WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is ramping up calls on the US Congressto stop legal immigrants from sponsoring extended family members who wantto move to the United States, saying so-called “chain migration” poses athreat to national security.
Even without legislative action, however, the number of immigrants approvedfor family-based visas has dropped this year to the lowest level in morethan a decade, a Reuters review of U.S. Citizenship and ImmigrationServices (USCIS) data shows. The drop has not been previously reported.
The Trump administration has taken a series of measures to more closelyscrutinize legal immigration. These steps have been overshadowed by Trump’smore public efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, such as his callsfor a wall along the Mexican border and more arrests of people living inthe country illegally.
Lately though, Trump has increasingly been taking aim at chain migration,saying it allows a single immigrant “to bring in dozens of increasinglydistant relations,” with “no real selection criteria.” He said aBangladeshi man who set off a homemade pipe bomb in a crowded New York Citycommuter hub in December was a prime example of the dangers of the system.
Immigration advocates counter that no one automatically qualifies for avisa because a relative is already in the United States. All immigrantsundergo security vetting and can face years-long waits before they aregiven a green light.
The intensified focus on chain migration has been accompanied by an overallslowdown in adjudications of family-based visas, known as I-130s, theReuters review shows. The number of approvals dropped by nearly a quarterin the first nine months of 2017 to around 406,000 compared to the sameperiod a year earlier when approvals were more than 530,000, despite asimilar number of applications during both periods, USCIS data showed.
The drop was even starker when looking only at I-130s approved forrelatives who were not immediate family members. Those fell by 70 percentin the same period, from more than 108,000 in the first nine months of 2016to 32,500 in the same period in 2017. (Graphic: link).The entire 2017 fiscal year had the lowest number of approvals for extendedfamily visas since 2000.
USCIS said that since there are a limited number of visas for thiscategory, it prioritizes processing visas that are more immediatelyavailable. The agency also said there are normal year-to-year fluctuationsin the number of visas that are filed and decided.
At the core of the administration’s long-term policy goal is a belief thatimmigration should be merit-based.
“Those people are just coming in based on connection to a family member,”the new director of USCIS, L Francis Cissna said in a telephone interview,referring to chain migrants. “That lack of selectivity; it takes us awayfrom where we want to go as a country.”
Cissna said no specific policy guidance has been put in place at USCIS tochange the way family-based visas are issued. He also said there were noplans to restrict visas for immediate family members and pointed out thatapprovals of visas and citizenship applications overall are still high.
He has said, however, that his agency is looking closely at all visacategories to root out fraud. USCIS said separately that closer scrutinycould lead to longer processing times.
For example, H-1B temporary work visas for high-skilled workers are facingmore hurdles, and applications are receiving far more requests forevidence, slowing down the whole program, according to immigration lawyersand data provided by the government. USCIS has also put in place newinterview requirements for US citizens seeking to bring over their fiancés.In the first nine months of 2017, approvals of fiancé visas dropped by 35percent over the same period a year earlier, the Reuters data review found.