Abhradeep Chatterjee moved to the United States in 2015 and has been on an H-1B visa ever since. Eleven years later, the 37-year-old Indian national is still waiting on a green card — and still hasn't set foot back in India. His story, which he shared publicly this week, is a fairly ordinary one inside the US tech workforce. That's sort of the point.
The numbers behind Chatterjee's wait
Chatterjee holds a 2018 priority date for an EB-3 green card, filed by a previous employer. In plain terms, that means his place in line is now eight years old. He's since changed jobs — he joined NTT Data in 2023 as an associate director, after a stretch at Tata Consultancy Services — and the green card process had to start over with the new employer.
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That restart is the trap. An H-1B is tied to the employer that sponsors it. Switch companies before the green card is approved and the clock, effectively, resets. Chatterjee's priority date survives, but the rest of the process doesn't.
Four years without a work permit
His wife came over on an H-4 dependent visa. She couldn't work for nearly four years — not until his employer filed the green card paperwork, which unlocked eligibility for a work authorization. Four years is a long time to sit out a career.
The couple has since put down roots. They bought a home in Minnesota. Their two-year-old daughter was born in the US, which makes her a citizen. Her father, after eleven years and a mortgage, is not.
Eleven years, zero trips home
Chatterjee hasn't returned to India since he arrived. He missed his uncle's funeral. He missed his cousin's wedding. Those absences aren't incidental — they're the predictable output of a system where leaving the country can mean long visa processing delays on the way back, and where a worker's legal footing is entirely contingent on an employer's willingness to keep filing.
He's not describing anything unusual. An entire cohort of skilled immigrants in the US lives this way: high salaries, permanent impermanence. The green card backlog for Indian nationals in the EB-3 category stretches into decades for newer applicants, and the 2018 date Chatterjee is holding is, by current standards, a relatively good one.
The obvious read is that this is a personal story. The less obvious read is that it's a labor-market story. H-1B workers can't easily leave a job without jeopardizing their status. That's a feature, not a bug, for employers — it suppresses mobility and, by extension, wage pressure across the tech sector. If immigration reform ever passes and those workers gain real freedom to switch jobs, the labor-cost picture at large tech companies changes overnight. That's a margin story, and it's one the market isn't pricing.
Meanwhile the talent pool is getting restive. Canada, the UAE and parts of the EU have spent years courting exactly the people stuck in the US backlog, and remote work has made leaving more viable than it was a decade ago. Crypto-native work — where payroll, savings and even equity can sit outside any single country's immigration regime — is an increasingly natural landing spot for people who've spent a decade being told their future depends on a government form.
Chatterjee's specific outcome depends on a priority date he can't move and a reform bill that doesn't exist. The next thing to watch is whether the EB-3 dates for Indian nationals advance at all in the coming visa bulletin — and whether more workers in his position decide the wait isn't worth it.
