Employment-based visas: The inflexible U.S. Visa regime and the impact(s) on immigrant labour market integration

Economic migrants play an important role in the fiscal stability of the United States. Focusing on economic-based (EB) green cards, our work presents an incongruence between labour demands of the American economy and the supply of highly skilled economic migrants. Using data from the United States Department of Justice and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) from 1971 to 2000 as well as data from the 1990 to 2022 Visa Bulletins, we show that visa caps have meant that migrants from countries like China, India and the Philippines have had to wait between 12 and 15 years for their visas to be processed. We also show that the visa backlog accelerated in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s despite the labour demands of the American economy. Currently, there are over 1.2 million people in the EB visa queue. Our work lays out the complexities of the visa system and advances policy recommendations to alleviate backlogs.