While more than half a million immigrants gained entry to the United States in 2005, hundreds of thousands of families are trapped in legal restrictions and processing backlogs at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), causing painful divisions for the families of legal immigrants.

The delays are a result of federal laws limiting the number of family members immigrants can sponsor each year and an overwhelmed Department of Homeland Security, which is able to process only a fraction of the applications that pour in each year, according to a report by The New York Sun.

“It’s causing a lot of hidden problems for families,” Consul Edgar Badajos, public information officer for the Philippine Consulate in New York, told The New York Sun.

“There’s already a generation gap between those who are here and those who are left, and in some cases, it leads to misunderstanding,” Badajos said.

The countries with the highest numbers of immigrants to the United States – China, Mexico, the Philippines and India – have the longest waits because no more than seven percent of family-sponsored admittances can come from one country.

The wait for Filipino siblings is so long that the cases that are now being processed – petitioned for in October 1983 – could have arrived illegally at that date and received amnesty three years later. [In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This law granted amnesty to undocumented aliens in the US who could show that they had been in the US since 1982 except for “brief, casual, and innocent absences.” – editors] Instead, they have been waiting for 22 years.

Legal immigrants and their family members often spend years apart while parents die, children marry, and other life-changing events occur. Once their turn arrives, there is another wait: for a green card: The processing time for green cards in New York is now about three years.

An immigration lawyer in Queens, Jesus Pena, whose firm has about 100 cases now in the processing backlog, said he has seen cases where petitioners pass away, meaning the petition is lost and the children age out of their category, resulting in longer waits. There is a “disruption in family life, people cannot travel,” he said. “It’s a total mess.”

Often, new problems come when family members reunite after being separated for long periods.

One of few legal avenues for immigrants to come to the United States, family sponsorship petitions, can take years – in the worst cases, more than two decades – to process, said Deborah Meyers, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

“A family that was born in the United States and hasn’t had to deal with the immigration process would find it unfathomable to be separated from their spouse and minor children for over a decade,” she said.

On average, the wait to be considered is now nearly four years for spouses and unmarried children of legal permanent residents. Other delays are much longer.

To sponsor a brother or sister, who fall at the bottom of a weighted preference system, a family member would need to have petitioned about 11 years ago for the case to be considered in January, according to the State Department’s current Visa Bulletin.

Meyers noted that even in employment-based petitions there are also significant backlogs. She said such restrictions on legal avenues for immigration could actually promote illegal immigration.

“Even though there’s legitimate concern over illegal immigration, the focus sometimes misses the mark on some of the other problems in the system,” Meyers said, referring to employment-based and family-sponsored delays.

“We just don’t hear that much debate about these problems in the policy arena, but I think that would be an important element of comprehensive immigration reform,” she said.

While the Republican Party has frequently stressed “family values,” it took a New York Democrat to add an amendment to the most recent immigration bill passed in the House, drawing attention to the plight of millions of legal immigrant families.

“Millions of close family members in New York City and across the country are finding themselves languishing in a wearisome visa application backlog process for years, waiting to be reunited with their loved ones,” Rep. Nydia Velasquez, who introduced the amendment in early December, said in a statement.

“In a nation where we hear so much about family values being a priority, we must provide relief for these families struggling to be together,” she stated.

In the House bill passed into law in early December that tries to restrict illegal immigration through stronger enforcement, Velasquez’s amendment, in broad terms, would change the processing backlog through transferring and increasing personnel to focus on certain areas, streamlining paperwork and promoting new technology.

She said that while President George W. Bush has already pledged to do this, through a $500 million initiative. His initiative, which was launched in 2002, planned to decrease to six months the wait for visa processing by September 2006. But his efforts had fallen short, with about a million cases still waiting to be processed.

In truth, his efforts have met with some success, particularly in the New York office, where the wait is the longest in the nation. Scores of new officers were brought in this summer, contributing to a 25 percent increase in applications completed in the last fiscal year, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

“Our customers are waiting too long, and we’re fixing it,” said Mary Ann Gantner, director of the USCIS-New York District. “We have a long way to go, but we are getting there. This time next year (2006), people filing for citizenship or a green card in New York will get a decision in six months or less.”

This is doubtful, critics charge – and even an official at the Department of Homeland Security has agreed. Eliminating the processing backlog alone, moreover, will not solve the problem of immigrant families being separated, according to Julie Dinnerstein, deputy director of Immigration Policy and Training at the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC).

The group supports an immigration bill introduced by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Edward Kennedy (D-MA) that would increase the number of visas allotted to family members of legal permanent residents, as well as taking steps to eliminate the processing problems.