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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing K-3 Visas. K-3 Visas are Marriage Visas for those who are married to American citizens. There has been a lot of talk about the backlogs within US Immigration and fortunately there is some good news on that front.

A recent announcement from USCIS, that is uscis.gov, the announcement is titled: USCIS Announces New Actions to Reduce Backlogs, Expand Premium Processing, and Provide Relief to Work Permit Holders. Quoting directly: "Today, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is announcing a trio of efforts to increase efficiency and reduce burdens to the overall legal Immigration system. USCIS will set new agency-wide backlog reduction goals." Then quoting further: "To reduce the agency’s pending case load, USCIS is establishing new internal cycle time goals this month. These goals are internal metrics that guide the backlog reduction efforts of the USCIS workforce and affect how long it takes the agency to process cases. As cycle times improve, processing times will follow and applicants and petitioners will receive decisions on their cases more quickly. USCIS will increase capacity, improve technology and expand staffing to achieve these new goals by the end of fiscal year 2023." Quoting further: "The agency's publicly posted processing times show the average amount of time it took USCIS to process a particular form from when the agency received the application until the decision was made on the case. Internally USCIS monitors the number of pending cases in the agency's workload through a metric called "cycle times". A cycle time measures how many months’ worth of pending cases for a particular form are awaiting a decision. As an internal management metric, cycle times are generally comparable to the agency’s publicly posted median processing times. Cycle times are what the operational divisions of USCIS use to gauge how much progress the agency is or is not making on reducing our backlog and overall case processing time." 

So a lot going on in there and further and unquoted, they do even mention there may be an increase in staff. I actually think that will have more impact on backlog than anything. But notable for purposes of the K-3 is, hey, they are at least trying something. I mean we have been dealing with backlog for quite some time. I have got a case that is pre-Covid that we are still trying to deal with. So this is definitely relatively good news compared to no news on the topic of backlogs. That being said, this isn't going to happen overnight. Fiscal year 2023 is when they anticipate things kind of getting going so that presumably is the fourth quarter of this year, at the earliest, so it is not imminent change with respect to backlog but it is definitely, definitely good news.