Visa Backlog Forces SoCal Families Into Stressful Limbo

Mina Manzano is the sole breadwinner in her Azusa household.

She supports a disabled husband, an elderly father and a teenage son with a rare genetic disorder. At 4 in the morning, she rouses to administer her son's first tube feeding of the day before heading to her nursing job caring for developmentally disabled adults.

Her youngest brother in the Philippines has offered to give her much-needed respite. Like thousands of immigrants across Southern California who've petitioned for loved ones to come to the U.S., her family has been anxiously waiting for his visa application to come through.

"I'd have someone to help me in order to survive,” Manzano, 52, said.

It’s now been 10 years since his application was submitted. A huge visa backlog, only exacerbated by the pandemic, has forced applicants to wait years, sometimes decades — a limbo that some policymakers say is unduly cruel and is renewing calls to revamp the visa system.

Mina Manzano works as a licensed practical nurse taking care of developmentally disabled adults.

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Courtesy of Mina Manzano

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Manzano’s family is in particularly dire straits. Her mother, who petitioned for her brother, died. He had cleared all the application hurdles and only had an interview left to do at the U.S. embassy. Now the family was back at square one, all those years of waiting seemingly amounting to nothing.

Limited spots, lost hope

Manzano’s mother, a legal permanent resident, in 2013 started the process to bring her son over. There is a limited number of visas and through the quirks of the U.S. immigration system, it’s faster for a parent who's a legal permanent resident to apply for a child than for a U.S. citizen to sponsor a sibling.

The family waited, and waited. Meanwhile, immigration lawyers noticed that paperwork required by the federal government had become more onerous under former President Donald Trump, stretching out timelines. Then, the pandemic hit and shut down consulates, which then had problems staffing up again.

Next thing Manzano knew, more than nine years had passed. Then last year, Manzano’s mother died of a cardiac arrest, she said.

The petition for her brother Apolonio Francisco, Jr. was automatically canceled, they learned. If Manzano were to file a petition for him, she could expect to see him in 21 years or so, the estimated time it takes to bring a sibling from the Philippines.

“We lost hope," Manzano said. "Even my brother."

Taking on risk

Jonathan Fung, an immigration attorney who directs legal services at the Immigration Resource Center of San Gabriel Valley, said he’s seen too many applications languish when something unforeseen strikes like death or illness.

“It's unfortunate that we ask immigrants to plan their lives decades ahead of time for how and when they're going to reunite with their family members in the U.S. when nobody else is expected to perform that kind of mental task,” Fung said.

Mina Manzano's youngest brother, Apolonio Francisco Jr. (far left) has offered to move to the U.S. to help his sister Mina Mazano (fourth from left), but his application is now in limbo.

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Courtesy Mina Manzano

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He said the basis for the backlog is a system that uses per-country caps. No more than 7% of visas in each family category can go each year to applicants from any one country.

Fung said this rule has a disproportionate impact in parts of the world where demand for visas outstrips availability, such as Latin America and Asia.

"You start to hit that 7% pretty quickly, especially for countries with huge populations like China or India, or countries with really strong ties to the U.S. such as the Philippines, a former American colony," Fung said.

Applicants from Asia make up more than a third of 4 million people mired in the family-based immigration backlog, according to the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

Unused visas by the hundreds of thousands

Meanwhile, other countries, such as those in northern Europe might not hit any caps.

“The thing that really irks me is that actually we have so many unused visas,” said California Rep. Judy Chu, who represents West San Gabriel Valley.

The result is that less than 75% of 226,000 available family-based visas were allocated during the last fiscal year. Chu, a Democrat, said this is an improvement over past years, but not enough of one.

Chu chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, which sent a letter last month calling on President Joe Biden to open up hundreds of thousands of visa slots that have gone unfilled over the last 30 years and add them to family and employment-based visa categories. The caucus also wants Biden to expand the use of family reunification parole, which allows visa applicants to live in the U.S. while they wait for the backlog to clear.

Both are proposals in Chu's Reuniting Families Act of 2023 and would benefit not only families but the labor market, she said.

“When family comes, they support each other,” Chu said. “So if there is child care that needs to be done, that family member can take care of it instead of having the family suffer, and perhaps one worker int that family from having to drop out."

Solo parenting in a backlog

The president has not formally responded to the letter but Chu said his administration has talked about the possibility of recapturing unused visas through congressional action.

Congress, though, is at an impasse over immigration reform. (Exhibit A: the Reuniting Families Act has been introduced and re-introduced since 2008).

Rep. Judy Chu. who chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, speaks in the Reuniting Families Act in 2019.

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Mark Wilson

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Getty Images

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With no clear relief in sight, Chu's office hears from constituents from across her district who are stuck in the visa bottleneck.

One constituent wants only to be identified by her first name Sylvie because she's concerned anything hindering her effort to bring her husband from Lebanon.

A legal permanent resident who lives in Pasadena, she first came to the U.S. with her parents in 2017, leaving behind her boyfriend. She returned to Lebanon to marry him during a visit. But then the pandemic struck and she didn’t return to the States until mid-2020, while pregnant with their son. Weeks after his birth, she petitioned for her husband to join them in a country that she feels offers stability and opportunities.

Her immigration lawyer had told her in a 1 and 1/2 years, they’d all be reunited. More than three years later, it hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, Sylvie’s fears about her husband’s safety grow because of regional unrest related to the Israel-Hamas war.

"We waited all this time," she tells her disheartened husband. "So let's just be patient a little bit more and we're going to be together."

Privately, she despairs as she parents their son on her own while working as an auditor.

"Every December, we say hopefully this Christmas we're going to be together," she said. "But it's never happening."

Humanitarian exception

Mina Manzano also needs help now.

Fung, of the Immigration Resource Center, has taken on her case as a supervising attorney working with staff attorney Bree Salthouse. The team is trying to keep her brother’s application alive by seeking a so-called humanitarian reinstatement through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“It's really up to the officer who is looking at the application to determine under their own judgment, whether or not something is going to meet the definition of hardship,” Fung said. “Ultimately, it’s just who you get.”

And it could take years to get a petition reinstated. The last humanitarian reinstatement Fung filed for another family took more than two years to attain.

Meanwhile. the pressure has only been mounting on Manzano. She now has college costs to cover: She has an older son who is a freshman at UC Irvine, studying computer science. When he talks about getting a job to help support the family, his mother gently rejects the idea.

“I can still manage, my son,” Manzano tells him. “So just concentrate on your [studies]. God will provide.”

Every day she prays her brother can come to the States and her son can finish his studies. She just needs to hold on, she says, because that’s all she can do.