Families Waiting to Reunite Could Pay Over $113,000 in Remittances Alone, New Report Finds

Families separated by America’s immigration backlog aren’t just losing time, they’re paying for it, according to a new report from The Mendoza Law Firm, which found that a family sending a typical monthly remittance over the course of a 24-year visa wait could pay more than $113,000 before ever being reunited, a figure that doesn’t include travel costs, legal fees, lost income, or the expense of maintaining two households in two countries simultaneously.

The financial burden begins well before that long-term total accumulates. Filing a Form I-130 petition alone costs hundreds of dollars, before visa application fees, immigrant fees, medical examinations, document translation costs, and travel expenses are added on. But the report identifies remittances, the recurring money transfers families send across borders to support relatives during years or decades of separation, as the real long-term financial strain behind the family visa backlog. Globally, remittances totaled roughly $700 billion in 2024, with Mexico alone receiving a record $64.7 billion and the Philippines receiving more than $40 billion, flows the report ties directly to the same countries facing the longest family visa wait times.

The backlog’s human and financial impact is not evenly distributed across the country. California is home to close to 11 million immigrants, and Texas has around 5.8 million, with Florida, New York, and New Jersey adding millions more; together, these states account for more than half of the entire foreign-born population in the United States. At the metro level, the concentration becomes even sharper: the New York metro area alone has nearly six million immigrants, Greater Los Angeles has more than four million, and Miami, Houston, and Chicago aren’t far behind. In cities like Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, Queens, San Jose, and Newark, the report notes, the family visa backlog isn’t an abstract policy debate, it’s siblings who haven’t seen each other in over a decade and children whose petitions were filed when they were young but remain unresolved well into adulthood.

No two countries illustrate the system’s uneven burden more clearly than Mexico and the Philippines, both of which have long-standing migration ties to the United States and correspondingly high demand for family reunification, and both of which run into the same fixed per-country visa caps documented monthly in the State Department’s Visa Bulletin. The disparity is most extreme in the F3 and F4 categories: Mexican applicants sponsoring married children of U.S. citizens are currently waiting on petitions filed more than 25 years ago, while Mexican applicants in the sibling category face a queue stretching back more than 24 years, meaning a petition filed when George W. Bush was president is only now approaching eligibility.

“People think of immigration as a legal process. What they do not see is what happens to a family during a 20-year wait,” said Mendoza Law. “Children grow up without a parent. Siblings become strangers. Petitioners die before their cases are resolved. By the time some of these families finally reunite, the relationship the petition was filed to protect no longer looks the same.”

The report argues that these financial and geographic patterns reinforce each other: families in high-remittance corridors like Mexico and the Philippines face both the longest visa wait times and the heaviest recurring financial burden of maintaining relatives across borders during that wait, a dynamic that can persist across generations rather than resolving within a single petition’s timeline.

“Legislative proposals exist, such as the Reuniting Families Act and the Dignity Act, bipartisan bills introduced across multiple Congresses,” Mendoza Law said. “The data to justify action has existed for decades. What has been missing is the political will to treat family separation as the crisis it actually is, and our hope is that campaigns like this one help make that case.”