Waiting lists for immigrant visas

[SusieQQQ 11,586]

Not sure this has been posted yet (apologies if it’s a repeat I missed elsewhere). It’s all immigrant visas registered as at Nov 2018, but posting here as most of it is family of USC. The numbers help one understand why the waits for certain categories/countries are so long.

 

https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Immigrant-Statistics/WaitingList/WaitingListItem_2018.pdff

 

some numbers:

• 3.7m family based applicants in waiting as at Nov 2018. The number includes derivatives listed in the petitions
•  Biggest category is F4 with 2.2m waiting, then F3 with 690k. (As a reminder the annual limits on these categories respectively are 65k and 23.4k. )
• By country Mexico has most waiting at 1.2m, followed by Philippines at 314k and India at just under 300k.
• The top 11 countries together account for 78% of the total wait list.
• total IV issuances for 2019 will be 226k
• they break it down further so you can see biggest countries per category too 

Edited January 7, 2019 by SusieQQQ

[Boiler 45,466]

Puts the time lines into more perspective.

[edshere 0]

Thank you for publishing this chart and report it was interesting reading. What I gathered from it is that in all categories Mexico has the most applicants and therefore if done solely on the time of application then the huge majority of immigrants will be from Mexico, China and india if i read them correctly. To me it would make more sense if the immigrations allowed would be more diverse and not sinmply based on when one applies.

I have read what Trump and the WH propose about language, education etc and tend to agree with it to some extent but not totally.

When my grandfather and grandmother came here from italy neitherv could speak english but they made an effort to learn forvat least my grandfather knew employment waswdifficult unless he could learn the language. I think that was true of most immigrants at that time. It seems to have changed however and they tend to live amoung themselves now for it is more comfortable for them and i understand that totally.

[SusieQQQ 11,586]

@edshere, I am guessing you are not familiar with the visa bulletin, because you’d see that the big countries waiting-list wise like Mexico and Philippines have different priority dates (much further back) than everyone else, so that they don’t swamp the total numbers allocation every year. There is an annual per country limit to circumvent the kind of issue you worry about. They actually talk about this too in the document that I linked above. So it’s not just based on when one applies.

 

Some types of immigrants like to integrate and others find comfort in familiarity, it has always been that way and it always will be. But this is partly why learning English is a requirement to be a citizen, to try at least get people to learn the language.  Long before Trump by the way.

 

as for diversity, that is the point of the dv lottery visa - the diversity visa.

Edited January 8, 2019 by SusieQQQ