Who to blame for the decade long wait in green card processing?
Waiting in line for a decade is never fun. Drives people to the edge - or sometimes even over (that’s when they go back!). in that state of mind, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees in understanding why immigration is such a nightmare.
USCIS operating performance report for April 2009 - released recently in June, highlights USCIS accomplishments in FY 2008 and provides current status as of April 2009. This is a great document that provides a good picture of USCIS workings on a monthly basis.
- Pending Naturalization petitions at the USCIS have been at the lowest that they’ve ever been in the history of the USCIS. Quite an achievement and we congratulate USCIS for that!
- They are hiring while the rest of the country is laying people off. USCIS has grown 20% - or 1700 employees - in the last year alone.
- I-140 processing is close to their targeted 4 month time frame.
The BIG BIG issue remains to be visa numbers. A system that allows a lot of temporary workers to stay for several years, allows them to apply to immigrate and they makes them wait a decade or more in line to get there. There is not much that the USCIS can do about that. That’s all what the law dictates and USCIS, just like you and I, has to follow the law.
However, using up available visa numbers is USCIS’s responsibility. Some of us may remember that in 2008, they came out with a report that highlighted hundreds of thousands of unused visa numbers over the past 15 years. This means that visa numbers were available, either directly in a category, or as a result of lesser demand in other visa categories (such as Eb1, Eb4, Eb5, etc.) but USCIS was not able to adjudicate enough petitions in time to use those numbers. A real frustration for those waiting in line. USCIS has been a lot better about using up visa numbers in FY 2008 and FY 2009. Final numbers for this year will not be available for several more months, but we’ll be keeping a watch and report on this blog.
Understanding the visa number process - the role of the law, DOL and the USCIS, as well as following USCIS monthly reports, provides a better picture of how the system is performing.
http://www.uscis.gov/files/nativedocuments/operating_performance_apr09.pdf
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