New official numbers show that the U.S. government failed to issue a quarter of the available employment‐based green cards for legal immigrants in fiscal year 2021. Despite about 1.4 million immigrants waiting for an employment‐based green card in 2021, the government only used 195,507 of the 262,288 available green card numbers, wasting 66,781 green cards.
The official, final number of wasted green cards is somewhat more than the 62,000 number government officials told the press at the end of FY 2021. Table 1 shows the cap for each of the five employment‐based categories and the number of green cards wasted in each category. With 84 percent unused, the EB‑5 investor category had the most green card waste in FY 2021 as a percentage of available green cards. In absolute terms, the greatest waste came from the EB‑3 category for (mostly) bachelor’s degree holders, which wasted 19,774 green cards last fiscal year.
The numbers in the wasted column of Table 1 overlook an important detail of how the employment‐based immigration caps are supposed to work. If any EB‑4 and EB‑5 numbers are going to go unused, those numbers are supposed to be used by EB‑1, and if EB‑1 doesn’t use all of them, they can be used by EB‑2, and then any unused for EB‑2 can be used by EB‑3. This means that EB‑2 could have used as many as 107,000 green cards, and EB‑3 as many as 122,000 (assuming all the other categories failed to use the same amount).
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