US Green Card Backlog: Indian Professionals Face 179-Year Wait

India’s highly skilled professionals who want to apply for employment-based permanent residency or Green Card in the US may have to wait for an estimated 179 years, according to a recent assessment by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). Indian candidates face the longest delays in the American immigration system of any group, according to research, due to the annual caps and strict country-specific limits.

Visa category comparisons: India vs China

It also noted that as of December 2025 the employment-based immigration backlog has grown past 1.2 million applicants. Almost 1 million of these applicants are from India. This means Indian workers and their families make up 79% of the entire pending employment-based backlog. The NFAP analysis demonstrates how nationality quotas place a vastly heavier burden on Indian workers when compared to applicants from other nations, including China and the Philippines. EB-1 priority workers wait periods stand at an estimated 4 to 5 years for Chinese nationals – similar to India. EB-2 advanced degree professionals from China have an estimated 25-year wait and EB-3 skilled workers from China are projected to wait around 7 years. “A high-skilled foreign national from India with a labor certification application or an employment-based immigrant petition filed in January 2026 or later has a potential wait time for a green card (permanent residence) of 179 years in the employment-based second preference (EB-2), 38 years in the employment-based third preference (EB-3) and 5 years in the employment-based first preference (EB-1),” said the new National Foundation for American Policy report.

Why Indians may have to wait for nearly two centuries job-based visa

The think tank identifies two primary legislative bottlenecks behind the escalating logjam. The first is the 140,000 annual ceiling established by the US Congress in 1990. It is the nationwide statutory cap that provides roughly 140,000 employment-based green cards each fiscal year. This total ceiling includes both the primary sponsored employees and their dependent family members, creating a total allocation far too small to absorb corporate sponsorship levels. Secondly, American immigration statutes mandate that every country receives the same percentage limit, regardless of total population. Under these rules, populous nations like India and China are allocated the exact same number of permanent resident slots as small countries like Luxembourg and Iceland.

How the Indian EB-2 stockpile multiplied

Historical government immigration statistics reveal the rate at which the queue expanded. In 2016, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) cleared 47,601 EB-2 petitions for Indian workers. When factoring in dependent family members, that volume represented approximately 98,594 individuals. However, the NFAP report notes that only 4,407 Indian nationals received EB-2 permanent residency cards throughout that entire fiscal year. As a result, more than 90,000 primary applicants and dependents were pushed directly into the waitlist in 2016 alone, establishing a compounding trend that repeated through 2017 and 2018.