USCIS Improves Online Tool to Provide More Accurate Processing Times

On Thursday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS announced it’s making changes to its processing time tools in order to provide applicants with more accurate information. This is part of the agency’s effort to increase transparency and speed up visa processing as it faces one of the most unprecedented backlogs in history.
Additional Resources
Read the Full Report: www.boundless....
Biden Admin’s Outline to Reduce the Backlog: www.boundless....
USCIS Processing Tines Tool: egov.uscis.gov...
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[@yenitaly244]

Thank you for the video. Does this represent the time for approval or is the time to receive the visa itself (for the interview)?

[@BoundlessImmigration]

Hi there! Give us a call at [phone], Monday-Friday from 6:00am-10:00pm (Pacific Time) if you would like more information or visit our website for more info bit.ly/3bxnKKg

[@salvadorrobles8428]

There is a design problem with this metric. I will try to explain why you actually should be "happy" to see the month mark increase (as counterintuitive as it may seem). 80% of cases are solved in 8 months (based on the pool of cases resolved in the last 6 months) As the metric is computed on the pool of cases resolved in previous 6 months, the key question is "how old were the cases resolved in the previous 6 months". If the majority of cases were younger than the current processing time, the metric would be reduced, if the majority of cases were older than the current processing time, the metric would increase. Therefore, if USCIS was focusing on solving older cases, with the current metric, you should expect to see the processing times increasing. However if USCIS was focusing on solving newer cases, you would expect the metric to keep constant or decrease. The issue with this metric is that it incentives USCIS to focus on newer cases (which are not at risk of losing status/employment authorization) at the expense of older cases (which are actually at risk of losing status/employment authorization). The paradox is that people actually pressure USCIS to reduce this metric, and rage when this metric goes up. This has made USCIS focus their main efforts on solving newer cases and only marginally work on older cases, just in the right proportion so that the metric remains at least constant. As a result of this, it is increasingly less worth it to solve an old case, as they need to solve many more new cases to compensate for it. And this dynamic can only get worst the older the case gets. If you analyse your inquiry date, which is representative of when 93% of cases in the pool have been solved you will observe that it's several months higher than processing time. However, even that date is not entirely accurate, as it is based on the pool of cases from previous 6 months (see the problem?) A more useful metric would be to obtain what percentage of cases filed in your month have been resolved at a given month mark, to visualize the right tail of the processing time distribution. Current system incentives USCIS to solve newer cases over older cases, for the only purpose of keeping the current metric constant, but is this really a good approach? I hope this gave you better insights of how to interpret this metric.

[@BoundlessImmigration]

We see the problem, and we agree.