H4 wives grappling with personal and professional stalemates

New Jersey. October 6: For more than three years, 27-year-old Shreya Yeddula has been living a life of what she calls 'little short of a nightmare.' For the last year or so, she has been seeing a counselor twice a month.

Another year or more of this, she says, and she is ready to pack her bags to leave for India, husband or no husband. Her spouse, Sudhakar, says there is almost nothing he can do to help his wife, till he receives his green card which is at least four years away.

Back home in Secunderabad, Shreya had been a busy career woman, teaching at an engineering college and working towards a Ph.D. When she married Sudhakar in 2007, all that changed. Two months after marriage, Sudhakar landed a plum job as a software tester in a New Jersey firm and Shreya followed him to the US, hoping to be a part of the American dream.

While Sudhakar is eligible to work under his H1-B visa, Shreya is constrained to stay at home as a dependent spouse on an H-4 visa. She is eligible for neither a work authorization permit nor even a driver's license and ends up having to look up to Sudhakar for almost all her needs.

'It can be the most demoralizing experience ever, especially if you have always been independent all your life. It creates a lot of domestic friction and I end up getting acutely depressed. '

Hers is a story that closely mirrors that of thousands of other highly qualified professional women who are forced to let their talent gather dust in the highly restrictive H1-B visa regime that lets dependant spouses live in the US, but not work.

If she has to be able to work here, only one of three options is open to Shreya:

1) look for an employer who will sponsor her own H1B visa. This means that her employer can demand she work anywhere in the US, which in turn means time away from her husband.

2) get enrolled as a student in an accredited educational institution which would qualify her for a five year F1 visa. However, tuition fees in most institutions are prohibitively high and international students do not qualify for federal financial aid or

3) wait till her husband's employer applies for his'and of extension, her'green card which could take anywhere between three to nine years.

'This is a very tricky and testy situation which the woman has to navigate carefully,' says Sujata Rao, a New Jersey-based immigration consultant.

'while most of them strike a balance by either doing volunteering work or by starting a family, many fall in between and often end up taking cash jobs which severely exploit them. Also, if they are found working, it is illegal and they are liable to have their H4 visas revoked or even deported' adds Rao.

So restrictive are the H4 visa provisions that the women cannot even have bank accounts in their name. 'Forget about everything else, it seems such a waste just letting so much talent sit around idle especially when the economy is poor and we need all the resources we can to get it back on track. Instead of restricting us from work altogether, it would make much better sense if we were allowed some form of legal employment, even at comparatively lesser wages,' said Veena P. (name changed) who organizes a Yahoo! chat forum for H4 wives on the US East Coast.

So, apart from the three options listed above, are there other ways out? None are available legally, say immigration consultants, and the H4 wife should not even be looking at other options since that could essentially jeopardize both her own and her spouse's immigration status.

Given the present status of immigration reform in the US and the forbiddingly long immigration queues, the road ahead seems very long and fraught with personal and professional difficulties for these women who would otherwise have been at the peak of their careers, had they stayed back in India.