The Four Doors Into America and Who Holds the Keys to Each

Imagine a big old house with a front porch, and every neighbor on the block arguing about the front door. One says it should be wider. One says it should be locked. One says there is no door at all, just a hole in the fence. Meanwhile, if you ask them to draw the floor plan, not one of them can tell you how many doors the house actually has, which one is the busiest, or who has the key to which. That is the American immigration debate in a nutshell. People shout about "legal immigration" as though it were one thing, with one line and one rule. It is not. It is four doors, each with a different set of rules, a different gatekeeper and a different waiting room. If you learn the floor plan, you can follow almost every argument you hear.

A permanent resident card, the green card, is the legal status that lets a person live and work here for good. It comes through only a handful of routes, and I'll group them into four: family, employment, the diversity lottery, and humanitarian protection. There are small side entrances beyond these, such as certain special-immigrant categories, but if you hold these four in your head you have the picture.

Door one: family

This is the widest door by far, and it has two parts.

Part A: immediate relatives of U.S. citizens. The spouse of a citizen, the unmarried children under 21 of a citizen, and the parents of a citizen who is at least 21, are classed as immediate relatives. There is no annual numerical cap on this group. If you qualify, you do not wait in a numbered line. The number that comes in each year depends on how many citizens have such relatives and choose to petition.

Part B: the family preference categories. Everyone else in the family system waits for a capped number of visas. The categories are named F1 through F4:

• F1: unmarried sons and daughters, age 21 or older, of U.S. citizens.
• F2A: spouses and unmarried children under 21 of lawful permanent residents.
• F2B: unmarried sons and daughters, age 21 or older, of lawful permanent residents.
• F3: married sons and daughters of U.S. citizens.
• F4: brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens, where the citizen is at least 21.

The statute sets the annual number for the preference categories through a formula. The worldwide level for family-sponsored immigration is 480,000, but the number actually available to the preference categories is whatever that leaves after the previous year's immediate relatives are subtracted, with a floor of 226,000. Because the immediate-relative group is large, the floor is the figure that usually matters. So the practical annual allotment for the preference lines is 226,000. Check the State Department's monthly Visa Bulletin for the actual dates, because that is where the real queue is published.

Who holds the keys. The petitioner, who is a citizen or permanent resident, starts the process by filing a petition with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. USCIS decides whether the relationship is real. Then, for people abroad, the State Department's consulates take over, and the State Department controls when a visa number becomes available based on the date the petition was filed. Congress holds the master key, because it wrote the formula.

Door two: employment

The second door is much narrower. The statute sets an annual limit of 140,000 for employment-based preference immigrants, in five categories.

• EB-1: priority workers, meaning people of extraordinary ability, outstanding professors and researchers, and certain multinational executives.
• EB-2: professionals with advanced degrees or exceptional ability.
• EB-3: skilled workers, professionals with bachelor's degrees, and other workers.
• EB-4: certain special immigrants, including some religious workers.
• EB-5: immigrant investors, a category created in 1990.

Round the split like this: about 40,000 each for the first three and about 10,000 each for the last two. Check: 3 × 40,000 + 2 × 10,000 = 140,000. The real statutory shares are close to that, and the small remainder is why you will see slightly different numbers in different sources.

Two details deserve attention. First, for most of the middle categories an employer has to go through a labor certification process at the Department of Labor, showing that qualified American workers were not available at the prevailing wage. Second, the spouse and minor children of an employment-based immigrant count against the same annual limit. A visa "for a worker" often uses two, three or four numbers. The 140,000 figure is therefore not 140,000 workers.

Who holds the keys. The employer, who files a petition and in many cases first clears the Labor Department. Then USCIS. Then the State Department's numbers, which are subject to the same per-country limit described below. This door is the one most closely tied to the temporary work visas explained in H-1B, H-2A and H-2B, What Each Work Visa Does and Who Can Use It, because many people hold a temporary visa for years while waiting for a green card through this door.

Door three: the diversity visa

The Immigration Act of 1990 created a lottery, formally the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, with 55,000 visas a year authorized. Since 1999 a portion, 5,000, has been set aside for a different statute that granted relief to certain Central Americans, so the number available is 50,000 in practice. Applicants must come from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States, and they must have a high school education or two years of qualifying work experience. Winners are chosen at random by computer.

Who holds the keys. The State Department runs the lottery. Congress created it and Congress can end it.

Notice what this door does and does not do. It does not require a family connection or a job offer. It is the only major door where the main qualification is luck and a country of birth. A person can have a sound argument for or against it, but nobody can call it a deliberate selection of the nation's needs.

Door four: humanitarian routes

This door is for people in danger, and it has several rooms, which I'll take quickly because they are covered in detail in Asylum, Refugee, Parole and TPS, Four Statuses People Mix Up.

• Refugees are people outside their country who fear persecution, approved for resettlement abroad. The President sets an annual ceiling after consulting with Congress.
• Asylees are people who reach the United States, or its border, and show that they meet the refugee definition. After a year in asylum status they may apply for a green card, subject to a statutory annual cap on those adjustments.
• Others include victims of certain crimes and trafficking, who may qualify for special visas and, in time, permanent residence.

Who holds the keys. Mostly the executive branch: asylum officers, immigration judges, the State Department and the White House refugee ceiling. Congress wrote the framework in the Refugee Act of 1980.

The seven percent rule, with the arithmetic

Here is the piece that explains why some lines stretch into multiple decades. Section 202 of the Immigration and Nationality Act says that the total number of family-sponsored and employment-based preference visas going to people from any single country cannot exceed seven percent of the total of those visas in a fiscal year. The statute carves out some exceptions, which is part of why the actual numbers shift.

Do the baseline arithmetic. Use the figures above: 226,000 family preference visas plus 140,000 employment visas gives 226,000 + 140,000 = 366,000. Seven percent of that is 0.07 × 366,000 = 25,620. So in a plain year, with no adjustments, about 25,620 preference visas are the ceiling for any one country. That applies to a country of 5 million and a country of 1.4 billion alike.

Now a hypothetical, labelled as such. Suppose a country has a backlog of 1,000,000 qualified people in the preference lines, and suppose no one new ever joined the line. At 25,620 a year, clearing the backlog would take 1,000,000 ÷ 25,620, which is about 39 years. In real life new applicants keep joining, so the wait grows. That is the whole story behind the multi-decade waits you hear about in the news: the same ceiling applied to very different populations. Real numbers differ from year to year, so check the Visa Bulletin and the State Department's annual waiting-list figures before you quote a wait to a neighbor.

The per-country rule was meant to keep any one country from dominating the flow. The consequence is that people from the biggest source countries wait the longest, in the same family category, behind the same paperwork, for the same visa as someone from a small country who may be approved in a fraction of the time. That is a design feature that nobody defends when it is described plainly.

Which door would conservatives widen, narrow or leave alone?

Conservatives disagree among themselves here, so I'll give you my argument and flag the disagreements. Think of it as a proposal, not a party platform.

Leave alone: spouses and minor children. The immediate-relative and nuclear-family categories are the most defensible parts of the system, and almost every reform proposal on the right keeps them. A country that cannot keep a married couple together has lost its moral compass.

Narrow: extended-family chains. The sibling and married-adult-child categories, F3 and F4, are the ones that make the system a function of who is already here. I'd argue Congress should decide these numbers deliberately rather than leave them to the accidents of family chains. See How the 1965 Immigration Act Quietly Rewrote Who Comes to America for the history.

Narrow or end: the lottery. A program where the main qualification is chance is hard to defend to a country that says it wants immigrants who add something. Some conservatives would end it and move the numbers to skills. Others point out that it gives a path to people from places with no existing family networks here. That is a real argument and deserves an answer: the answer is that a country can adopt a merit rule without a lottery, and it can be neutral on nationality without being random.

Widen, carefully: skills and work. Compared to the family door, the employment door is small, and because the worker's spouse and children count against the cap, a large share of its slots can go to dependents. I would widen it for those who bring needed skills, and I would consider not counting dependents against the cap, a change that would instantly free up room for actual workers. Some on our side fear that wider employment immigration lowers wages. That deserves an honest hearing too, and "Immigration Always Helps the Economy" Is Only Half True gives it one.

Keep honest, and separate: humanitarian. The humanitarian door should be real for real refugees and not a side entrance for people who do not qualify. That means functioning screening and decisions in months, not years.

The strongest objection

A defender of the current system will say: "You are describing the system as if the family door were an accident. It is the product of a conscious decision in 1965 that family is the foundation of society. Why would conservatives, of all people, want to weaken the family?"

I take that seriously. My answer has two parts. One, I'm not proposing to weaken the nuclear family. That stays first in line. Two, the question is whether a sibling or an adult married child of a citizen should be able to go to the front of a line ahead of someone with a skill the country needs. Reasonable people say yes. Reasonable people also say the country should decide on purpose. The difference is not between those who love family and those who don't. It is between those who think the extended family should decide the size of the next wave, and those who think the voters' representatives should.

How to use this at the dinner table

When somebody says "why don't they just come legally," ask: which door? For the spouse of a citizen, that is a short, clear road. For the adult sibling of a citizen from a country with a huge backlog, it is a line that may not move in the person's lifetime. For a farm worker, the employment door is narrow, and the temporary agricultural visa is a different thing again. For someone fleeing persecution, the door is a screening process with its own legal standard. The answer to "why don't they come legally" is not a slogan. It is a floor plan. For the path at the end of the road, see Becoming an American Citizen Step by Step, From Green Card to Oath, and for the local effects of whichever door people use, see Three Towns, Three Budgets, and What Immigration Looks Like Locally.

The bottom line

• A green card comes through four main doors: family, employment, the diversity lottery and humanitarian protection. Ask "which door?" before you argue.
• The family door is the largest. Spouses, minor children and parents of citizens are outside the cap; other relatives wait in capped lines of 226,000 a year at the statutory floor.
• The employment door is capped at 140,000 a year, and dependents count against it. The seven percent per-country rule (7% of 366,000 = 25,620) explains multi-decade waits for large countries.
• A conservative reform keeps the nuclear family first, trims extended-family chains and the lottery, and widens the skills door, all by a vote of Congress.
• Check the monthly Visa Bulletin on the State Department's website before you tell anyone how long a wait is.