New Report: Reducing the Immigration Backlog
Attracting global talent by streamlining our immigration process
New York, NY – Immigration debates are as hot as ever, but with attention solely on the border, another crisis is largely ignored: America’s growing legal immigration backlog is turning off high-skilled migrants capable of creating jobs and driving growth in the United States. In a new Manhattan Institute report, graduate fellow Daniel Di Martino quantifies the inefficiencies of the country’s legal immigration system, reveals its crucial economic costs, and presents commonsense solutions that cut through the political debate.
While the US makes law-abiding, high-skilled immigrants wait months and years for decisions, other nations are jumping at the chance to welcome them through procedures that take just days or weeks. Di Martino identifies the causes of this discrepancy, and offers several specific federal reforms that would speed-up processing times, including:
Expand premium processing: allowing immigrants to pay additional fees for faster processing will increase the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) budget, allow it to hire more staff, force it to speed up, and thus help all applicants receive more timely decisions.
Reduce the use of form I-765: this employment authorization form is the most filed even though, in most cases, it is unnecessary. Reducing its use would save USCIS over 400,000 hours of work and streamline the application process for high-skilled immigrants.
Debates over the appropriate level of legal immigration in the United States will continue. But subject to existing caps, it is in the interests of all Americans that the United States successfully attract and retain global talent. Di Martino shows that modest reforms can make the process for adjudicating individual applications timely, cost-efficient, and modern. Failure to enact them means dissuading high-skilled talent from contributing to our economy, for no reason other than that other countries offer faster, simpler application processes.
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