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By Jeremy L. Neufeld

The COVID-19 pandemic is spreading and will it likely has already put the economy into recession. Our immigration system is poorly designed for immigrants to weather this kind of crisis. Unless the administration and Congress make immediate policy changes, many legal immigrants and guest workers will lose their status and be required to leave the country, devastating families, but also thereby endangering public health, retarding economic recovery, and increasing illegal immigration.

The American immigration system adds many more people to the green card queue each year than it grants green cards. The result is an ever-expanding green card backlog and ever-lengthening waiting times. We at the Niskanen Center have been critical of this bottleneck in normal times, but the fallout from COVID-19 makes the existing and impending backlog disastrous.

A high-skilled workers pathway to a green card is arduous enough in normal circumstances. An H-1B visa allows them to work for up to six years, during which time their employer can petition for an employment-based immigrant visa. If that petition is approved, then the immigrant must wait patiently, renewing their H-1B in three-year increments until a green card becomes available for them.[1] This waiting period takes many years on average even decades for certain immigrants from countries affected by per-country caps.

While in this holding pattern, the immigrant must retain their H-1B status in order to get their green card, even if the coronavirus makes doing so difficult or impossible.

Using the most recent data available from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Serviceson approved I-140 petitions and economic projections from the St. Louis Fed, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that as many as 125,000 legal immigrants already working in the United States may fall out of status and be forced to return home because of the coronavirus by the end of June.[2] More than a quarter of those will have been waiting in line for over a decade for a green card. If we included H-1B holders who may intend to become permanent residents, but who do not yet have approved immigrant petitions, the total number of would-be legal immigrants working here who may lose status and have to depart would likely more than double to over a quarter of a million.[3]

These immigrants have spent years and even decades building their lives and setting down roots in the United States, following the arduous road laid out by our immigration laws. The harms extend beyond their own futures. Family separation will result as U.S. citizen children are forced to stay behind because of COVID-19 travel bans in the home countries of their parents. People will be forced to choose between becoming illegal immigrants by overstaying their visas or endangering public health by violating social distancing in departing. When recovery can finally start, businesses and teams who relied on the talents of these individuals will be handicapped.

There are rapid regulatory policy changes that can be made to avert this looming disaster, including that:

The coronavirus is set to leave permanent scars on our country. Temporary changes to immigration policy can help make sure we dont add to them unnecessarily.

[1] Terminological note: Legally speaking, USCIS would designate these individuals as nonimmigrants until they receive a green card. However, under any normal usage, a long-term resident, present in the country, intending to stay permanently, with an approved immigrant petition is an immigrant.

[2] This very rough estimate makes the simplifying assumption that unemployment among H-1B workers would be the same as for the general population, and that H-1B workers would be unable to transfer to another H-1B eligible job within the 60 days necessary to retain status.

[3] While there is no publicly available data on the total number of H-1B workers working in the United States or how many H-1B workers have immigrant intent, we use three years of initial petitions (H-1Bs last for an initial period of three years) and then apply the same assumption about unemployment as above. While many H-1B workers may not in fact have immigrant intent, this figure is still likely to be an underestimate because it does not include any of those who have extended their H-1B status but do not have an approved I-140.

More:
How the Coronavirus Will Kick Legal Immigrants Out of Line and Out of the Country - Niskanen Center