Photo: Jesús García / Impremedia
Patience will be the greatest virtue that an immigrant who applies for a Green Card or wants to sponsor a relative should have, because migration processes have been delayed considerably in recent years years.
“The delay is causing waiting times for benefits increase drastically”, indicates the CATO Institute report.
The analysis carried out by David J. Bier, associate director in Immigration Studies, notes that average processing times tripled on all forms sent to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services office (USCIS). They went from less than four months in 2012 to more than a year in 2022.
“Processing delays have caused immigrants and the Americans they want to associate with to miss out on the benefits the system is supposed to provide,” Bier warns in his report.
The graph that accompanies the report shows a clear increase in processing times, a marked problem in recent years, after the COVID-19, although Bier states that the delays they are not only for that reason.
“They are a consequence of inefficient processes of the agency that have caused waiting times and delays to increase during the last decade”, he exposes.
The graph shows that family petitions (permanent residence for children, parents or siblings) have been affected by the delays since 2017, with the government of the president Donald Trump, but the government of the president Joe Biden has not been able to reduce this problem.
Applications and renewals of Employment Authorization (EAD) are in the same situation. ), visas for humanitarian assistance, including the replacement of a Green Card.
Although the application for naturalization has remained almost at the same level in the last five years.
It highlights that the accumulation of pending cases has increased from two million in the fiscal year 2010 to 8.8 million in the fiscal year 2022.
The report indicates that there are approximately 24 Millions of cases handled by USCIS, a dependency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“Shows that delays are not isolated within certain parts of the system, but rather a systemic and growing problem for the four departments responsible for enforcing US immigration law”, it warns.
Bier suggests to the immigrants and their lawyers plan petitions in years and not in months, as was the case more than 10 years.
“The four departments of the federal government that handle the processing of immigration are in crisis”, he indicates. “The delays are affecting tens of millions of applications for immigration benefits. Wait times are reaching unimaginable levels; now it is better to measure them in years, not in months or days”.
Emphasizes that this “total collapse of the immigration system” is not recent, that it began years ago.
“Developing slowly at first, the government’s actions to shut down most processing have created a massive backlog of work,” he said.
The director of USCIS, Ur M. Jaddou, has recognized the delays in the agency, for which he has requested more funds from Congress and has a staffing campaign.