Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says he’s still waiting for his green card amid immigration debate ahead of the US presidential election 2024.

In a reply tweet, the AI startup CEO averred to the long wait time to immigrate to the U.S., saying, “Yep. I have been waiting for my green card for like the last 3 years. Still haven’t gotten it. People mostly have no idea when they talk about immigration.”

As the U.S. Presidential election 2024 almost here, several Indian immigrants working in the U.S. tech sector have weighed in on the country’s hotly debated immigration policies.

Srinivas’ tweet was in response to a post by Rohit Krishnan, chief technology officer of AI startup, Bodo.ai, who said that very few people actually understand how hard it is to immigrate to the U.S. “I have been an immigrant 3 times now and U.S. was by far the longest and hardest it’s been,” he said.

Srinivas’ tweet garnered a lot of responses from immigrants who were in a similar position as him. 

Matt Turck, a VC at FirstMark Capital said, “Took me 7 years to get mine, 4 of which at one employer I couldn’t leave because I was maxed out on H1Bs.”

Francois Chollet, an AI researcher at Google re-tweeted Krishnan’s tweet calling out the country’s “anti-immigrant immigration policy.” 

He noted, “We need immigration reform to make it easier for talented people to come. Immigration is the engine of innovation and growth. You either capitalize on it as the US has done for most of its history or get left behind.”

Srinivas, a graduate of IIT Madras holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He went on to work with OpenAI for a year before co-founding Perplexity AI in 2022. 

Early in April this year, U.S. government data confirmed that more than a million skilled Indians were waiting in employment-based immigration backlogs.