Immigration Wait Times from Quotas Have Doubled: Green Card Backlogs Are Long, Growing, and Inequitable

Although President Trump asserted that he would welcome immigrants with proper authorization coming to the United States, wait times for many of those immigrants have reached extraordinarily high levels. In this study, the Cato Institute’s immigration policy analyst David J. Bier uses data from the U.S. Department of State to examine the viability of today’s legal immigration system. Would-be immigrants experience two types of delays: bureaucratic delays in the processing of initial applications, and delays after applications have been approved due to numerical and per-country limits on immigrant visa availability. This study examines the second type of delay.  The paper highlights that there are nearly five million people waiting in the application backlog, and that wait times have grown exponentially over recent decades. For example, the processing time for applicants in employment-based categories has increased more than sevenfold in just three decades. Lengthy wait times disproportionately affect applicants from certain countries of origin, particularly Mexico, China, India, and the Philippines.  When an applicant from one of these countries reaches the country limit, someone from another country can pass them in line. The paper recommends that the outdated quotas should be reformed to reflect the growth in the American economy over the last 40 years.  The author further suggests that country of origin limitations should end, and congress should place a five-year limit on wait times for green cards. The author argues that these reforms are necessary to have viable legal paths to immigration so the U.S. can remain competitive in a fast-changing global economy.  (Ayse Alkilic for The Immigrant Learning Center’s Public Education Institute)

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