Visa Caps and the Visa Bulletin

Congress caps most green card categories each year: at least 226,000 in family preference categories, about 140,000 in employment categories, and 55,000 diversity visas, while immediate relatives of citizens are unlimited. On top of those totals, no single country may receive more than 7 percent of the capped visas in a year. When demand exceeds the supply, applicants wait in line based on their priority date, usually the date their petition or labor certification was filed.

Each month the State Department publishes the Visa Bulletin, which lists, for each category and for heavily oversubscribed countries such as India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines, the priority dates that can move forward. Applicants watch two charts, one for when a green card can be approved and one for when they can file. Waits range from none in some categories to more than a decade for some family categories from Mexico and the Philippines and for many Indian-born workers in EB-2 and EB-3.

Unused visas in one year sometimes roll over to the next, but many family and employment visas have gone unused because of processing delays, especially during the pandemic. Proposals in Congress would lift the per-country caps, recapture unused visas, or exempt family members from the limits, while others would reduce overall immigration. The backlog means many workers spend years on temporary visas, tied to one employer, while they wait.