Two siblings can file the exact same immigration petition, on the same day, for the same U.S. citizen relative, using the same forms and paying the same fees, yet end up waiting years, or even decades, apart from one another based on nothing more than where they were born. That’s the central finding of a new data-driven analysis of the U.S. family immigration system from The Mendoza Law Firm, which found that roughly four million people with already-approved family-based petitions remain stuck waiting overseas for a visa number to become available, under country-based quotas that have changed little since 1990.
The disparity is clearest in the family-sponsored fourth preference category, known as F4, which covers siblings of adult U.S. citizens. The federal government is currently issuing visas for most F4 petitions filed in September 2008, meaning new applicants today are effectively joining a queue stretching back nearly eighteen years. For Mexican-born applicants specifically, the current cutoff sits in April 2001, a backlog exceeding 25 years, more than seven years longer than the wait facing applicants from most other countries in the identical category, filing the identical paperwork, for the identical family relationship.
The root cause is a provision of immigration law capping any single country at approximately 7% of annual family-sponsored visa allocations, a rule applied equally to countries with populations in the hundreds of thousands and countries with populations exceeding one hundred million. Over time, that flat per-country cap has created dramatically different realities for applicants from high-demand countries like Mexico and the Philippines compared to applicants from countries with lower petition volumes, even though the underlying family relationships being sponsored are identical.
The pattern repeats across nearly every family preference category tracked in the report. In the F1 category, covering unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens, Mexican applicants are currently waiting on petitions filed roughly eleven years earlier than many applicants from other countries. In the F2B category, covering unmarried adult children of permanent residents, both Mexico and the Philippines remain years behind worldwide processing averages. Across category after category, the report concludes, the strength of a family relationship has no bearing on how long a family waits; geography alone determines it.
The scale of the broader backlog compounds the problem. The United States issued approximately 1.36 million green cards in fiscal year 2024, the highest total in more than a decade, with more than half going to family members of U.S. citizens and green card holders. Yet USCIS began 2025 with more than 11 million cases still awaiting processing, and even family-based petitions can take over a year to move through initial approval steps before an applicant ever reaches the visa number queue described in the report. For many families, in other words, the wait documented in the Visa Bulletin each month begins only after a separate, yearslong administrative wait has already passed.
“People think of immigration as a legal process. What they do not see is what happens to a family during a 20-year wait,” said Mendoza Law. “Children grow up without a parent. Siblings become strangers. Petitioners die before their cases are resolved. By the time some of these families finally reunite, the relationship the petition was filed to protect no longer looks the same.”
The report notes that the foreign-born population of the United States reached an estimated 53.3 million people in 2024, the highest immigrant share of the population ever recorded, with family-sponsored immigration continuing to represent the largest single pathway to lawful permanent residency. Against that backdrop, the report’s authors argue, a visa allocation system built on flat, decades-old per-country caps is increasingly out of step with where actual family reunification demand originates.
“Legislative proposals exist, such as the Reuniting Families Act and the Dignity Act, bipartisan bills introduced across multiple Congresses,” Mendoza Law added. “The data to justify action has existed for decades. What has been missing is the political will to treat family separation as the crisis it actually is, and our hope is that campaigns like this one help make that case.”
