Episode 64: An interview with the Cato Institute’s David Bier

It’s March 7 and this is your BAL Immigration Report.

• H-1B registration opens.
• Canada imposes a visa requirement on some travelers from Mexico.
• A new study from the Cato Institute shows that just 3% of immigrant applicants for green cards will receive them in 2024.

“This is rivaling a historic low for green card approval rates for people trying to become legal permanent residents in the United States.”

— David Bier, Associate Director at the Cato Institute

U.S. news

H-1B registration opens

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services opened H-1B registration yesterday. Petitioners have until noon Eastern Time on March 22 to submit registration. Following the registration period, USCIS will conduct a lottery to select H-1B recipients.

This year, the agency will switch to a beneficiary-centric lottery, meaning each beneficiary can be selected only once regardless of how many registrations are submitted on his or her behalf. Employers will be able to submit H-1B petitions for selected beneficiaries beginning April 1.

USCIS-BAL Community event

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Doug Rand will join BAL Community next week for a discussion on the agency’s progress on key goals, including backlog reduction.

Last month, USCIS published a report showing the agency processed more than 10 million immigration cases last fiscal year, effectively reducing overall backlogs by 15%. Rand, a senior adviser to USCIS Director Ur Jaddou, will join BAL Partner Lynden Melmed for a 45-minute discussion on this and other topics Tuesday, March 12, at 1 p.m. Eastern. For more information on this event or to sign up for BAL Community, visit community.BAL.com.

U.S. news roundup

• A rule to temporarily increase the automatic extension period of some employment authorization documents is under White House review.
• The Department of Labor posted updated PERM processing times.
• BAL Senior Associates Naz Ali and Storm Estep published updated expert analysis on why national interest waivers are increasingly common in the green card process.

Spotlight

Conversation between Brittney Quezada-Reed, BAL associate attorney, and David Bier, associate director at the Cato Institute: the green card backlog.

BAL Immigration Report: Last summer, David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, joined Brittney Quezada-Reed, a BAL associate attorney, for a BAL Community event on immigration developments and trends. Last month, Bier published a paper that looked at decades of data on green card applications and concluded green card approval rates have reached a record low. Quezada-Reed joined Bier this week for a follow-up discussion. Here’s part of their conversation.

Quezada-Reed: David, thanks for joining us. We spoke last year at a BAL Community event, and just recently, you published a new paper on green card approval rates. Can you tell us what your findings were on how many green cards may be approved this year?

Bier: We looked at all types of green card requests, people at all stages of the process, whether at the petition stage or entering the lottery, and altogether, about 35 million people are seeking a green card through one channel or another. Of that 35 million, about 1.1 million, or 3%, of the applicants will actually receive a green card this year, and this is rivaling a historic low for green card approval rates for people trying to become legal permanent residents in the United States.

Quezada-Reed: Three percent is very low. You mentioned that you published this paper on the hundredth anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1924. How did that law change green card approval rates?

Bier: If you look at green card approval rates over time — and our paper goes all the way back to the 1880s — if you look at the period before the 1920s, you had a 98% approval rate for people seeking to become permanent residents in the United States. That was because there were no caps on the number of people who could get a green card in any given year. The Immigration Act of 1924 made permanent the caps on legal immigration that were put in on a temporary basis in the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. In 1925, for the first time in American history, fewer than half of the people seeking to become permanent residents were denied the opportunity to do that in that year. The act also reversed the presumption of eligibility to become a permanent resident. Before, the burden was on the government to establish that a person was ineligible, and after 1924, the presumption was flipped. Now people have to demonstrate that they are eligible. Of course, the main reason people are being denied is not because they’re unable to demonstrate their eligibility for these categories that they’re applying for; it’s that they caps are set so low that the vast majority are turned away or forced to wait decades before they can migrate.

Quezada-Reed: And have things changed in more recent years with the cap?

Bier: Not very much — we actually also include information on the cap over time. The cap was last updated in 1990. The president sets the cap for the number of refugees who can be admitted — there’s no cap for certain categories. But the basic immigration, employment, diversity lottery and family-based caps were all set in 1990 and haven’t been updated in 33 years. And that’s a major reason why we’re seeing these continuous declines in the number of people approved through these processes.

Quezada-Reed: Do you discuss which of those green card categories are the most backlogged right now?

Bier: By far and away, the largest number of applicants are in the diversity visa lottery category, with 22.2 million applicants vying for 55,000 slots, so a 0.2% approval rate for the lottery in 2024. After that, you have the family-based system, which has 8.3 million people waiting for a green card there; 7.1 million of those are under the capped categories, which has a cap of 226,000, so 3% of those will be approved in 2024. The immediate relatives who are uncapped, there’s 1.2 million of those waiting for a green card even though there’s no cap.

That’s just processing delays in the State Department and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services processing those petitions and applications for adjustment of status. In reality, only about half of the people who are pending at the start of this year are actually going to get a green card as an immediate relative, even though there’s no cap and then they’ll probably be waiting another year to get through that line. After that, you have employment-based at 1.8 million, asylum at 1.8 million and rapidly rising — I’m sure it’s already over 2 million since I spoke those words. And then you have refugee, the U visa category, between 330,000 and 360,000 for those categories. Then there’s a few other smaller categories we look at. Those are the main ones that we’re looking at for who is getting a green card and who’s applying.

Quezada-Reed: And what are the consequences of such a low green card approval rate?

Bier: Well, the most important one is that the United States is a much smaller country than it would otherwise be. Having more people be able to move here and contribute to this country would make us a larger and more prosperous place to live. When people can come and work and contribute to the economy, this is a thing that we should all be interested in. Of course, there’s lots of other ways in which this affects the society here — the economic effects are massive. The fact that right now, at this moment in time, we have the lowest population growth rate in history, means that we’re going to have more and more elderly people drawing resources and fewer and fewer workers contributing to the tax base or just goods and services in the economy. The best way to reduce inflation is to produce more than you consume, and that’s what immigrants can help us with. There’s huge economic costs.

There’s a huge societal cost because we’re separating families with this policy. We’re separating friends really to the detriment of millions of people who are trapped in terrible countries. And there’s really not a good reason for it. We set these caps at an arbitrary level. There was never any scientific research or economic analysis that went into establishing these caps. They were just arbitrarily pulled out of a hat by members of Congress 33 years ago, and we’re stuck with that policy now.

BAL: In his conversation with Quezada-Reed, Bier also discussed whether there have been improvements in green card processing under President Joe Biden and other consequences of the green card backlog, including its impact on illegal immigration. You can find the full conversation on BAL’s YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/@bal_llp. Look for the links to the interview and David Bier’s Cato Institute paper in our show notes.

Global news

Canada reimposes visa requirements for Mexican nationals

In Canada, the government has reimposed visa requirements for some Mexican nationals. Mexican citizens traveling to Canada must now obtain a visa unless they are traveling by air and either hold a valid U.S. nonimmigrant visa or have held a Canadian visa in the past 10 years.

Authorities canceled all electronic travel authorizations, or ETAs, issued to Mexican passport holders, except for those linked to valid Canadian work or study permits. Mexican nationals must apply for a visitor visa or reapply for a new ETA if eligible. The policy change comes amid a surge in asylum claims from Mexican nationals entering Canada.

Singapore ends COVID vaccination requirement

Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower announced that COVID-19 vaccinations are no longer required for work pass holders. Previously, work passes were only issued after COVID-19 vaccination records were verified and updated with the National Immunization Registry. The ministry still encourages COVID-19 vaccinations for work pass holders to minimize severe illness and risk of transmission.

Singaporean officials also announced that the minimum qualifying salary for employment pass applicants will be raised on Jan. 1, 2025. New employment pass applicants’ minimum salaries will rise by 600 Singaporean dollars, while those in the financial services sector will increase by 700 Singaporean dollars. For employment past renewal applicants, the new qualifying salary won’t take effect until Jan. 1, 2026.

Global news roundup

• Italy began accepting quota-subject work permit applications on the Ministry of Interior’s online portal.
• Nigeria imposed a new levy on companies hiring foreign workers.
• Ireland imposed new visa requirements on travelers from Dominica, Honduras and Vanuatu.

Follow us on X, and sign up for daily immigration updates. We’ll be back next week with more news from the world of corporate immigration.