Center for Immigration Studies

Chronic Backlogs at USCIS Show Agency Is Not Ready for CIR-ASAP
By Jessica Vaughan
December 2009

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Jessica M. Vaughan is the Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

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One of the many reasons why lawmakers have been loath to enact a mass amnesty and immigration expansion, such as the new Democratic amnesty bill (HR 4321, or CIR-ASAP), has been the government’s chronically poor performance in administering all of our current (and previous) immigration benefits programs. Obama administration officials have assured the public that they are ready for this task.1 But a look at the most recent workload report2 from USCIS reveals that the agency is actually still deep in the weeds and unable to keep up with the existing workload. As of the end of June 2009, the agency had a backlog of nearly 2.7 million applications and petitions that were pending review, above and beyond the 1.8 million that had been completed that quarter. And recent statements3 by agency head Alejandro Mayorkas suggest that huge fee increases for immigrants and hundreds of millions of dollars in increased taxpayer-funded appropriations will be required to improve the situation.

Apparently recognizing that this huge backlog of pending cases might send the wrong signal about the agency’s efficiency and readiness for major immigration expansions, USCIS uses alternative calculations and definitions of the processing backlog as smoke and mirrors to disguise the true scale of the problem. In its last quarterly report to Congress, it claimed the backlog was about 207,000 cases. (Note that the processing backlog, which here refers to the number of applications for immigration benefits of all kinds that the government has yet to act on, should not be confused with the immigrant visa waiting list, which refers to the applications in the queue that results from statutory limits on the number of green cards issued each year. For more on this, see http://cis.org/Vaughan/FamilyImmigrantWaitingList.)

How did they get from 2.7 million pending cases to only 207,000 cases in the backlog? An excerpt from a table in the quarterly report is below. This table is a reminder of both the complexity of U.S. immigration law and the many ways otherwise unqualified people can bypass the conventional green card process (temporary protected status, cancellation of removal, temporary work permit, crime victim, waiver of inadmissibility, etc.). The first column lists the type of immigration benefit, which corresponds to a specific form that has to be filled out by an applicant or sponsor.

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