Record Backlogs, Visa Shortages, and Increasing Scrutiny Are Straining the Employment-Based Immigration System
WASHINGTON, D.C., August 18 — The United States continues to rely on high-skilled workers from around the world to stay globally competitive in key industries including technology, engineering, and health care. However, new data shows increasing pressure across the employment-based immigration system, with workers seeking permanent residence facing greater uncertainty and mounting obstacles.
Two new reports from the American Immigration Council examine a decade of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data on nonimmigrant and immigrant petitions for high-skilled workers. The reports find that demand for high-skilled workers remains strong, with high approval rates across several nonimmigrant visa categories, including H-1B.
READ THE REPORTS HERE AND HERE
But they also point to growing pressure on USCIS as the agency struggles to keep pace with rising demand for temporary workers, contributing to increasing backlogs. For workers seeking employment-based green cards, they face an even more uncertain way forward, due to record backlogs, limited visa availability, longer waits, and heightened scrutiny in certain categories.
“The United States continues to recruit and rely on high-skilled workers from around the world, but for many of those workers, building a permanent future here means navigating years of uncertainty,” said Nan Wu, director of research at the American Immigration Council. “If the United States wants to compete for the world’s best talent, it needs an immigration system that allows employers and workers to plan for the long term with greater confidence.”
The Council’s analysis found that USCIS is still approving large numbers of petitions for temporary high-skilled workers. However, the agency is showing signs of strain and increasingly failing to keep pace with demand.
The challenges become even more significant for workers seeking permanent residence. USCIS is falling behind on employment-based green card processing, backlogs are growing sharply, and workers can spend years waiting to complete the process even after USCIS has approved their immigrant petitions. In some high-skilled green card categories, denials have also risen sharply.
“These findings show a system in which employers and workers have to spend years navigating a backlogged system. That kind of uncertainty makes it harder for workers to build their lives here and for employers to retain the talent they need,” said Steve Hubbard, senior data scientist at the Council.
READ THE REPORTS HERE AND HERE.
Top findings include:
- Temporary high-skilled worker petitions continue to receive high approval rates, but processing challenges are growing. Nearly 98 percent of H-1B petitions were approved in FY2025, while approval rates for L-1 and O categories stayed above 90 percent. At the same time, USCIS struggled to keep up with rising petitions, more than 456,000 for the H-1B category in FY2025 alone, leading to a growing backlog.
- Workers seeking employment-based green cards face a fraught path forward. The backlog of employment-based green card petitions has more than quadrupled over the past decade, reaching a record 180,439 pending cases by the end of FY2025. At USCIS’s current processing pace, it would take about more than 9 months just to clear that backlog. Many applicants are paying additional fees to get faster processing, generating an estimated $300 million in fees for USCIS in FY2025.
- Denial rates rose in key employment-based categories. At one point in FY2025, USCIS was denying roughly 1 in 6 employment-based immigrant petitions. In two categories intended for especially accomplished workers, the EB-1A and the EB-2 NIW, denial rates almost doubled during FY2025.
- Visa availability remains a major bottleneck. Once USCIS approves a petition for an employment-based green card, the process doesn’t end there. Employment-based green cards are capped by law, so workers can spend years waiting for a visa number to become available even after USCIS has already approved their application. By the end of FY2025, more than 642,000 approved workers were still waiting for a visa number to become available.
“The U.S. government is basically telling high-skilled workers, we want your talent for to build companies, conduct research, treat patients, and grow the U.S. economy, but we can’t tell you whether you’ll be able to build a future here. That is not a serious approach for competing for global talent,” said Wu. “If we want to attract and retain these high-skilled workers, we need an immigration system that provides them with more long-term certainty.”
READ THE REPORTS HERE AND HERE
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