This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 18th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

For those opposed to illegal immigration, the refrain has long been get in line do it legally for

those who are currently mired in our slow inefficient legal immigration system

one thing is clear wait times are getting longer.

Cato's David Beer has authored a new paper detailing the problems that go along with a long

and growing green card backlog.

Well, there are different ways that legal immigrants come to the United States, mainly through

sponsorship of some kind, usually by a family member.

The majority of immigrants are what the law calls immediate relatives.

These are parents, spouses, and minor children of U.S. citizens.

And they don't have any numerical limit,

which means they can immigrate immediately

upon proving their eligibility. But for people who are sponsored by an employer or they are

sponsored by a family member who doesn't meet that criteria, for example, an adult child of a U.S. citizen or the

sibling of a

legal permanent resident of the United States,

those people all have quotas,

or a numerical limit on the number of green cards that will be issued each year.

And for those people, the process starts with the sponsor in the US,

submitting a petition saying, we want to sponsor this person and bring them over.

But because the green card quota has been filled for the year, those people then have

to wait in a line until a green card becomes available for them.

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