Immigrating to the US: A Labyrinthine Process and Long Waits

As a Chinese-born U.S. citizen studying law in the 1970s, Gordon Quan admits he was a bit naïve when he assumed getting a green card for his new wife, a Hong Kong resident attending the University of Houston on a student visa, would be relatively easy. More than once, she waited for hours at the local immigration office to check her application status, only to be told, curtly, “Yeah, it’s pending. Next!”

“It was very frustrating,” says Quan, an immigration attorney in Houston. “Because we didn’t know what we were doing, it took us about two or three years before we got the green card.”

He adds: “The basic rules have stayed almost the same over the years, but the volume of cases has expanded exponentially. The waiting line is continuing to grow.”

No One-Size-Fits-All Path to Becoming a U.S. Citizen

There is no one-size-fits-all path to a green card or U.S. citizenship. For some foreign nationals, the journey begins with a temporary visa granted for travel, work, or higher education in the United States. Others pursue permanent residency from the outset while continuing to reside abroad.

Each year, up to 675,000 immigrant visas may be issued by the U.S. Department of State (DOS) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), including 140,000 allocated for employment-based visas (EB-1 through EB-5). This total does not include family-based “immediate relatives”: the spouses, unmarried children, or parents of a U.S. citizen.

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Wait Times Are Enormous

Processing times are lengthy, and the backlog is enormous. “There are quotas, so if you’re a citizen and you’re sponsoring your sister who’s not a citizen, who’s a resident or born someplace else, that waiting line is like 17 years right now,” Quan says.

“If you’re sponsoring your mother and father, they’re under a different category, and they may get it within six months to a year. You could run from six months up to 20 or more years, depending upon your country of birth.”

Monthly visa bulletins posted by the U.S. government show that some residents from China, India, Mexico, and the Philippines — the nations with the highest demand — have been waiting since 2001 to lawfully immigrate to the U.S.

The US Immigration System Is a Legal Labyrinth

Kathleen Campbell Walker, the immigration practice chair at Dickson Wright in El Paso, calls it a labyrinthine process.

“Unless you’re really following and studying it, the process and waiting periods are really hard for a member of the general public to figure out in order to determine the path they should take,” she says. “In addition, it is very challenging to be able to spot potential risks or roadblocks that may be pivotal. Choosing to fly solo without competent counsel in this area is like walking off a cliff.”

Campbell Walker recently handled a case for a man whose wife, a citizen of the U.K., was ineligible to live with him in the U.S. “I was able to shortcut a process where you file an I-130 petition with USCIS, physically, in the United States, to say that they qualify as a couple,” she says.

“Instead of taking over a year for the adjudication, it was just a couple of months. And then for the follow-up to get an immigrant visa for the spouse, there was another expedite. So instead of something taking potentially almost two years or more, it was through in six months or less.”

Misconceptions About American Immigration Law Are Rampant

Immigration law misconceptions, the attorneys agree, are rampant. “Sometimes people will say to me, ‘All I need to do is marry a U.S. citizen. Then I’ll get my green card,’” says Quan. Except, he adds, USCIS “frowns on fraudulent marriages, and if they find a person engaging in that, they’re barred for life from any of these petitions being granted to them.”

Another common mistake is assuming that a higher degree will automatically open doors. “Just to say, ‘I’m a Ph.D. candidate, and I’m in bioscience, and this will be good for America’ — that’s not enough,” Quan says. “You’ve got to show what specifically you have that our country needs.”

To apply for U.S. citizenship, you must first be a green card holder for five years, or three if you’re the spouse of a U.S. citizen. The DOS and USCIS websites provide extensive information on numerous topics, including naturalization, citizenship, and the immigrant visa process.

The entire naturalization process — from application to exam to oath ceremony — takes about two years. “Many people seem to think you just go file this application at the post office and you’ll get citizenship,” Campbell Walker says. “It’s true to get a U.S. passport, but this belief ignores what we’re talking about here — which is immigrating to the United States.”

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