In early August, Amazon’s SVP of human resources, Beth Galetti, penned a blog post urging the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to expedite the processing of employment-based green cards.
The plea was, of course, self-serving — Amazon topped the list of companies applying for green cards in 2019 with 1,500 applications, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. But it did serve to spotlight that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — the agency responsible for issuing green cards — is barreling toward a failure to adjudicate tens of thousands of applications before a September 30 deadline.
Green cards are highly sought after. Unlike temporary work visas (e.g., H-1Bs), they allow workers to freely switch jobs without losing their immigration status. In response to demand (and political pressure), Congress allotted 281,000 employment-based green cards in 2022, up from 262,000 in 2021. (The typical cap is 140,000.) But the pandemic — and restrictive laws under the Trump administration — threw an additional wrench in the largely manual, paper-driven process.
U.S. embassies and consular offices were temporarily closed, creating a long queue of appointments to collect fingerprints and photographs. Annual per-country caps didn’t help matters — according to the Cato Institute, about 875,000 approved petitions for green cards were waitlisted in 2021 because of the limits.
This year, the USCIS claims to have taken steps to expedite adjudication, telling Bloomberg Law in July that it shifted staff resources to prioritize processing green cards and adopted a “risk-based approach” to waive interview requirements. But it’s unclear whether this will be sufficient to prevent tens of thousands of green cards from going unused. As of July 31, the USCIS reported that it had adjudicated around 210,000 applications, leaving over 70,000 to be processed.
Unused green cards aren’t transferred or added to next year’s count.
Unsurprisingly, Amazon isn’t the only tech giant taking issue with the U.S. visa approval process. When contacted for comment, Google noted that it’s pushed for legislation to remove the per-country limits that “create an unfair system for certain nationalities.” Just 13% of Google-affiliated candidate applications filed since October 2020 had been approved as of 2021.
“The per-country limits and processing delays have resulted in a green card backlog that can be measured in decades for many high-skilled workers of certain nationalities,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said via email, arguing that the system as it exists hinders Google’s ability to retain global talent. “The green card backlog is problematic for a couple of reasons. It injects unnecessary instability into the lives of many workers, their families and communities while also harming our economic growth. … There is a national security imperative to build future technologies without the threat that the engineers working on these cutting-edge technologies will be deported.”
To Castañeda’s point, some analysts point to reduced immigration as a major force driving labor market gaps. According to a Goldman Sachs report, foreign-born workers accounted for nearly 60% of the expansion in the U.S. labor force from 2010 to 2018, but growth in those workers slowed to 100,000 per year between 2019 and 2021, leading the labor market to shrink by 1.6 million people.
The government stands to gain, too, in recapturing unused green cards. Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Niskanen Center estimates that recapturing green cards could contribute over $1 trillion to the U.S. GDP over 10 years and increase net revenue to federal, state and local governments by approximately $463 billion by addressing the shortfalls in application processing. Lest the analysis face accusations of liberal spin, the Niskanen Center’s namesake is William A. Niskanen, a former economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
But reform bills have thus far failed to make their way into law. And with each passing year, the green card situation dramatically worsens. A 2022 report released by the libertarian Cato Institute found that more than 1.4 million skilled immigrants are now stuck in green card backlogs.
Salesforce’s VP of federal government affairs, Hugh Gamble, agreed that change is overdue. He said he’s seen the effects of delays within various Salesforce divisions, including the postponing of promotions and relocations to avoid disruptions pending green card applications.
“Immigration-related processing delays and employment-based visa backlogs are affecting our employees’ ability to lawfully live and work in the U.S. and travel internationally for business and personal reasons,” Gamble said. “Delays are now commonplace and disrupting both our business operations and employee productivity. In some cases, employees have been unable to travel for critical business conferences, or even to visit ailing family members, due to substantial delays in obtaining a visa stamp from a U.S. consulate. For example, it currently takes up to a year at some U.S. consulates abroad for our employees to obtain an intra-company transfer visa.”
Gamble called for broader reform than some tech giants propose, touching on an unfortunate victim of U.S. immigration policy: startups. Despite numerous attempts to create one, the U.S. doesn’t have a startup visa — ironic considering that more than half of the country’s billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants. Some international treaties have visa carve-outs for entrepreneurs, but most impose the onerous requirement that the recipients invest “a substantial amount of capital” in a U.S.-based business.
“Our immigration system needs to evolve in order to ensure that highly skilled individuals can come lawfully to the U.S. to study, work and contribute to our society. It’s no secret that immigrants have long been key to driving American innovation and entrepreneurship,” Gamble said. “We do believe there’s significant room for improvement. … If we don’t modernize the immigration system, our economic competitive edge may suffer as we struggle to attract top talent from around the world.”