WASHINGTON: Indian professionals seeking employment-based permanent residency in the United States could face a potential wait of 179 years in one major Green Card category, highlighting an unprecedented immigration backlog affecting highly skilled workers.
According to an assessment by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), the US employment-based immigration backlog exceeded 1.2 million applicants as of December 2025, with nearly one million from India.
Indian workers and their families consequently account for around 79% of the pending employment-based backlog.
The NFAP estimated that an Indian professional filing an employment-based petition in January 2026 or later could potentially wait 179 years under the EB-2 category, which covers many advanced-degree professionals.
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The projected wait is 38 years for EB-3 skilled workers and around five years for EB-1 priority workers.
Chinese applicants, by comparison, face an estimated 25-year EB-2 wait and around seven years under EB-3, according to the analysis.
Why US Green Card Backlog Is Growing
NFAP attributed the extraordinary delays primarily to two features of US immigration law.
Congress established an annual ceiling of roughly 140,000 employment-based Green Cards in 1990. That allocation includes sponsored workers as well as eligible dependent family members.
Country-specific limits further restrict how many employment-based immigrant visas can go to nationals of any single country annually, disproportionately affecting applicants from countries with large numbers of skilled workers seeking permanent residency.
The scale of the problem is illustrated by historical data.
In 2016, US authorities approved 47,601 EB-2 petitions involving Indian workers. Including dependants, the figure represented approximately 98,594 people, according to NFAP.
However, only 4,407 Indian nationals received EB-2 permanent residency that fiscal year, adding tens of thousands more people to an already expanding queue.
The findings underline the growing uncertainty facing Indian professionals who have built careers in the United States but remain caught in lengthy pathways towards permanent residency.
