A Book Excerpt: Long Delays and Huge Backlogs

Many native-born Americans are unaware of the arduous journey a legal immigrant must undertake to become an American.

people wait in line

Author’s note: I’m a legal immigrant from China, and my journey of becoming an American took 17 years. Yet, I consider myself lucky because, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute, the estimated wait time for some highly educated and skilled tech workers from India would be 151 years. What’s the point of having green cards when you are long dead?

I've dedicated years to researching and proposing solutions to the issues of legal and illegal immigration. This dedication led to the 2016 publication of my book, The Broken Welcome Mat: America’s unAmerican immigration policy and How We Should Fix It. I released the second edition in 2024 with updated data.

My last post on birthright citizenship generated many responses, and one reader asked me to share some insights about the long wait that legal immigrants have to endure. The following is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of the 2nd edition of The Broken Welcome Mat, which is for sale on Amazon.com. The only change I made in this post is to use the most up-to-date visa bulletin from January 2025. Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with me.

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Long Delays and Huge Backlogs

Currently, more than 5.2 million legal immigration applications stuck in the bureaucratic backlog. Most Americans outside of immigrant communities have no idea about the excruciating wait times many legal immigrants must endure. Also, it is politically expedient for many on the left and the right to focus on illegal immigration. There-fore, most media, think tanks, and policymakers rarely pay attention to the enormous backlogs in our legal immigration system. The most thorough analysis of it that I can find is a 2019 study by David J. Bier of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C. His key findings included :

• “More than 100,000 legal immigrants—28 percent of the family‐sponsored and employment‐based lines with quotas—waited a decade or more to apply for a green card in 2018, up from 3 percent in 1991. By contrast, 31 percent had no wait at all from the quotas in 1991, while just two percent had no wait in 2018.

• Nearly five million people are waiting in the applicant backlog. Without significant reforms, wait times will become impossibly long for these immigrants . . . about 675,000 would‐be legal immigrants—14 percent of those waiting in 2018—would die without seeing a green card if they refused to give up and stayed in the line indefinitely [highlighted by me]. It will take decades and—in some categories—a half-century or more to process everyone else waiting now.”

The long waits and backlogs have only gotten worse since the 2019 study. All you have to do is to look at the latest visa bulletin board, published by the U.S. State Department, to see the problem.

To understand the visa bulletin, one must first grasp the concept of a “priority date.” The 1990 Immigration Act dictates that an applicant must have a visa number before he or she can apply for permanent residency (a.k.a. a green card). When intended legal immigration applicants submit their applications for green cards, they are given priority dates based on when their applications were received. These priority dates determine when those immigration visas will be available.

The State Department’s website publishes a visa bulletin monthly. The visa bulletin shows current priority dates for different visa types of applicants. The following was the visa bulletin for the family reunion category in January, 2025:

Here is an example of how to interpret the bulletin.