Waiting times for citizenship are back to normal
Obtaining U.S. citizenship is the final step of a long and complicated journey. Immigrants who must go through it to fulfill their American dream often take years to do so, and it’s only after a winding process filled with doubts and fears.
All of this was further exacerbated by the pandemic and the bipartisan struggle, where political interests interfere with the proper functioning of things and impact the most disadvantaged
But now, and after great efforts by the administration of Joe Biden, the waiting times for citizenship are improving day by day. The last 2 and a half months have been decisive for immigration, and they have exceeded everyone’s expectations when the processing time was reduced from 24 to 15.2 months on average in all 89 offices of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
While these numbers are still not as good as 2016, it is hoped that they will continue to improve to make the lives of immigrants in the United States more pleasant and simple, and that the administrative disasters that the pandemic left us with are finally behind us.
The new migratory times
With the USCIS Time Processing resource, you can clearly see the change in the time to wait for U.S. citizenship in recent months. Additionally, there was an update to the agency’s website, which now measures processing times based on a single level of processing instead of calculating a maximum and minimum waiting time.
This demonstrates the reduction in the time immigrants must wait for citizenship, as well as other important documents processed by USCIS. At the end of March of this year alone, there were more than 750,000 people from abroad awaiting adjustment of status. Now, this number is dropping even faster, securing a future in the United States for thousands of migrants.
Controversy at USCIS
While this is wonderful news, many immigration attorneys, activists and immigrants are still wary of the USCIS tool for calculating the time it takes to obtain citizenship.
Many of them find it suspicious that the Time Processing tool estimates a 15-month delay while many are receiving U.S. citizenship in only 6 to 8 months. This raises doubts about the veracity and effectiveness of the agency’s calculations.
In any case, most of those afflicted emphasize that although it is still not the optimal amount of time, there has been a great improvement over the waiting times during the coronavirus pandemic, which in some cases exceeded 25 months.
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As mentioned above, a record number of applications were pending in March. The majority corresponded to citizenship by naturalization (Form N-400), and to requests for permanent residency or green card.
Since then, USCIS has promised to implement a new way of processing cases that would alleviate this significant backlog. This created a brief advancement that we are just starting to notice today.
We still hope that waiting times will continue to improve and normalize completely in the coming months, thus reassuring the thousands of immigrants waiting for their papers.
At Jaskot Law we help you with your citizenship process, and any other immigration process you may want to apply for. Call us at +1 (410) 235-6868
