The CBS News report shows that visas issued by the State Department rose at the end of the Obama administration, from 531,000 in 2015 to 618,000 in 2016, before beginning a decline under the nativist policies of the insurrectionist administration. In 2019, the State Department issued 462,000 visas, a number that would be slashed nearly in half when the pandemic hit the following year, and much processing shut down.
The insurrectionist administration had already made clear it more than clear that it opposed even legal immigration (unless it meant workers for his personal businesses), so the pandemic was merely the excuse it needed to both slow down visa approvals and implement immigration slashes.
“Soon after taking office in 2021, President Biden revoked the Trump-era visa restrictions and instructed the State Department and other agencies to eliminate barriers to legal immigration to the U.S.,” CBS News reported. That includes improvements at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, another agency that was purposefully strained under the insurrectionist administration. More than 967,000 eligible immigrants were naturalized in the last fiscal year, following a slew of government initiatives. Only 1996 and 2008 saw larger numbers.
USCIS said in a progress report that thanks in part to “crucial appropriations from Congress,” the new naturalizations represented “a 62 percent reduction in the net backlog of naturalization applications … from the end of FY 2021 to FY 2022, and the highest number of naturalized citizens in almost 15 years.”
However, “the State Department is overseeing a massive backlog of hundreds of thousands of unresolved cases and certain visa applicants still face lengthy waits for interviews at U.S. consulates, many of which have not returned to pre-pandemic processing capacity,” CBS News said. It’s clear that continued resources are needed. But we are heading in the right direction.
“The rebound, an enormous part of it, is the easing of pandemic restrictions and the reopening of consulates and [U.S. immigration officials] getting back to regular levels of processing,” Migration Policy Institute researcher Julia Gellat told CBS News. “But I also think the Biden administration is really concentrating on this.”
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