Legal  Immigration
 

The United States admits between 700,000 and 900,000 legal immigrants each year. This number does not represent the actual number of people settling here lawfully — rather, it represents the total number of people who were granted permanent residence ("green cards"), half of whom are already living here, some illegally, some legally on temporary visas.

The mechanism for selecting legal immigrants is very complex, but all legal immigration flows have at least three components — family, employment, and humanitarian. Our family immigration program admits the spouses, parents, and minor children of U.S. citizens without numerical limits, and has limited categories for the adult sons and daughter of citizens, the siblings of citizens, and the spouses and children of non-citizens. The employment-based categories are a complicated collection of preferences ranging from "priority workers" to unskilled and religious workers and investors. The humanitarian categories include refugees, asylees, and those receiving "cancellation of removal," i.e., longtime illegal aliens whose deportation would cause hardship for American family members. In addition, there is a visa lottery for people from countries other than the primary sources of current immigration.