The State Department has slowly reopened most consulates under President Biden, and it is now cumulatively issuing about as many immigrant visas for prospective legal permanent residents across all consulates as it was issuing before the pandemic. Nonetheless, the reopening has not happened equally across the world. Immigrants from North America and South America are issuing enough visas to reduce their backlogs of applicants, while immigrants from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania are still seeing large declines in immigrant visa issuances. Africans have seen the largest decline.
As Figure 1 shows, the State Department has begun issuing immigrant visas at almost the same pace as fiscal year 2019 overall at all embassies and consulates around the world. Despite a massive backlog of nearly 469,017 applicants, it is still not recovered to any thing close to the monthly issuance rate from fiscal year 2016 when there was an average of 55,167 issuances per month. At the end of fiscal year 2021 (ending in October 2021), it appeared that the department would fully recover, but in fiscal year 2022, the rate has once against returned to a lower level.
As Figure 2 shows, there is significant disparity among regions within the overall recovery of immigrant visa issuances. As of February 2022, immigrants from the Americas have seen significant increases in the issuance of immigrant visas compared to FY 2019’s monthly average. South America in particular saw a 43 percent increase in immigrant visa approvals from FY 2019 to FY 2022. Meanwhile, Europe, Oceania, Asia, and Africa have seen decreases of about 20 percent or more. Africa saw the largest decline of 33 percent compared to FY 2019.
Figure 3 shows the change on a monthly basis compared to the FY 2019. As it shows, immigrant visa processing effectively stopped everywhere during 2020 (except for September 2020 in Europe). The administration appeared to rush to process more visas at the end of fiscal year 2021, but fiscal year has seen a return to a much lower rate—particularly for Africans.
One reason for the disparate outcome for Africans is that the Biden administration has deprioritized the diversity visa lottery program. As Figure 4 shows, the diversity lottery program is operating 84 percent below the monthly average for FY 2019, compared to 16 percent for family preference (or capped family cases). The immediate relatives, employment, and other categories are all operating above their FY 2019 levels. Before 2020, the diversity lottery program provided about a third of all immigrant visas that went to Africans. The rest of the world received just 6 percent of their immigrant visas from the diversity program. This means that the Biden administration’s decision to make the lottery program the lowest priority for immigrant visa issuances has caused Africans to lose out more visas than immigrants from other regions. It is only because federal courts have intervened to require the administration to process diversity visas that any significant numbers were issued at all in 2020 and 2021.
Unlike other categories, diversity lottery winners must receive their immigrant visas before the end of the fiscal year or they lose their chance to immigrate forever (absent a court intervening, and so far the Biden administration is trying to prevent diversity lottery winners from 2020 and 2021 from receiving the visas that courts have said they are entitled to by appealing those decisions).
The inequitable recovery in immigrant visa processing highlights how the Biden administration is resuming the operation of the immigration system that the Trump administration dismantled for only certain groups. It has not adopted the aggressive policies needed to fix the system for everyone.
