The United States had about 1.4 million employment‐based immigration cases winding their way through its permanent residence process in 2021. The backlog of cases is nearly ten times the total number of green cards generally made available for employment‐based immigrants in most years. Skilled Indian immigrants will suffer the most from this backlog, with more than 200,000 likely to die before they could conceivably receive a green card (absent a change in the law). Another roughly 90,000 children of immigrants—mainly Indians—will “age out” of green card eligibility during their waits. Only about half of the pending Indian immigrants will likely receive green cards under current law.
Figure 1 shows the number of employment‐based immigrants by year since 2018 (the first year that the government reported the data) broken down by stage in the process. As of September 2021, there were nearly 320,000 petitions pending, about 875,000 approved petitions that were wait listed because of the annual green card limits, and about 245,000 who had filed an application for adjustment of status to receive a green card (i.e. legal permanent residence).
Figure 2 shows the backlog by country of birth for approved, wait listed petitions (i.e. those approved petitions without the ability to file for permanent residence because of the green card caps). As it shows, 82 percent of the approved petition employment‐based backlog was born in India. Another 12 percent was born in China, and the rest...
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