How Easy Is It to Immigrate to the U.S.?

From the way some people talk, it may seem like immigrating to America is simple -- but the wait list can actually be more than 20 years long. Learn more about how immigration works in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bam here. If you watch cable news these days,
you may have heard a lot of impassioned debate about
a phenomenon that some call family reunification and others call
chain migration either way, in which immigrants who settle in
the United States then sponsor family members to enter the

(00:23):
country and join them. President Donald J. Trump said in
his State of the Union address, under the current broken system,
a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of
distant relatives. To fix that perceived problem, Trump favors passage
of the Rays Act, a piece of legislation that, if enacted,
would reduce the ability of Americans to sponsor extended family

(00:45):
and adult family members, and would impose a skills based
point system for deciding who gets to enter the United States.
As a result, the Act would cut legal immigration to
the United States by a projected fort in its first
year alone. From the tenor of the discussion, you might
think that it's pretty easy to obtain a so called
green card, the permit that enables a foreign national to

(01:07):
live and work in the US permanently, provided that you've
got relatives here already. But how easy is it really.
Let's take the example of a naturalized citizen from say,
the Philippines, who's been trying to bring a brother sister
here to live. According to the U S. Department of
State's latest visible in currently covering, such a sibling is
now eligible for processing via family reunification if they filed

(01:30):
immigration paperwork before February one. Yep. That means the projected
weight time for a brother or sister who applies today
would be more than twenty three years. Other categories of
family members from various countries face similarly long waits. A
sibling from Mexico faces a projected weight of slightly more

(01:51):
than twenty years, while one from India probably will have
to sit tight for about fourteen. And those projections aren't
set in stone the way. It could get shorter or
longer depending on other factors. We spoke with Joshua Brasblatt,
an attorney and senior policy analyst at the American Immigration Council,
which is a Washington, d c. Based organization that supports immigration.

(02:13):
He said, people think you just apply, you get in line,
and you come. It's much more complicated than that. With
all the categories and the limits. US immigration regulations tend
towards the inscrutable, in part because it essentially has multiple systems,
one that's family based, another based on employment, and separate
routes for refugees and those seeking asylum. That American Immigration

(02:35):
Council has a nine page document to explain it. There
are numerical limits on categories of immigrants and countries as well,
but let's focus for a moment on family based and
employment based immigration, which Breezeblitz says are the two main
categories accounting for most of the people who enter the
US legally and become permanent residents. So stick with me here.
There are four categories of family based immigration. F one

(02:58):
is unmarried sons and daughter is over age twenty one
of U. S. Citizens. F two is separated into A
and B. A is spouses and children of permanent residents.
B is unmarried sons and daughters over age twenty one
of permanent residents. F three is married sons and daughters
of U. S citizens, and F four is brothers and
sisters of adult U. S. Citizens. The family based portion

(03:22):
of the system has a theoretical ceiling of four hundred
and eighty thousand immigrants allowed into the country each year,
though according to Breese Blett, the actual numbers often higher.
That's because the f to a category of immigration preferences
that spouses and minor children of permanent US residents is
not capped. But that doesn't mean that they get in
right away. Those applications can face a projected weight time

(03:44):
of about two years, according to the latest State Department bulletin.
Other family categories have caps on the number of people
who can use them. For brothers and sisters, for example,
the cap is sixty five thousand immigrants per year, unless
there happens to be unneeded visas from the first three
categories to supplement. In addition to the cap on categories,
there's also a rule that no country can exceed seven

(04:07):
percent of the total people immigrating to the US in
a given year. A breeze split explains China, India, Mexico,
and the Philippines are countries where there's a high desire
to immigrate, they have longer wait times because they hit
the limit sooner. Okay, but what about a foreign national
without relatives of the country who wants to come here
to take a job. While that's often a quicker route.

(04:28):
In some cases, those immigrants have to wait for years
as well. Immigration for employment purposes is capped at a
much lower level, just a hundred and forty thousand people
per year, but the number of available slots is actually
less because those job related immigrants are allowed to bring
spouses and minor children, and those both are counted against
the a hundred and forty thousand person limit, according to

(04:49):
bree Split. Additionally, not all workers are equal. There are
different employment based preference categories. The first preference EB one
a k a. The Einstein Visa, goes to people deemed
to have extraordinary ability in various fields. There are also
categories for people with advanced degrees both professionals and skilled workers,
and another for investors willing to put up one million

(05:11):
dollars or more to underwrite a new business that would
employ at least ten full time workers, although a fifty
thousand dollars is enough if the investment is targeted at
a rural or high unemployment area. To make things even
more complicated, that seven percent limit on immigration from a
particular country still has to be factored in. As a result,
some workers from China could face a projected weight of

(05:32):
eleven years, while an immigrant from Vietnam in the same
category might be eligible immediately for a green card. Perhaps
the thing that people on both sides of the immigration
debate can agree on is that the system is messy
at best. In a June twenty seventeen Gallop poll, thirty
eight percent of Americans said that immigration should be maintained
at its present level, thirty five percent felt it should

(05:54):
be decreased, and twenty four percent favored allowing more immigrants
into the country. M HM. Today's episode was written by
Patrick J. Keiger and produced by Tyler Clang, with kind
engineering assistance by Ramsay Yount. For more on this and
lots of other sticky topics, visit our home planet, how
stuff Works dot com.