A new report from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) released this month offers one of the clearest pictures yet of how the current administration’s immigration policies are playing out in the real world. The findings are hard to ignore.

The Door Is Getting Harder to Open

For immigrants applying for green cards based on extraordinary ability, researchers, scientists, artists, and athletes who have earned national or international recognition in their fields, denial rates have nearly doubled in just one year. For national interest waivers (NIWs), denials have risen even more sharply.

What makes these numbers particularly telling is that no new regulations formally changed the approval criteria. The bar did not officially move. And yet far fewer people are making it through.

Temporary visa categories are feeling the pressure too. Professionals applying for O-1 visas, which recognize extraordinary achievement in fields from science to the performing arts, are being denied at significantly higher rates. Executives and specialized employees transferred between international offices are encountering more resistance as well, after years of steady improvement in those categories.

A System Under Strain

Beyond denial rates, there is another layer to this story: the backlog. The number of pending applications at USCIS has grown dramatically over the past year, and a meaningful portion of that growth is a direct result of policy decisions rather than increased demand.

Ending temporary protections for immigrants from dozens of countries generated hundreds of thousands of additional pending cases almost overnight. The system was not built to absorb that kind of volume, and applicants are feeling the slowdown.

However, on a hopeful note. A lawsuit filed in federal court just last week is challenging the Trump administration’s decision to eliminate automatic work permit extensions for immigrants with pending renewal applications. That grace period had been put in place specifically to protect workers from losing their jobs while their paperwork sat unprocessed in a backlogged system. Eliminating it, the lawsuit argues, was done without the legally required public comment process and without accounting for the real harm it causes.

The workers most affected are not gaming the system. They applied for renewals on time. They are simply waiting, like hundreds of thousands of others, for an agency that is stretched thin to catch up.

Who Actually Bears the Cost

This is the part that often gets lost in the broader immigration debate. As the Wall Street Journal has reported, the administration’s crackdown on immigration is not meaningfully helping American workers. What it is doing is creating real disruptions for the American employers, hospitals, universities, and industries that have built teams around skilled foreign nationals.

When a research scientist is denied after years of building a career in the United States, that is not a job going to an American. That is a vacancy, a delayed project, or a research program relocating to another country. When a company cannot transfer a senior executive or a specialist to its U.S. office, that is a business weighing whether to grow here or elsewhere.

Healthcare is one of the most concrete examples. Nursing homes and hospitals across the country have come to rely on immigrant workers who have been embedded in their communities for years. Restricting their ability to stay and work does not fill those shifts. It leaves them empty.

Reasons to Be Cautiously Optimistic

Despite the challenging landscape, there are meaningful signs that the system is course-correcting.

Courts have been an important check. Federal judges have blocked several of the administration’s most sweeping moves, and the new lawsuit challenging the elimination of work permit extensions adds another layer of legal scrutiny to policies that advocates argue went too far, too fast.

Congress is showing signs of engagement too. The recent bipartisan House vote to extend TPS for Haitian immigrants through 2029 demonstrated that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle recognize what is at stake, both for the people affected and for the communities and industries that depend on them.

And independent researchers are doing the important work of putting real data behind what immigration attorneys and employers have been observing for months. When the evidence is clear and well-documented, it is harder to dismiss.

Our Take at Garvish Immigration

At Garvish Immigration, we work with employers and skilled professionals navigating exactly this environment every day. The policy landscape is shifting quickly, processing times are longer, and uncertainty is high. But so is the legal infrastructure designed to hold agencies accountable when they overstep.

We are watching these developments closely and will continue to share what we are seeing. If your organization is trying to make sense of what these trends mean for your workforce or your immigration strategy, we are here to help you think it through.