A new data released by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) says that Indian nationals in line for an employment-based green card in the US numbers over 800,000 with a wait time of over eight decades. This wait means nearly 200,000 will die before they could even reach the front of the line and only 44 percent of the applicants will receive the green cards. This backlog is because of the insufficient numbers under the green card limits and not due to delays in processing applications.

Despite more employment-based green cards to become available in FY 2021, the new numbers will prove to be far fewer than the number required to meaningfully reduce the backlog. Majority of the backlog is concentrated in the EB-2 and EB-3 category for employer-sponsored immigrants with master’s or bachelor’s degrees, which increased to 127,609, while the category for unskilled employer-sponsored immigrants also increased to nearly 20,000 this year. The EB-4 category for special immigrants increased nearly 28,000 but EB-1 and EB-5 investor backlogs declined slights.

The report mentioned that nearly 68 percent of the employment-based backlog was from India (EB-2 and EB-3 category backlog reached to 741,209) in April 2020 from the total 1.2 million applicants – the highest ever. This gap is due to the country caps that limit nationals of any single birthplace to not more than seven percent of the green cards in a year, unless the green cards would go unused. China accounted for 14 percent, while 18 percent was from the rest of the world.