Picture this — you are waiting in line at everyone’s favorite government office, the DMV. Your driver’s license recently expired so you have to take a few hours out of your day to wait in a seemingly endless line to receive your new license.
Except, instead of your driver’s license, imagine you are waiting for a green card or asylum papers. And instead of a few hours, imagine you are waiting several years for the DMV to say if it will even give you a license or not.
That is the unfortunate reality that many immigrants to the United States face.
In 2023, the average wait time for someone applying for asylum was 1,525 days, according to PBS. That is over four years of waiting for an answer to whether you can stay in the country.
The cause of this absurd wait time is simple to define — case backlogs. At all stages of the immigration process (asylum or visas), there are massive backlogs of cases and applications.
For example, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) had 4.3 million outstanding cases, exceeding their target processing times by the end of 2023, according to the agency’s archive. This is despite reducing the overall backlog by 15% from the year before, the USCIS’ first backlog reduction in over a decade.
The immigration court system is similarly overwhelmed.
In 2024, immigration judges completed just over 700,000 cases — which would have been an impressive number had the system not been left with 3.6 million outstanding cases by the end of that year, according to the Congressional Research Service.
So, what exactly is causing all of this backlog?
Dr. Michele Waslin, assistant director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, said that a lack of investment and excessively strict investigative standards, amongst a variety of other issues, contribute to the backlog.
“There are many ways that this process can be slowed to a grinding halt,” Waslin said.
Sarah Brenes, executive director of the Binger Center for New Americans at the University’s Law School, said the current focus of the immigration system strayed from its historical roots, becoming more rigorous and investigative.
“Over the past several decades, we have criminalized the process, when immigration has to do with simply regulating the movement of people,” Brenes said.
But what are the actual effects of this backlog?
Immigrants, who are forced to try to plan their lives under a shroud of uncertainty, are most affected by the long wait times caused by the backlog.
“It’s a huge strain on people to be waiting,” Brenes said. “And then also just to have that uncertainty, wanting to put down roots or invest in their education and their communities… and always being stuck with that reality that it could be temporary and that they could be told they are no longer able to stay here. I think it really makes it a challenge for people to really feel safe, because it’s no guarantee.”
This crippling uncertainty does not make for ideal living conditions for anyone, and so it is understandable that some immigrants may want to avoid the process entirely.
After all, who would want to go through years of uncertainty and strict scrutiny only to be potentially forced out of the country?
“We suspect that a lot of people who are here undocumented are part of the group waiting for their visa to be processed and part of that backlog,” Waslin said.
Despite all of the rhetoric around border security issues, the U.S.’ flawed immigration system is perpetuating the cycle of undocumented immigration through huge backlogs and long wait times. We must work to fix this issue or thousands more immigrants will be forced to navigate impossible positions in the hope for a better life.
Brenes said refocusing the priorities of the immigration system from strict enforcement to due process, as well as reallocating the powers given to bodies like USCIS and the Executive Office for Immigration Review could help alleviate the backlog.
“We’ve put a lot of attention at the border and really criminalizing anyone who is trying to seek safety in the United States rather than being creative and trying to find solutions that are sound for the day and age that we live in,” Brenes said.
Waslin said hiring more immigration judges, helping judges manage their dockets better and moving some Congressional spending away from enforcement and toward processing staff would help reduce the backlog as well.
“We need a good, functioning system for the 21st century,” Waslin said.
These are far from the only solutions that could be implemented to fix the backlog.
A report from the Migration Policy Institute suggested a variety of solutions, including increasing representation for immigrants within the court system, allowing prosecutors to use more of their discretion during legal proceedings, and allowing USCIS asylum to resolve asylum claims on their own.
“The implementation of these measures would enable the immigration court system to reduce case volumes, increase the pace of decision-making and improve the quality of its adjudications,” according to the report. “To those ends, a nationwide effort at full-scale modernization and court reform is a central imperative going forward.”
No matter the solution we choose, we truly owe ourselves, our country and our immigrants a better immigration system.
The poem at the base of our Statue of Liberty provides an open invitation for people to come to a country largely built by immigrants, and we should honor that invitation with pride instead of slamming the door in their face.
Going to the DMV may seem tedious for all of us, but it’s important to remember that we are very lucky to not be going through a worse bureaucratic hassle.
Let’s hope that, one day, the wait for immigration proceedings will be closer to a DMV wait time than a decade.
