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  • Shoppers in California plan to splurge this holiday season — out of fear

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    Shoppers in California plan to splurge this coming holiday season, but not because they are confident about the future. They are worried about inflation and figure it’s better to buy now than pay more later.

    At least that’s the takeaway from a new report from accounting firm KPMG that shows that consumers on the West Coast are more concerned about price rise and tariffs than those in any other region in the country.

    Nationally, shoppers intend to boost their holiday spending by 4.6% this year compared with last year, spending an average of $847 on shopping, according to the report.

    “When you think about why consumers are planning on spending more, it’s not that they have more wallet to spare, but it’s actually an expectation that prices are increasing,” Duleep Rodrigo, KPMG U.S. consumer and retail leader, said in an interview. “Eighty percent also of consumers are really being very conscious about inflation, and inflation that is impacted as a result of tariffs.”

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    Of the six different regions KPMG surveys, the Pacific region — which includes California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska — showed the highest concern for rising prices due to tariffs, with 72% citing inflation as a top concern.

    Nationally, 8 in 10 consumers believe tariffs will result in price increases. The least concerned were consumers in the Northeast, where only 6% said price increases would result in cutting back on holiday spending.

    “The consumer is spending like a poker player with a small chip stack,” Rodrigo said in the report. “They know they can’t play every hand but are willing to go ‘all in’ on a promising hand with a high emotional payoff. There’s also a psychological element where the consumer is managing a complex set of uncertainties.”

    KPMG found that consumer spending on essentials such as groceries, automotive expenses and personal care have increased in 2025, though much less than last year. In discretionary categories such as toys, furniture and hobby supplies, people expect to spend less.

    As budgets get tight, more people plan on spending on themselves this holiday season, with many purchasing big ticket holiday travel costing more than $1,000.

    The top gifts people want to receive this holiday season? Cold hard cash — followed by gift cards and apparel — indicating that more people want flexibility to spend on things they like, according to KPMG.

    Consumer price inflation for Los Angeles increased 3.3% in August, compared with the same time last year. National consumer inflation stood at 2.9% for the same period, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    From toys to apparel, retailers have experienced varying levels of impact due to President Trump’s sweeping tariffs on much of the world this year.

    Many retailers have been absorbing the costs of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration but cannot hold off indefinitely.

    Rodrigo said price increases on goods have already started happening, with retailers being more strategic.

    “For now, consumers that are in the top 20% are probably driving 80% of the economic activity that is sustaining and maintaining the current state of the economy,” Rodrigo said. “But there is a larger population that is really hurting, and that is really concerned with their dollars right now.”

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    Nilesh Christopher

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  • Altadena ICE raid highlights fears that roundups will stymie rebuilding efforts

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    When ICE agents raided the construction site of a burned property in Altadena this month, they made no arrests. The man they were after was not there. But the mere specter of them returning spooked the workers enough to bring the project to a temporary halt.

    The next day, half of the 12-man team stayed home. The crew returned to full strength by the end of the week, but they now work in fear, according to Brock Harris, a real estate agent representing the developer of the property.

    “It had a chilling effect,” he said. “They’re instilling fear in the workers trying to rebuild L.A.”

    Harris said another developer in the area started camouflaging his construction sites: hiding Porta Potties, removing construction fences and having workers park far away and carpool to the site so as not to attract attention.

    The potential of widespread immigration raids at construction sites looms ominously over Los Angeles County’s prospects of rebuilding after the two most destructive fires in its history.

    A new report by the UCLA Anderson Forecast said that roundups could hamstring the colossal undertaking to reconstruct the 13,000 homes that were wiped away in Altadena and Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7 — and exacerbate the housing crisis by stymieing new construction statewide.

    “Deportations will deplete the construction workforce,” the report said. “The loss of workers installing drywall, flooring, roofing and the like will directly diminish the level of production.”

    A house under construction in Altadena.

    (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

    The consequences will spread far beyond those who are deported, the report said. Many of the undocumented workers who manage to avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be forced to withdraw from the labor force. Their specialties are often crucial to getting projects completed, potentially harming the fortunes of remaining workers who can’t finish jobs without their help.

    “The productive activities of the undocumented and the rest of the labor force are often complementary,” the report said. “For example, home building could be delayed because of a reduction in specific skills” resulting in “a consequent increase in unemployment for the remaining workforce.”

    Jerry Nickelsburg, the director of the Anderson Forecast and author of the quarterly California report released Wednesday, said the “confusion and uncertainty” about the rollout of both immigration and trade policies “has a negative economic impact on California.”

    Contractors want to hire Americans but have a hard time finding enough of them with proper abilities, said Brian Turmail, a spokesperson for the Associated General Contractors of America trade group.

    “Most of them are kind of in the Lee Greenwood crowd,” he said, referring to a country music singer known for performing patriotic songs. “They’d rather be hiring young men and women from the United States. They’re just not there.”

    “Construction firms don’t start off with a business plan of, ‘Let’s hire undocumented workers,’” Turmail said. “They start with a business plan of, ‘Let’s find qualified people.’ It’s been relatively easy for undocumented workers to get into the country, so let’s not be surprised there are undocumented workers working in, among other things, industries in construction.”

    The trade group said government policies are partly to blame for the labor shortage. About 80% of federal funds spent on workforce development go to encouraging students to pursue four-year degrees, even though fewer than 40% of Americans complete college, Turmail said.

    “Exposing future workers to fields like construction and teaching them the skills they need is woefully lacking,” he said. “Complicating that, we don’t really offer many lawful pathways for people born outside the United States to come into the country and work in construction.”

    A home under construction in Altadena, where immigration agents visited earlier this month.

    A home under construction in Altadena, where immigration agents visited earlier this month.

    (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

    The recently raided Altadena project had plenty of momentum before the raid, Harris said. The original house burned in the Eaton fire, but the foundation survived, so the developer, who requested anonymity for fear of ICE retribution, purchased the lot with plans to rebuild the exact house that was there.

    Permits were quickly secured, and the developer hoped to finish the home by December. But as immigration raids continue across L.A. County, that timeline could be in jeopardy.

    “It’s insane to me that in the wake of a natural disaster, they’re choosing to create trouble and fear for those rebuilding,” Harris said. “There’s a terrible housing shortage, and they’re throwing a wrench into development plans.”

    Los Angeles real estate developer Clare De Briere called raids “fearmongering.”

    “It’s the anticipation of the possibility of being taken, even if you are fully legal and you have your papers and everything’s in order,” she said. “It’s an anticipation that you’re going to be taken and harassed because of how you look, and you’re going to lose a day’s work or potentially longer than that.”

    De Briere helped oversee Project Recovery, a group of public and private real estate experts who compiled a report in March on what steps can be taken to speed the revival of the Palisades and Altadena as displaced residents weigh their options to return to fire-affected neighborhoods.

    The prospect of raids and increased tariffs has increased uncertainty about how much it will cost to rebuild homes and commercial structures, she said. “Any time there is unpredictability, the market is going to reflect that by increasing costs.”

    The disappearance of undocumented workers stands to exacerbate the labor shortage that has grown more pronounced in recent years as construction has been slowed by high interest rates and the rising cost of materials that could get even more expensive because of new tariffs.

    “In general, costs have risen in the last seven years for all sorts of construction,” including houses and apartments, said Devang Shah, a principal at Genesis Builders, a firm focused on rebuilding homes in Altadena for people who were displaced by the fire. “We’re not seeing much construction work going on.”

    The slowdown has left a shortage of workers as many contractors consolidated or got out of the business because they couldn’t find enough work, Shah said.

    “When you start thinking about Altadena and the Palisades,” he said, “limited subcontractors can create headwinds.”

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    Roger Vincent, Jack Flemming

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  • The six fire-, flood- and storm-prone cities where billionaires love to buy homes

    The six fire-, flood- and storm-prone cities where billionaires love to buy homes

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    Rising interest rates. Natural disasters. There are a host of reasons not to buy a home in the current real estate market — particularly in certain areas. But the ultra-rich are unfazed.

    As most of the market recovers from its pandemic hangover, megamansions in some cities have been immune to the slowdown. Across the country, billionaires are still spending tens of millions of dollars on homes, despite traditional logic telling them to park their money elsewhere.

    A new report from Realtor.com says that six cities have emerged as the favorites of the elite so far this year, and two of them are in California. Tops for the fat-cat crew are Malibu, San Francisco, Aspen, New York City, Miami and Palm Beach.

    All six have seen sales north of $50 million so far in 2024, and a handful have seen sales much, much higher.

    In May, a private island compound in Palm Beach fetched $152 million, setting the all-time price record in the Sunshine State. California saw a record of its own a month later when Oakley founder James Jannard sold his Malibu spread for $210 million.

    For every excuse not to buy, billionaires find a workaround, the report said.

    For example, climate change and its ripple effects — floods, fires and storms — threaten homes in coastal communities across California and Florida. But Federal Emergency Management Agency regulations and insurance providers have raised the standards for homebuilders and developers, requiring increased wind and flood protection. So well-heeled buyers in Florida, for instance, see many new homes, especially expensive ones, as hurricane-proof.

    Storm-prepped homes may be too expensive for some, but not for those with a budget of $50 million or more.

    The same logic goes for other environmental disasters, the report said. Wealthy beach-house hunters can minimize the effects of coastal erosion by buying a home with a concrete foundation and brand-new sea wall, which protects against crashing waves and shrinking beaches much better than do the older, less pricey homes built on wood stilts in the 1950s and ’60s.

    For mansions in fire-prone areas, billionaires outfit estates with fire suppression systems and even hire private teams of firefighters to protect their homes from the flames.

    The other factor barring some potential buyers from the housing market? Soaring interest rates.

    Unlike during the pandemic, when rates plummeted to 2% or lower, rates in the modern market hover around 7%.

    A mortgage payment with a 7% rate can cost thousands of dollars more per month — or even tens of thousands more for multimillion-dollar properties. But billionaires aren’t at the mercy of interest rates for a few reasons, the report said.

    Some affluent buyers can pay all-cash for a luxury property, avoiding interest altogether.

    Others are able to broker special deals with banks due to their longstanding relationships and massive holdings. In other words, the more zeroes you have in your account, the better rate you’ll score from a bank.

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    Jack Flemming

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  • Biden’s Hidden Economic Success

    Biden’s Hidden Economic Success

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    Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.

    President Joe Biden’s economic agenda is achieving one of his principal goals: channeling more private investment into small communities that have been losing ground for years.

    That’s the conclusion of a new study released today, which found that economically strained counties are receiving an elevated share of the private investment in new manufacturing plants tied to three major bills that Biden passed early in his presidency. “After decades of economic divergence, strategic sector investment patterns are including more places that have historically been left out of economic growth,” concludes the new report from Brookings Metro and the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at MIT.

    The large manufacturing investments in economically stressed counties announced under Biden include steel plants in Mason County, West Virginia, and Mississippi County, Arkansas; an expansion of a semiconductor-manufacturing plant in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania; a plant to process the lithium used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries in Chester County, South Carolina; an electric-vehicle manufacturing plant in Haywood County, Tennessee; and plants to manufacture batteries for EVs in Montgomery County, Tennessee; Vigo County, Indiana; and Fayette County, Ohio.

    These are all some of the 1,071 counties—about a third of the U.S. total—that Brookings defines as economically distressed, based on high levels of unemployment and a relatively low median income. As of 2022, the report notes, these counties held 13 percent of the U.S. population but generated only 8 percent of the nation’s economic output.

    Since 2021, though, these distressed counties have received about $82 billion in private-sector investment from the industries targeted by the three major economic-development bills Biden signed. Those included the bipartisan infrastructure law and bills promoting more domestic manufacturing of semiconductors and clean energy, such as electric vehicles and equipment to generate solar and wind power.

    That $82 billion has been spread over 100 projects across 70 of the distressed counties, Brookings and MIT found. In all, since 2021 the distressed counties have received 16 percent of the total investments into the industrial sectors targeted by the Biden agenda. That’s double their share of national GDP. It’s also double the share of all private-sector investment they received from 2010 to 2020. Funneling more investment and jobs to these economically lagging communities “is really just at the core of what [Biden] is trying to accomplish,” Lael Brainard, the director of Biden’s National Economic Council, told me. “The president talks a lot about communities that have been left behind, and now he is talking a lot about communities that are coming back.”

    Brian Callaci: Biden says goodbye to tweezer economics

    This surge of investment into smaller places is a huge change from previous patterns that have concentrated investment and employment in a handful of “superstar” metropolitan areas, Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro and one of the report’s authors, told me.

    “As the rich places have been getting richer, the social-media/tech economy was something that was happening somewhere else for most people,” Muro said. “Clearly, this is a different-looking recovery that is occurring in different places and has a tilt to distressed communities right now.”

    One of those places is Fayette County, in south-central Ohio, about equidistant from Dayton, Cincinnati, and Columbus. Fayette’s population of roughly 28,000 is predominantly white and rural with few college graduates. Its median income is about one-fourth lower than the national average, and its poverty rate is about one-fourth higher.

    Early in 2023, Honda and its partner LG Energy Solution broke ground on a massive new plant in Fayette to build batteries for Honda and Acura EVs. The Honda project has already generated large numbers of construction jobs, as has a massive Intel semiconductor-fabrication plant under construction about an hour away, outside Columbus, in Licking County. “The trade associations for electrical workers, plumbers, whatever it might be, they are going to have jobs in the state of Ohio for years,” Jeff Hoagland, the CEO of the Dayton Development Coalition, told me. “These are huge facilities. The Honda facility is the size of 78 football fields.”

    Honda is already advertising to fill some engineering jobs, and once the plant is operational in late 2024 or early 2025, it expects to hire some 2,200 people. Most of those jobs will not require college degrees, Hoagland said. Many more jobs, he added, will flow from the plant’s suppliers moving to establish facilities in the area. “There are companies already buying up land,” Hoagland told me.

    Hoagland said he has no doubt that the federal tax incentives in the big Biden bills for domestic production of clean energy and semiconductors were central to these decisions. The federal incentives have been “100 percent critical, and I know that firsthand from Intel and from Honda,” Hoagland said. “Those companies needed those [incentives] to get into the full implementation of their strategy to rebuild that manufacturing, that supply-chain base, in the United States. Now we are seeing all these companies come back to the heartland in Ohio to do manufacturing.” Yet another firm, Joby Aviation, announced in September that, with support from federal clean-energy loan guarantees, it plans to construct a factory near Dayton to build electric air taxis.

    Encouraging manufacturers to locate their facilities in the U.S. rather than abroad has been the central goal of the tax incentives, loan guarantees, and grants in the clean-energy, semiconductor, and infrastructure bills. But the Biden administration has also been using provisions in those bills, as well as other programs, to try to steer more of those domestic investments specifically into distressed communities.

    As the Brookings/MIT report notes, the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy tax credits provide extra bonuses of 10 percent or more to companies that invest in low-income communities. An Energy Department loan-guarantee program favors companies that locate clean-energy investments in communities that lost jobs when fossil-fuel facilities shut down. In a speech last month, Brainard highlighted a $1 billion Transportation Department program that funds infrastructure improvements to “reconnect” neighborhoods that have been isolated from job opportunities by highways or other transportation infrastructure. (Many of those places are heavily minority communities.)

    Similarly, under the semiconductor bill, the administration is awarding substantial funds for “regional innovation engines” through the National Science Foundation, as well as “tech hubs” that require communities to organize businesses, schools, and government to develop coordinated plans for regional growth in high-tech industries. The winners of these grants include projects that are based in places far beyond the existing large metro centers of technological innovation, such as Louisiana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Oklahoma. “Those [programs] are spreading innovation investment to clusters all around the country rather than being concentrated just in a few huge metros,” Brainard told me.

    Joseph Parilla, the director of applied research at Brookings Metro, told me that the large manufacturing facilities being built in response to the new federal incentives naturally would flow toward the periphery of major metropolitan areas where many of these distressed counties are located. But Parilla believes the tax incentives and other programs that the Biden administration is implementing are also “having a pretty significant impact” in driving so many of these investments to smaller, economically strained places.

    Biden has made clear that he considers steering more investments to the places lagging economically both a political and policy priority. Even in forums as prominent as the State of the Union address, he often talks about the importance of creating jobs that will allow young people to stay in the communities where they were born. Biden has also, as I’ve written, rejected the belief of his two Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, that the most important step for expanding economic opportunity is to help more people obtain postsecondary education; instead, Biden conspicuously emphasizes how many jobs that do not require four-year college degrees are being created in the projects subsidized by his big-three bills. “What you’ll see in this field of dreams” are “Ph.D. engineers and scientists alongside community-college graduates,” he declared at the 2022 Ohio Intel plant ground-breaking.

    But it’s not clear that the economic benefits flowing into distressed communities will produce political gains for Biden. In 2020, despite his small-town, blue-collar “Scranton Joe” persona, Biden heavily depended on the big, well-educated metro areas thriving in the Information Age: Previous Brookings Metro research found that, although Biden won only about one-sixth of all U.S. counties, his counties generated nearly three-fourths of the nation’s total economic output.

    The outcome was very different in the economically distressed counties. Brookings found that in 2020, Trump won 54 of the 70 distressed counties where the new investments have been announced under Biden. Some Democratic operatives are dubious that these new jobs and opportunities will change that pattern much.

    Read: Biden’s economic formula to win in 2024

    Partly that’s because Democrats face so many headwinds in these places on issues relating to race and culture, such as immigration and LGBTQ rights. But it’s also because of the risk that without unions or many local Democratic officials to drive the message, workers simply won’t be aware that their new jobs are linked to programs that Biden created, as Michael Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director, has argued to me.

    Jim Kessler, the executive vice president of Third Way, a centrist Democratic group that has studied the party’s problems in small-town and rural areas, agrees that even big job gains won’t flip small red places toward Biden. But even slightly reducing the GOP margin in those places could matter, he told me. “Some of these swing states have vast red areas, and he needs to do well enough in those areas,” Kessler said. Pointing to new jobs in previously declining places, Kessler said, could also provide Biden a symbol of economic recovery that resonates with voters far beyond those places.

    The Brookings and MIT authors expect that Biden will have many more such examples to cite as further investments in industries including clean energy and semiconductors roll out. “The map is not yet finished,” the report concludes. “There are hundreds of distressed counties with assets similar to those that have attracted investment and have not yet been targeted.” One of the most tangible legacies of Biden’s presidency may be a steady procession of new plants rising through the coming years in communities previously left for scrap. Whether voters in these places give him credit for that will help determine if he’s still in the White House to see it.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Were California's grizzlies really ravenous meat eaters? Not so much, new report shows

    Were California's grizzlies really ravenous meat eaters? Not so much, new report shows

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    Forget what you were taught in elementary school about the supposed ravenous meat-eating grizzly bear: New research has found that California’s extinct bear was actually more of a vegetarian.

    “California’s historical record misrepresented” the animal and humans are largely to blame, researchers say.

    The grizzly bear was previously portrayed as a massive hypercarnivore, an animal whose diet is more than 70% meat, and a danger to public safety, according to recently published research in The Royal Society.

    California was home to as many as 10,000 bears before the Gold Rush in 1848, so numerous that a grizzly is emblazoned on the flag of California. But the grizzly was last seen in California in 1924 and became extinct so quickly there are very few natural history notes available and fewer than 100 historical skins and skeletons in existence, according to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

    But there is an abundance of written historical archives of the grizzly, said Peter Alagona, co-author of the report. As a historian and an ecologist, he said reading and trying to interpret these archives raised a lot of questions for him.

    In historical accounts, including available newspaper reports, researchers found that grizzlies were “accused of attacking people and preying on the livestock that proliferated on the open range during California’s Spanish Mission and Mexican Rancho eras,” the report stated. Such stories played a large role in molding the public’s perception of the bear in a mostly negative light.

    “It’s surprising in the context of the historical sources which really portrayed an entirely different animal, an animal that was very much a product of people’s minds [contrary] to what the creature was actually out there doing in the wild,” Alagona said.

    Alagona, a historian and ecologist at UC Santa Barbara, said the research has a mix of paleontology, history, geography and biology and the information is “holding up a mirror to us and telling us about our own perceptions about the way in which we look at other animals, we’re often seeing reflections of ourselves.”

    The recent study didn’t focus on the bear’s alleged predatory behaviors against people, but it did find that when ranchers and farmers raised free-range livestock, grizzlies remained largely herbivorous.

    Alagona argued the Spanish caused the bears to become more carnivorous by bringing their livestock to California.

    The report states that colonial land uses that began in 1769 led grizzlies to moderately increase animal protein consumption. Even so, grizzlies still consumed far less livestock than otherwise claimed, according to the report.

    After studying the artifacts of grizzly skulls and teeth, food resources in the region and human activity, researchers found that the bears derived less than 10% of their nutrition from other mammals and were therefore largely herbivorous for a period ahead of the first European arrival in 1542.

    The study even compared the grizzlies’ diet with that of present-day brown bears living in Mediterranean climates whose diet is dominated by plants. Brown bears are wide-ranging omnivores with diets that vary seasonally, inter-annually and geographically.

    In terms of its massive stature, historians got that wrong too.

    Adult grizzly bears have been assumed to reach about 4.5 feet at the shoulder and 8 feet tall when standing, according to California’s Capitol Museum. State records show female bears weigh about 400 pounds and males 1,000 pounds, but they could reach 2,000 pounds. Researchers say that by their estimations, the species never made it to the purported historically huge proportions.

    “Being able to work together with paleontologists, paleobiologists enabled us to see the story in an entirely new way and really in some ways rewrite the historical ecology of grizzlies in California,” Alagona said.

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    Karen Garcia

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  • Is ’90 Day Fiancé’ having an effect on visa approvals? A new report argues it is

    Is ’90 Day Fiancé’ having an effect on visa approvals? A new report argues it is

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    WASHINGTON, D.C. — 

    Since it first aired in 2014, TLC’s “90 Day Fiancé” has shown viewers the complexities of long-distance, international romances between U.S. citizens and people from foreign countries. But as the reality TV series has grown in popularity over the last decade, the approval rate for fiancé visas has dropped.

    Those things could be linked, according to a report released Monday by Boundless Immigration, a tech company that helps people navigate immigration processes. The organization is looking into the ways in which the series might be affecting regular visa applicants, and says that while the show raised awareness about the visa process, it may have led to increased scrutiny of applications.

    U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, however, said there isn’t any correlation between the show and the approval process.

    “Requests for immigration benefits are not determined based on television entertainment or other forms of media content,” spokesman Matthew Bourke said.

    “USCIS adjudicators individually evaluate every request for immigration benefits fairly, humanely and efficiently before issuing a determination,” Bourke said.

    Viewership for “90 Day Fiancé” has steadily increased since the show launched in 2014, according to the report. Meanwhile, the approval rate for fiancé visas dropped nearly by a quarter, from 87% in fiscal year 2015 to 63% in 2022, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.

    Before the show started, the approval rate was 75% in 2013. Data through the third quarter of this fiscal year show a 75% approval rate of applications processed so far. Still, Boundless Immigration said, the drop after “90 Day Fiancé” began airing is worth continuing to examine.

    “The vast majority of Americans and even members of Congress would agree that keeping people in purgatory or keeping families from starting their lives together is probably not the best way of operating for the country,” said Boundless Immigration’s chief executive Xiao Wang, adding that the company has had clients who were featured on the show.

    Representatives for TLC did not respond to requests for comment.

    The K-1 visa is designed to reunite U.S. citizens with their foreign fiancés, giving them 90 days to get married before the visa expires.

    But as with all immigration processes, the pandemic caused significant delays for fiancé visas. Early this year, the average processing time for the I-129F petition by the U.S. citizen fiancé for their foreign partner — a critical step in the visa process — ballooned to 21 months from seven months, according to the report.

    On an episode of “90 Fiancé: Before the 90 Days,” participant Gino Palazzolo lamented how difficult it was leaving his partner, Jasmine Pineda, after he proposed to her in Panama.

    “As soon as I got home, I filed the K-1 visa to bring Jasmine to the United States,” Palazzolo says on the episode. “But, you know, it’s taken a long time to process. We’re at, like, 12 months. So that makes Jasmine frustrated, because she wants to be with me now, and it causes friction between us.”

    Though the show hasn’t led to an increase in fiancé visa applications, the backlog of applications waiting to be processed has more than doubled since before the pandemic to 51,500, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.

    Although visa issuances have risen since 2020, they are still nowhere near pre-pandemic levels, according to the report. Fiancé visas make up less than half a percent of all yearly non-immigrant visa admissions.

    Bourke of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the agency recently implemented changes to reduce the backlog of fiancé visa cases after the pandemic caused an agency-wide hiring freeze. Appropriations by Congress last year have been critical to reducing the backlog, he said, and proposed application fee increases would also help.

    California is among the most common states for fiancé visa holders, as well as Texas, Florida and New York, according to the report.

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    Andrea Castillo

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