80,000 US resident cards could be lost.

The administration Biden acknowledged that, in the last fiscal year, the United States did not issue approximately 80,000 green cards that should have been issued to workers immigrants legal. The decrease is added to a cumulative of more than a million people waiting to receive employment visas. Congress must make sure those green cards are used and then begin fixing a system that uselessly burdens skilled immigrants and the companies that employ them.

Every year, EE.UU. issues a maximum of 140,000 green cards — the famous green cards — to employer-sponsored immigrants who have received approval for permanent residence. This number has been frozen since 1990. Another 226,000 green “family preference” cards are reserved for family members of US citizens and permanent residents. In years when the limit for family preference visas is not reached, due to low demand or processing delays – or both – the unused visas are transferred to the employment category, but must be granted to the end of next fiscal year.

The closure of immigration offices during the pandemic, coupled with restrictions imposed by the Trump Administration, caused the number of family preference green cards to plummet in 2020. As a result, an additional 122,000 green cards were made available since the job category. This should have been good news for workers lining up for the green card process, some of whom have lived legally in the US for decades. But the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency was not prepared to handle the surge in demand. Despite a belated push from the Biden Administration, the agency failed to award the full quota before the Sept. 30 deadline. If Congress doesn’t act, those unused green cards will be lost forever.

This compounds the failure of a system that, even when it works as intended, leaves hundreds of thousands of legally employed and skilled workers in limbo. On average, highly educated immigrants who have qualified for green cards can wait 16 years before receiving them. Due to limits on the amount issued individually to a country, many immigrants from India whose permanent residence in the US has been approved will never receive a card.

Legislation introduced by two Republicans, Senator Thom Tillis and Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, would authorize the government to “take back” expired visas and transfer them to next year. So far, the bill has failed to win the backing of Congressional Democrats, who seek to include broader immigration reforms in their $ 3.5 trillion spending package. At least one lawmaker, Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, suggested he would oppose issuing more green cards for employment unless Congress also does what is necessary to protect the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

This is bad. While Democrats are right to push for comprehensive immigration reform, it makes no sense to leave this immediate problem unsolved. Democratic leaders should immediately adopt the Tillis bill to allow the Citizenship and Immigration Services agency to retain unused employment green cards and issue them next year. Congress should also provide additional resources to address staff shortages. In the meantime, the Biden Administration should streamline an absurdly complex approval process. This means, among other things, updating technology to allow applicants to submit paperwork online.

Eliminating the accumulation of visas will eventually require raising the arbitrary limit to the number of cards issued each year. Broader immigration reform is also needed. Those are bigger challenges, but an easy first step is to hand over the cards that the government is already authorized to issue. There is no excuse not to do even that.