Wait-times, visa queues and uncertainty: the barriers to American legal migration

Abstract

Legal permanent residency (LPR) removes the immediate threat of deportation and allows a permanent foothold in America. Yet despite its protections, LPR is an incredibly difficult status to achieve for legal immigrants who are not immediate relatives (spouses, parents or minor children) of American citizens. Within a climate of increased enforcement, immigrants are urged to migrate using legal channels. Yet these channels are often oversubscribed and may span decades depending on visa type or country of origin. Using data from the National visa Center (NVC) and the U.S. Department of State, this manuscript outlines the difficulties of American LPR within its two largest quota capped categories: family reunification and employment. Findings indicate that countries like India, China, Mexico and the Philippines have the longest wait-times in visa queues -averaging between 7 and 23 years. Data also indicate that for the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years, there were over 3.7 million petitions waitlisted in visa queues at U.S. consulates abroad. As such, this manuscript evaluates how the unpredictability of American LPR restricts immigrant pathways to legal integration. It also evaluates how time spent in long visa queues -in part engenders illegal immigration.

Immigration and the Life Course: Contextualizing and Understanding Healthcare Access and Health of Older Adult Immigrants

“…Doing so would allow researchers to examine issues related to the timing of when immigrants receive their visas. Longitudinal studies can also utilize probabilistic matching to examine the long-term effects of the time to obtain visa and visa types on health, which is a new and growing area of research ( Bacong & Sohn, 2021 ; Morey et al, 2020 ; Obinna, 2014 , 2020 ).…”

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Health selection on self-rated health and the healthy migrant effect: Baseline and 1-year results from the health of Philippine Emigrants Study

“…The Philippines provides a particularly informative context in which to study migration and health selection. Compared to other immigrants, Filipinos comprise one of the four visa "oversubscribed" countries to the U.S. which include China, India, and Mexico [31][32][33]. The number of prospective immigrants requesting visas from these countries outnumber the total number of visas allotted.…”

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Queuing to leave: A new approach to immigration

“…18 Similarly, in the US, prospective immigrants are faced with different waiting time criteria due to country limits, which cap the number of green cards for any nationality. Under this requirement, immigrants who are applying from China, India, Mexico, and the Philippines, which are at or nearing the country limits, face waiting periods equal to several times that for other nationalities, between 7 years and 23 years (Obinna, 2020).…”