Highlights:
For years, immigration lawyers told Indian professionals a comforting certainty: if you clear the exceptionally high bar for EB-1, the category built for individuals with extraordinary ability, elite researchers and senior multinational managers, you skip the decades-long queue trapping everyone else. That foundational promise is now cracking under administrative strain.
The State Department's September 2026 Visa Bulletin, the final publication of fiscal year 2026, cautions that high demand from India-born applicants could exhaust the country's specific EB-1 allocation before September 30. If that occurs, the category simply shuts down for the rest of the fiscal year. Final approvals stop completely, regardless of how qualified an applicant is, until fresh numbers arrive on October 1.
A systemic backlog crisis
This potential shutdown compounds a crisis documented by the National Foundation for American Policy. Its analysis puts the total US employment-based backlog across EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3 at roughly 1.26 million people as of December 2025, up 20.6 per cent from about 1.05 million in April 2020. Indian nationals account for an estimated 996,599 of those pending cases, representing nearly 80 per cent of the entire queue.
This happens even though EB-2 has already been marked "unavailable" for India for months, and EB-3 India is stuck processing petitions filed before January 2014. The mechanics driving this frustration are structural rather than accidental. Congress capped total employment-based green cards at 140,000 annually back in 1990, a figure that must stretch across principal applicants alongside their spouses and children and layered on a strict 7 per cent per-country limit. That formula treats India, with by far the largest pool of employer-sponsored applicants globally, exactly the same as nations sending a tiny fraction of petitions each year.
Bleak projections and legislative stagnation
The mathematical reality of this formula yields staggering wait times. NFAP calculates that an Indian professional filing today could face a projected wait of 179 years in EB-2 and 38 years in EB-3. Even EB-1, long considered the reliable fast lane, now carries an estimated four-to-five-year wait, and this month it faces a complete freeze.
Bipartisan bills aiming to phase out the per-country cap, most recently reintroduced in Congress as the EAGLE Act and the IVES Act, have stalled across successive legislative sessions without passing. Until Congress enacts structural reform, immigration attorneys advise eligible applicants to file promptly and keep documentation meticulously current, since a vital category can shift to "unavailable" with almost no warning.
