U.S. President Donald Trump is ramping up calls on the U.S. Congress to stop legal immigrants from sponsoring extended family members who want to move to the United States, saying so-called “chain migration” poses a threat to national security. Even without legislative action, however, the number of immigrants approved for family-based visas has dropped this year to the lowest level in more than a decade, a Reuters review of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data shows.
There has been an overall slowdown in adjudications of family-based visas, known as I-130s, the Reuters review shows. The number of approvals dropped by nearly a quarter in the first nine months of 2017 to around 4,06,000 compared to the same period a year earlier when approvals were more than 5,30,000, despite a similar number of applications during both periods, USCIS data showed.
The drop was even starker when looking only at I-130s approved for relatives who were not immediate family members. Those fell by 70% in the same period, from more than 1,08,000 in the first nine months of 2016 to 32,500 in the same period in 2017. The entire 2017 fiscal year had the lowest number of approvals for extended family visas since 2000.
USCIS said that since there are a limited number of visas for this category, it prioritises processing visas that are more immediately available. The agency also said there are normal year-to-year fluctuations in the number of visas that are filed and decided.
L. Francis Cissna, the new immigration director of USCIS, said no specific policy guidance has been put in place at the agency to change the way family-based visas are issued. He also said that there were no plans to restrict visas for immediate family members. He has said, however, that his agency is looking closely at all visa categories to root out fraud.
