Challenges with America’s Family Immigration System and its Impact on Asian Americans
Family unity is a valued tradition and the foundation of America’s immigration system, adding to the nation’s economy and strengthening families and communities.
- It remains an American tradition and policy that U.S. citizens and permanent residents unite with their closest family members in the U.S. Families are the core unit of our nation, and immigrant families come to the U.S. in search of opportunity. Together, families work hard, pay taxes, buy homes, and start job-creating businesses.
- Family sponsorship counts for more than 88 percent of legal immigration to the United States.
However, the family-based system has not been updated in decades, resulting in an outdated and inefficient process, which forces families to live apart for years, sometimes decades.
How the system works:
- The family-based system grants visas that are grouped into two categories: immediate relatives and family preference (1).
- The annual ceiling for all family-based immigration is 480,000 applicants a year. Family preference visas are capped at 226,000 applicants a year (2).
- Applicants for family-based visas must have a sponsor in the U.S. to financially support the applicant.
How it keeps families apart:
- The system has not been updated in over 20 years, imposes an unacceptably narrow concept of family on people from different cultures, and thus does not match the current needs of families.
- A combination of limits on overall visas and bureaucratic delay force a current worldwide family backlog of 4.3 million aspiring immigrants (3), which includes millions of Asian-Americans living apart from their families.
Asian Americans rely on the family-based system to keep their families together, and thus, are disproportionately impacted by this broken system.
- The majority of Asians immigrating to the U.S. do so through the family immigration system; in 2016, 82.1% of visas issued for Asian countries were family-based (4).
- Asian American citizens sponsor more than one third of all family-based visas each year. In 2015, 57% of Asian immigrants granted legal permanent status did so through family visas (5).
- Asian Americans are more likely than other groups to have family members caught up in visa backlogs.
- Family members who are caught in the backlogs wait as long as 9 to 22 years to be reunited (6).
How this affects Minnesota
The Asian American population in Minnesota is strong, and growing.
- Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in Minnesota; between 2010-2015, the Asian population grew by 22% (7).
- Of the 240,000 Asians living in Minnesota, 62.4% are immigrants. This is a larger proportion of foreign-born people than any other group in Minnesota (8).
- The Asian population is projected to grow by 114% percent by 2035 (9).
The AAPI community in Minnesota values family unity as both as a tradition and as the foundation of our immigration system. Reunification keeps our communities strong, and gives our families the opportunity to pursue the American Dream. As our community grows, more Asian Minnesotans will be affected by this broken system; any cuts will impact many Asian Minnesotans.
We must update and improve the family based immigration system, not cut it. AAOP is proactively engaging with the community and our elected officials to show that our families, our community is not a bargaining chip for any political ploy—this is our life.
(1) The immediate relatives category includes spouses, parents, and unmarried children under 21 of U.S. citizens. The family preference category includes adult children and siblings of U.S. citizens, and spouses and unmarried children of green card holders.
(2) How the United States Immigration System Works, American Immigration Council, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/files/research/how_the_united_states_immigration_system_works.pdf
(3) Annual Report of Immigrant Visa Applicants in the Family-sponsored and Employment-based Preferences Registered at the National Visa Center, https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Immigrant-Statistics/WaitingListItem.pdf
(4) Immigrant Visas Issued(FY 2016), https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/AnnualReports/FY2016AnnualReport/FY16AnnualReport-TableIII.pdf
(5) 2015 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2015/table11
(6) Visa Bulletin for January 2017, https://travel.state.gov/content/visas/en/law-and-policy/bulletin/2017/visa-bulletin-for-january-2017.html
(7) https://mn.gov/admin/demography/data-by-topic/age-race-ethnicity/
(8) https://mn.gov/capm/assets/StateoftheAsianPacificMinnesotans_tcm1051-114507.pdf
(9) https://mn.gov/admin/assets/mn-population-projections-by-race-hispanic-origin-2005to2035-msdc-jan2009_tcm36-219384.pdf