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Green card approval rate to dip in 2024
97 percent of green card applicants who have already applied will not receive green cards this coming year
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Only three percent of applicants will be granted green cards, allowing them to live as permanent residents in the United States in fiscal year (FY) 2024, according to a report by the Cato Institute.
Delayed processing timings and backlogs have caused pending applications to reach approximately 34.7 million at the start of this fiscal year —an exponential rise from 10 million in 1996 Approximately 6.3 million green card spots have gone to waste since the early 1900’s.
In 1921 and 1924, the U.S. Congress passed immigration laws that limited the number of immigrants coming into the country. Before the caps were imposed, an average of 98 percent of immigrants were approved each year, and after 1921, 16 percent of immigrants were admitted on average.
The numbers kept plunging, and they reached 3.8 percent approval by 2023, and will be even lower in 2024 at 3 percent, meaning 97 percent of applications will be rejected. As per the report, 1.1 million applicants were admitted to the U.S., while more than 10.7 million applications were rejected and 10.2 million applications were backlogged.
The Green Card Lottery, employment, and family-sponsored visas are the three main ways that foreign nationals can become permanent residents of the United States.More than 22 million individuals submitted lottery applications for FY2024 in 2023.
As of March 2023, the employment-based green card backlog has grown to 1.8 million, up from 1.2 million in 2018. The overall cap in this category is set at 140,000 per year plus any unused family-sponsored green cards. In FY2024, about 8 percent of pending employment-based applications will be approved. Similarly, the backlog for family-sponsored applications has increased every year since the 1970s. Currently, there are 8.3 million pending applications in this category.
Indian nationals constitute half of the applicants in the employee-sponsored categories. Due to the system’s inefficiencies, these applicants face a wait-time of 134 years.
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