The Legal Landscape of U.S. Immigration: An Introduction

Decades of backlogs and long waiting times to obtain and process visa requests, along with recent increases in naturalization rates and visas for temporary migrant workers, are likely to have wide-ranging consequences for the lives of the 44.5 million foreign born living in the United States. [...]even though 1.1 million immigrants became lawful permanent residents in fiscal year 2017, more than twice that number (2.3 million) entered on temporary visas as temporary workers or foreign students accompanied by family members (Zong, Batalova, and Burrows 2019). [...]combined with congressional inaction, executive actions have created a system of exclusion that influences the experiences of legal immigrants now and will again in the future. Immigrant visas from Eastern Hemisphere countries were capped at an annual limit of 170,000, and visas from the Western Hemisphere were capped at an annual limit of 120,000. [...]a global limit