High-tech workers here on federal permits are speaking out — many for the first time — over rules that leave them in personal and professional limbo.

After Congress failed to reform immigration laws for the second year in a row, hundreds of the largely Indian and China-born workers protested in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC. They were frustrated that the divisive debate over illegal immigration had overwhelmed efforts at comprehensive immigration reform. “I’ve never held a banner before, but I don’t know what else to do,” said Gopal Chauhan, a high-tech employee who has been waiting seven years for a green card.  “It gets too frustrating sometimes,” said Sandeep Bhatia, a software engineer from Mumbai who first applied for a green card in 2001.

“The Indian and Chinese economies are being fed right now with people who get tired of waiting and go home,”Bhatia said. Applications for work-related green cards — limited to 140,000 each year, about 9,800 per sending country — are backlogged so deep that many immigrants must plod along for years, uncertain about their future in  and unable to change jobs. American-born tech workers who criticize the visa system argue the annual influx of 65,000 foreign workers like Bhatia takes jobs from Americans and puts a damper on all salaries. But the industry is putting its muscle behind its foreign workers.

“They’re the smartest in their field, recognised as essential to the companies’ growth, yet this immigration system subjects them to second-class status,” said Robert Hoffman, a vice president with business software company Oracle Corp and co-chairman of Compete America, a coalition pushing to increase the number of work visas available. Besides Oracle, its members include such heavyweights as Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp.