Each country can only get 8500 gc’s per year. My numbers are probably incorrect, but some countries have literally hundreds and thousands of people in the pipeline while some other countries only have perhaps thousand. The ones with long waiting periods will clearly benefit.
Edit. Via OpenAI
2025, the cap was about 26,323 per country because the total visa pool was larger.
Important details:
1. The cap applies to:
* Employment-based green cards
* Family preference green cards
2. The cap does NOT apply to:
* Immediate relatives of U.S. citizens
* spouses
* parents
* unmarried children under 21
Those categories are uncapped.
3. The cap is based on:
* Country of birth (“chargeability”)
* Not citizenship.
4. In practice, countries like:
* India
* China
* Mexico
* Philippines
hit the cap constantly, causing very large backlogs.
Simple example:
If 500,000 Indians qualify for employment-based green cards, but only ~25k–30k can be allocated annually under the cap system, the remainder wait in line. That is why Indian EB-2 and EB-3 wait times can stretch into decades.
