The news gets only worse :(

We had some clarity and understanding of how badly broken the US legal immigration system is. We finally got some information on what the impact of the July 2007 Visa-gate fiasco was, and how badly we need reform starting with recapturing the green cards that were lost due to bureaucratic delays. There is no better source for this information than Charles Oppenheim, Chief of Immigrant Visa Control and Reporting Division at the Dept of State. Mr. Oppenheim was a guest speaker at a May 20, 2009 American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) meeting.
(thanks to Murthy Law firm for the posting)

Some of the highlights were as follows

• Approximately 200,000 applications are pending with the USCIS
• Of these about 60,000 are EB2 India and EB3 India each
  
• China EB2 will experience same retrogression as India i.e. the cutoff date will be set to 1st Jan, 2000 (yes that was about 9 years ago)
• There has been a high usage of EB1 category preventing trickle down of these visas into EB2
• 3200 EB2 India visas were issued this year and this is above the limit for the year.
  

So consider this 140,000 total visas available each year 28.6% of these go to EB1, EB2 and EB3 each and rest to other categories i.e. lets say EB2 gets 40,040 visas now no single country can get more than 7% of the visas so say EB2 India gets 2,800 green cards each year, if there is some spillover from EB1 this number can go up, I guess thats why they issued 3,200 this year. So here is the kicker if you are one of the 60,000 folks in the EB2 India category you can get your green card sometime in the next 60,000 / 2,800 = ~20 years. At this rate my three year old kid who is a US citizen can become an adult and sponsor me and my spouse :)

This New York Times editorial hits the mark on the issue, the only way ahead is to support a visa recapture bill to recapture 500,000 visas that were not issued in the past 10 years due to bureaucratic delays. By the way this is nothing new, Bill Clinton signed a visa recapture bill in 2000 that ended in 2005 and hence this new logjam. The only thing I can say is contact your Congresswo/man and Senators, let them know your issues and press for Immigration Reform. There is a bill currently in the Senate Judiciary Committee S. 1085 includes provisions for Visa Recapture. Contact your representative and ask them to support this bill, the sooner you get your green card the sooner you can stop visiting our site ac21portability.com

cheers!!