Legal Immigrants Seek Reward for Years of Following the Rules Nathan Morgan for The New York Times Angeles P. Barberena, who lives near Nashville. She and her husband left Mexico with their two young children in 1995. Ms. Barberena says of the debate on immigration policy, "Now it seems everything is about illegal immigrants and nothing is about us." Angeles P. Barberena has always tried to follow the United States" immigration laws. She dutifully filed her petition to become a resident, complied with the requirements and paid her taxes and fees. That was 17 years ago. Ms. Barberena, who is from Mexico, is still waiting. Her file is inching through a backlog, and she has several years to go before she will receive the green card that will make her a permanent resident. As Congress debates an overhaul of the immigration system, Ms. Barberena often feels like yelling with frustration. "It's been so long and we did everything by the rule," she said, speaking from her home near Nashville. Now it seems everything is about illegal immigrants and nothing is about us. While stark differences between the Senate and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives have centered on border security and a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, another major issue is snagged in the dispute: the plight of more than 4.4 million aspiring legal immigrants like Ms. Barberena, who are languishing in backlogs in a broken system. A broad bill the Senate passed in June includes ambitious measures to eliminate green card backlogs and create a new merit program, based mainly on education and job skills, to expand and streamline future legal immigration. House Republicans have made it clear they will not take up that bill. Instead, Speaker John A. Boehner said the House would handle immigration in "bite-size chunks" over the coming months. None of several smaller measures recently approved by House committees deal with fixing the visa system, and a bipartisan House bill similar to the Senate's has stalled. For many House conservatives, the increase in legal immigration under the Senate plan is nearly as objectionable as the promise of citizenship for immigrants here illegally. As the overhaul becomes uncertain, so do the prospects of Eduardo de Souza, a college soccer coach from Brazil working in Virginia who has, like Ms. Barberena, been waiting more than a decade to become a permanent resident. What is the government going to do for those people who are doing the right thing? Mr. de Souza asked. The backlogs swelled because of a longstanding mismatch in immigration law between the number of visas available and the much larger number of foreigners who qualify for them, especially those applying based on family ties to American citizens and permanent residents. Congress has imposed caps on the number of visas issued to each country each year. As a result, immigrants from some countries - particularly China, India, Mexico and the Philippines - can wait a decade or more to get their visas after approvals. Most foreigners are waiting outside the United States, but many - at least hundreds of thousands - live here on temporary visas or work permits. The 1,192 pages of the Senate bill include a little-noticed requirement, or "trigger," linked to the visa logjam: all backlogs of legal applicants must be cleared within 10 years before any immigrants who had been here illegally can obtain green cards, the pivotal step toward citizenship. To accomplish that, any foreigners like Ms. Barberena who have been waiting more than five years for green cards would become eligible for visas immediately. The immigration authorities would devise a formula to issue visas for everyone in line over seven years, giving priority to those who waited longest. Under the Senate plan, Ms. Barberena could receive her green card within months. The legislation would also free up visas by removing numerical caps for spouses and children of permanent residents, and by closing down some other family categories. But over time the merit system would offer an even greater number of new green cards, particularly for highly skilled foreigners and for low-wage laborers. All in all, the Senate provisions would expand the immigration system and bring a rapid influx of legal immigrants, increasing the foreign-born share of the population to 15 percent by 2020, according to Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. That would be a fivefold increase since 1970 and the highest percentage of immigrants in the nation's history, said Mr. Camarota, whose group advocates reducing immigration.