Marrying a U.S. citizen and marrying a lawful permanent resident can put an otherwise identical couple on two entirely different immigration timelines, according to a new report from The Mendoza Law Firm examining the hidden toll of the family visa backlog on married couples, one of the system’s most overlooked casualties.
A U.S. citizen who marries a foreign national can petition for their spouse as an immediate relative, a category with no annual visa quota and no waiting line once the petition is approved. A green card holder who marries goes through an identical process, filing the same petition, paying the same fees, and submitting the same documentation, yet their spouse is instead placed into the F2A preference category, entering a queue that can mean years of additional separation before the couple can legally live together in the same country.
The consequences extend well beyond paperwork, the report finds. Couples routinely delay major life decisions, including where to live, when to start a family, and how to plan careers, because their long-term location remains genuinely uncertain. Parents miss pregnancies, births, and early childhood milestones they can never recover. In many cases documented in the report, couples effectively run two separate households in two different countries for years while attempting to build a shared life on paper only. For newlyweds specifically, the years that typically establish a marriage’s foundation instead become years defined by time zones, international phone calls, and periodic visits rather than daily life together.
Children face an even more acute risk within this system: aging out. Under immigration law, a child generally loses eligibility for certain family-based benefits upon turning 21. While legal protections exist to mitigate this in some circumstances, the report finds that petitions stretching past twenty years routinely place young people at risk of legally aging out of the very categories designed to keep their families together, meaning a child listed on a petition as a minor may already be an adult, in the eyes of the law no longer covered by that same family unit, by the time a visa number finally becomes available.
An even starker risk looms over petitions that stretch across decades: the petitioner or beneficiary may not survive to see the case resolved. Many family petitions are filed by parents, siblings, or adult children who reasonably expect to be alive when reunification finally occurs. When a wait extends to 20 years or more, the report notes, that expectation can no longer be taken for granted, and while limited legal remedies exist for some of these situations, they do not cover every case.
The emotional consequences of prolonged separation are well documented, the report finds, citing research linking extended family separation to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and trauma-related symptoms. Individuals separated from close family members consistently report significantly higher levels of mental health strain compared to those able to reunite, with that strain generally increasing the longer separation continues, a pattern the report says is largely absent from public conversations about immigration backlogs.
“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 frames these outcomes not as rare edge cases but as a predictable, structural feature of a system in which family preference categories remain capped at roughly 226,000 visas annually nationwide, a figure the report says demand has long since outpaced, leaving millions of otherwise eligible spouses, children, and siblings waiting for a system built decades ago to catch up with present-day reality.
