Presidential commission votes to process all Green Card applications within 6 months

The annual levels of immigration were established in the early 1990s and have remained largely unchanged since then, he said.

To make matters worse, the method used to calculate the annual number of employment-and-family-based immigration is deeply flawed, and has led to family-based immigration levels being set at their absolute minimum every year for the past 20 years, while hundreds of thousands of green cards for family members go wasted, never used by any individuals when they could be used to reunite families instead, Bhutoria said.

The extraordinary wait time for a Green Card to be available causes significant hardship for American families forced to wait decades to reunite with their loved ones, even though those individuals are already qualified to immigrate right now.

“Family separation takes a terrible emotional toll on families, and it imposes clear logistical, economic, and emotional hardships on families, and the growing nature of the backlogs makes the process uncertain and future planning impossible, he said.

Among other things, the commission also recommended the USCIS to expand premium processing to additional employment-based Green Card applications, all work permit petitions, and temporary immigration status extension requests, allowing applicants to pay USD 2,500 to have their cases adjudicated within 45 days in a phased approach.