The petitions of applicants who will be processed at an overseas US Consular post are forwarded by USCIS to the Department of State (DOS).  Applicants in categories subject to numerical limit are registered on the visa waiting list.  Each case is assigned a priority date based on the filing date of the initial petition.  There are about 3.5 million on this list.  This is positively disastrous when you consider that our current laws permit 376,000 people to immigrant to the USA each year under the family-based and employment-based systems, with the average wait being over 10 years long!

There are probably another 1 million in the USA waiting to adjust their status and these numbers aren’t even reflected in the DOS report.

About 95% of the people on the list are in the family-based categories and more than 1/2 of these are  in the brother-sister 4th preference category.  At the 65,000 number level for this category, this is a wait time that averages 10-26 years!

The total employment numbers waiting a priority date:  130,509 including 119,759 in the EB-3 category.  This is a 3-4 year wait, ignoring per country limits.  The countries with the largest backlogs are the Philippines (45,331 – mostly nurses and their families.  Yes, there’s something wrong with this picture!) and India (20,467 – mostly IT professionals and their families – something is wrong with this picture, too!).  Then we hear politicians and uninformed folks saying “get in line and wait your turn”  – like the line is actually moving!

It’s a sad state of affairs that points squarely at the fact that we must first focus on legal immigration reform – getting these wait times down to something reasonable.  Do we have any representatives courageous enough to vote for legal immigration reform so that we have a system that doesn’t punish people who play by the rules?