIRA, which is funded by NOAA and Colorado State.
U.S. colleges typically graduate about two dozen Ph.D.s a year in meteorology, Sengupta’s field, and CIRA illustrates how reliant U.S. research organizations are on immigrants like him. At a recent CIRA symposium, 10 of 14 academic papers were presented by foreign-born researchers.
At the Ph.D. level, “our field would shrink by two-thirds if you cut out foreign immigration,” says Andrew Jones, who heads Sengupta’s data- simulation research group.
Sengupta arrived in the U.S. on a visa that is reserved for temporary visitors on education exchanges. Colorado State next sponsored him for an H-1B, which requires an employer to attest that it can’t find a U.S. worker and is paying the immigrant the prevailing U.S. wage.
In February, at the urging of CIRA’s director, Colorado State offered to sponsor Sengupta for a type of green card that is reserved for what the immigration service calls first-priority workers.
“It’s like getting in line for a movie ticket – only so many can get in for each show,” says Michael Aytes, director of domestic operations for the immigration service.
The Senguptas are unabashed admirers of American ways. Sengupta says he’s lost his passion for Indian cricket and now roots for the Denver Broncos. He drives a Ford, watches congressional debates on C-Span and fusses about the lawn of the airy Fort Collins house he and his wife, Nilanjana, bought two years ago for $225,000. Their 6-year-old daughter, Pourna, an American by birth, bubbles about a kindergarten project to help Pakistani earthquake victims.
“This is my country, as far as I’m concerned now,” says Sengupta. He insists he’d leave only “if America chases me away.” Still, he’s puzzled by a system that invited and even paid him to study with leading U.S. scientists but now seems indifferent to whether he stays. “This thing escapes me,” he says.
With four years left on his temporary visa, he isn’t in imminent danger of being forced out but feels little government encouragement to stay and profound uncertainty about whether his future lies here.
Once Colorado State files his application for a first-priority visa, he won’t be able to change jobs – even to take a teaching post or more-senior research position at the university. His ability to win grants and get security clearance is also restricted.
“You want to grow, and they tie your hands,” he says.
Without access to federal grants, he can’t set up his own lab and train other scientists. Without security clearances, he can’t work at many of the private-sector companies that will use his CIRA research to develop weather-forecasting computer programs.
“I can do the science, but I cannot look at the applications the science generates,” he says.
His mortgage company charges him a premium because of his temporary status. His permanent visa will cost him $10,000 in lawyers’ bills and government fees, he calculates. His H-1B visa precludes him from earning extra income as a consultant or outside lecturer, which worries him as he calculates the eventual cost of Pourna’s college education. Nilanjana Sengupta, a special-education teacher in India, can’t work under her visitor’s visa – instead, she volunteers at a day-care center and is taking education classes at a community college.
After Nilanjana Sengupta had a difficult pregnancy with Pourna, the couple had hoped to adopt their next child. But U.S. adoption and foster-care agencies won’t deal with immigrants who are here on a temporary visa. Adopting from India is out of the question: The State Department predicts a five-year wait before the child could join the Senguptas – and that is after they get their permanent visas.
The H-1B visa:
Source: U.S. Department of Labor
