What's the time period for an I-130 form?

Form I-130 is the Petition for Alien Relative that U.S. citizens or permanent residents must file in order to help foreign-born family members immigrate to the United States. Only after U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has approved this form can the immigrant proceed with the application for a green card. This makes the inevitable waits for approval very frustrating.

Prepare to wait anywhere from five months to several years for an approval or denial of your Form I-130. To find out how long you are likely to wait, check the “USCIS Processing Time Information” page of the USCIS website. Select the Service Center that serves the U.S. citizen’s or permanent resident’s geographic area from the drop-down menu, and then click “Service Center Processing Dates.”

You’ll see either an estimate in months or a date. If a date is shown, it means that people who submitted their petitions on that date are only now receiving answers from USCIS.

What’s taking so long? The reasons can include:

• The various steps involved in USCIS’s consideration of these petitions. It is a multi-step process, involving checking to make sure that the application as complete (and sending follow-up correspondence if not) running background checks, examining the birth certificates and other documents for authenticity, .and finally determining whether the immigrant in fact appears eligible for a U.S. visa.
• The fact that many other people are applying all the time. This creates a backlog.
• USCIS’s prioritization of applications in response to the backlog. This includes putting the applications of preference relatives – that is, people who will have to wait a long time for a green card even after their visa petition is approved -- at the bottom of the pile. So, for instance, the brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens might wait a few years for the I-130 to be approved – but this doesn’t really hurt their eventual immigration chances, because even after approval, they’re likely to wait several more years before their priority date (the date the visa petition was first filed) becomes current and a visa becomes available to them. The long wait for preference relatives' I-130s doesn’t usually slow the process down at all.

As you can probably tell from the above, there's almost nothing you can do to speed the process up, other than making sure to submit a complete application in the first place, with all the relevant blanks filled in on the form, all needed documents attached, and including the required fee.

In a true emergency you might be able to ask for speeded up ("expedited") processing, but you'll need an attorney's help for this.

Once you have submitted an I-130 application, you can check its status on the USCIS website. If you see that it is taking longer than expected, make an INFOPASS appointment to visit your local USCIS field office to ask what’s going on, or hire an immigration attorney.