This month, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the worker shortage in the U.S. “sees no improvement, (and) for every 100 job openings[,] there are only 71 available workers.” This sheds new light on the current “immigration crisis” that continues to unfold and affect major cities—not just at the southern border, but here in New York City.
As the Adams administration grapples with the crisis situation of migrants seeking shelter and social services beyond the 60-day limit, the main culprit in this crisis remains the growing backlog in processing immigration cases by the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services .
According to the Migration Policy Center, “approximately 1.6 million applications for employment authorization documents were sitting in a backlog at USCIS…more than double the 676,000 pending in March 2020” as of October 2023.
These include, according to an article by Muzaffar Chishti and Julia Gelatt, “certain spouses of temporary workers, asylum applicants, humanitarian parolees, and beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programs.”
That means many of the same immigrants waiting for their asylum applications to be handled who are now in limbo in NYC shelter spaces that are not a viable long-term solution.
The other applications in backlog are affected by delays in adjudicating renewals of many immigrants’ work permits, which has forced employers to terminate those immigrants’ employment or place them on furlough.
“Some workers had to endure months without income, even as the U.S. economy faced severe labor shortages, particularly in the immigrant-heavy healthcare and child-care sectors,” the Migration Policy Center said.
These are people who have paid hundreds in fees for their applications to be processed, and even those who have paid for fast tracking.
The backlogs are also affecting immigration courts. According to TRAC, a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research center affiliated with the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Whitman School of Management, both at Syracuse University, “a new record was reached in November (as the0 Immigration Court backlog passed 3 million pending cases.”
As of November 2022, the backlog was 2 million. TRAC found that immigration judges now average 4,500 pending cases each. During just the last quarter of July to September 2023, the backlog jumped by nearly 400,000 cases at an average increase of 130,000 cases per month, the organization found. During October and November 2023, the monthly growth was even higher at an average of 140,000 per month.
At this rate, the current migrants seeking shelter in cities across the U.S. could be waiting for years. The same holds true for those waiting in Mexico, where the migrant crisis is also growing.
Until lawmakers in Washington can find real solutions to deal with the processing of immigration applications and clear the backlog to help solve the labor shortage, slow entry at the border by requiring applications only at consulates abroad and making paid applicants who have been in the U.S. a priority, the so-called immigration crisis will continue to be a political football, as it has been for decades.
It is time to focus billions of federal dollars not on helping to fight wars we have no business fighting, but in dealing with the crisis in the United States: the poor digital infrastructure at many government agencies in the era of AI; the lack of affordable housing and access to affordable health care; soaring inflation that is creating food insecurity in the Mighty USA; and the current labor shortage that is as real as the killing of so many innocent children, women, and men, and journalists in Gaza.
Felicia J. Persaud is the publisher of NewsAmericasNow.com, a daily news outlet focusing on Black immigrant issues.