By Kate Scanlon
WASHINGTON (OSV News) – Some immigrant religious workers are facing legal limbo, and Catholic advocates are pushing the Trump administration to address the backlog in their visa category.
Many immigrant religious workers, such as Catholic priests and nuns, legally enter the country on R-1 non-immigrant religious worker visas. These are initially granted for a 30-month period, with one possible renewal allowing for a total of five years. During that window, they can apply for employment-based EB-4 status to remain in the U.S. without interruption.
“One of the challenges is that because the number of green cards that are issued every year is not representative of the number of people that are eligible,” said Erin Corcoran, associate teaching professor and executive director of the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.
That backlog could have a grave impact on the church in the U.S. The National Study of Catholic Priests, released in 2022 by The Catholic University of America’s Catholic Project, indicated 24% of priests serving in the U.S. are foreign-born.
In April, bipartisan legislation, the Religious Workforce Protection Act, was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va.; Susan Collins, R-Maine; and Jim Risch, R-Idaho, and in the House by Reps. Mike Carey, R-Ohio, and Richard Neal, D-Mass. All five are Catholic.
If signed into law, the bill would permit religious workers already in the U.S. on temporary R-1 status with pending EB-4 applications to stay in the U.S. while waiting for permanent residency, Collins’ office said.
Catholic organizations, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Jesuit Refugee Service/USA and the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC), have backed the legislation.
A USCCB spokesperson told OSV News on Aug. 6, “We’re continuing our education efforts about the pressing need for the RWPA.”
“We remain hopeful that Congress will have an opportunity to move the bill forward before the end of the year,” the spokesperson said.
Corcoran said the legislation would allow, for example, a Catholic priest with temporary R-1 status to move from one parish to another in accordance with diocesan needs.
The bill would not increase the limit on how many visas are granted.
“It’s a very modest fix,” she said.
Despite bipartisan support, it was not immediately clear what the prospects might be for the bill once lawmakers return from their August recess, or whether President Donald Trump would sign it.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment from OSV News by publication time on whether the Trump administration would support the bill.
Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Hope Border Institute, told OSV News, “Congress and the Trump administration have a good opportunity to make an urgent targeted fix to ensure clergy and religious from abroad serving our communities throughout the country don’t become casualties of an increasingly broken immigration system.”
Corcoran said, “We’ve seen so little bipartisan solutions to problems, and we all benefit from these people being in our parishes.”
Advocacy for the bill comes as the Trump administration seeks to implement hardline immigration policies, including its pursuit of what it has called “the largest deportation in U.S. history.”
However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an Aug. 7 interview with Raymond Arroyo on EWTN’s The World Over that the administration is trying to “create its own standalone process” for religious workers, instead of having them conflated with other immigration categories.
“And I’ve been in touch, for example, with a number of our cardinals here in the United States and bishops about that as well,” Rubio said. “We don’t want to read headlines that some Catholic Church had to close because it couldn’t get their priests here … some order closed because some nun couldn’t get here.”
Congress is scheduled to return from its August recess in early September.