Immigrant Wives' Visa Status Keeps Them Out of Workplace

"Her career has already vegetated for four years," said Donepudi, whose application for a green card is among a backlog of 300,000 cases in the Labor Department. "We're living 50 percent of our full potential."

Some dependent spouses have been able to find employers to sponsor H-1B visas for them. Those work visas allow holders to stay in the country for up to six years, at which point they must return home or have their employers file green card applications. Once they have received green cards, workers and their families can live and work in the United States freely, but getting a green card can take years.

Advocates of more restrictive immigration laws say extending work authorization to dependents would take jobs away from Americans. Christopher S. Bentley, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said that he empathized with the immigrant spouses but that they entered the United States knowing their status would be temporary and dependent.

"It's a choice they made," Bentley said.

Lawyer and immigrant advocate Shivali Shah, who surveyed 70 H-4 visa holders, found that all but one of them would work if they could. And dozens of interviews with respondents revealed high rates of depression, isolation and loneliness. "The H-4 visa is taking some of the brightest women in India and turning them into housewives here," Shah said. "Their lives as professionals would have thrived in India but here, they are just somebody's wife. Not being allowed to work is skewing the power balance of the marriage."

As the co-founder of Kiran, a South Asian women's organization in North Carolina, Shah observed that an unusually high number of battered women seeking help were on dependent visas. Last year, she launched the survey with the hopes of using its results to lobby on their behalf. The dependent women, battered or not, have few advocates, Shah said. Immigration lawyers represent employers or workers, and other organizations tend to rally behind poor, undocumented migrants.

"Your most productive years for work out of college were spent e-mailing all day and collecting recipes from the Internet and waiting for your husband to come home so he can take you grocery shopping," she said.

Some women are so unhappy that they'd rather leave the United States -- and their husbands. After Brazilian native Marselha Goncalves married a Frenchman on an H-1B visa, she felt her world shrink down to the walls of their Arlington apartment. Night after night, Bruno Margerin found his bride on the couch crying. They bickered over stupid things like how much salt she had put in dinner.

To save the marriage, Margerin told his wife -- who had a master's degree in international peace and conflict resolution from American University -- to get as far away from him as she needed to find work.

Goncalves accepted a job this year in Haiti with a division of the United Nations.

"I'd rather be in a place where the two of us can work," she said during a recent visit to Arlington. "The hardest thing for me is to be apart. But here, I don't feel fulfilled. The Food Network cannot be the highlight of my day. We live in a capitalist world, so for you to be recognized, you have to get a paycheck."

Some women work illegally, while others fill their time on Web sites and listservs for dependent spouses, where they can swap recipes and status reports on green card applications. There is even a Yahoo group for dependent spouses in Dallas.