According to the latest visa bulletin, some people (married children of US citizens or F3) have been in the queue since 1997. And some of the employment-based categories for some countries (India and China) are backed up ten years. What business can wait ten years for a new hire to be ready to start work?
House lawmakers advanced a proposal Friday that would salvage unused green cards from the past three decades and make them available to immigrants stuck in long backlogs.
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How many green cards would be “salvaged” from the last 30 years? And is there a proposal to carry quotas from one year to the next so none are “lost”?
I don’t know the details but apparently the bill salvages 220,000 family-based visas and 157,000 employment-based visas. See, e.g., https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/workers-wanted-proposed-legislation-to-9487893/.
How did we get into this problem? Back when I was a boy, the INS was careful to hand out all of a year’s green cards by September because it was clear that Congress intended for exactly the quota number to be distributed in a year. But for years it seems that CIS hasn’t been able to distribute the year’s quota within a year.
The demand has almost always been greater than the supply. The result has been a backlog that ebbed and flowed (but mostly flowed).
No, I was wondering why the number of green cards issued has been lower than the statutory limit, given that when I was a boy, INS had no trouble issuing all that were authorized in the first 9 months of each year.
I think you can blame the one-two punch of Stephen Miller and the pandemic.