Which LPR admissions are exempt from the 675,000 annual cap and how many of those are granted each year?
Executive summary
The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) sets a 675,000 “worldwide” numerical ceiling that is allocated as roughly 480,000 family‑preference, 140,000 employment‑based, and 55,000 diversity visas, but key classes of admissions are exempt from that 675,000 cap — principally immediate relatives of U.S. citizens and persons granted asylum (and refugee admissions, which are set separately by presidential determination) — and those exemptions are the reason annual new lawful permanent resident (LPR) admissions routinely exceed 675,000 [1] [2] [3]. Official counts show nearly 1.17 million new LPRs in FY2023, meaning the exempt categories (plus other non‑numerically limited admissions and parole‑related adjustments) collectively account for the roughly 400–500 thousand admissions above the statutory ceiling, though precise annual breakdowns require consulting DHS/State tables for the year in question [4] [3].
1. How the 675,000 ceiling is structured and who it nominally covers
The INA’s statutory framework allocates the 675,000 limit across three buckets — family‑sponsored (about 480,000), employment‑based (about 140,000), and diversity — and these allocations form the numerical “cap” that Congress established in the Immigration Act of 1990 [1] [2]. Those totals are the baseline used to compute family preference availability and employment immigration ceilings each fiscal year, and the diversity program is explicitly set at 55,000 visas annually [1] [3].
2. The principal LPR admissions that are exempt from the 675,000 cap
Immediate relatives of U.S. citizens (spouses, unmarried minor children, and parents) are explicitly not subject to the numerical limits in the INA, and asylees who adjust to LPR status also are not numerically limited; refugee admissions are handled separately and are set annually by the President in consultation with Congress rather than by the 675,000 statutory cap [1] [2]. DHS/USCIS reporting and legal summaries repeatedly note that these non‑numerical categories make the INA “worldwide limit” porous in practice, allowing total LPR admissions to exceed 675,000 in many years [1] [5].
3. How many of these exempt admissions occur each year — what the data say
Available government reporting shows total new LPRs rose to almost 1,173,000 in FY2023, and independent analysts place 2023 LPR admissions near 1.2 million, demonstrating that the exempt categories (immediate relatives, asylee adjustments, plus refugees and certain parole/other adjustments) together account for the excess over the 675,000 ceiling [4] [3]. DHS’s descriptive tables and the Yearbook of Immigration Statistics break admissions down by major class of admission, and other DHS products note immediate relatives constitute the largest single category (more than 40 percent of new LPRs in recent years), which aligns with the observation that immediate‑relative admissions alone can be several hundred thousand annually [5] [4]. The sources provided do not, however, give a single concise line item in this dataset that sums “immediate relatives + asylees + refugees” for FY2023 in an immediately citable figure; deriving an exact annual count by exempt category requires consulting the detailed DHS/State tables (e.g., Table 6 / Table 10D) for that fiscal year [3] [4].
4. Why the discrepancy matters and how reporting can obscure it
Because the INA both establishes fixed numerical preference ceilings and separately exempts immediate relatives and asylees (and leaves refugee admissions to a presidential cap), public totals can be—and frequently are—misinterpreted: critics who cite the 675,000 figure as a “hard limit” overlook that immediate relatives and asylum adjustments routinely push admissions well above it, while advocates who point to 1.1–1.2 million LPRs in a year sometimes do not distinguish which admissions were governed by the numerically limited preference categories [1] [4] [3]. The available sources make the policy design clear but require readers to consult DHS/State tables for exact year‑by‑year counts by exempt category rather than relying on aggregate headlines [1] [3].