Again. This is an excerpt from shusterman.com with regard to EB retrogression. Just FYI.
In the absence of congressional action, the retrogression will get worse, probably a lot worse, before it gets better. Why?
In May 2005, President Bush, recognizing the tremendous shortage of nurses and therapists, signed a bill which "recaptured" 50,000 immigrant visas for Schedule A professionals, primarily registered nurses, physical therapists and their family members. By the end of this month, all 50,000 visas will be used up. What will happen to RNs and PTs who are still in line for green cards and those who will apply for permanent residence in the future? They will be added to the EB-3 backlog which will result in increased waiting times, perhaps to five years or more.
The total number of persons who are permitted to obtain permanent residence each year in the employment-based categories is only 140,000. Adding another 30,000 - 50,000 to the current backlogs will certainly make the retrogression more severe.
Even more problematic are the 300,000+ applications for labor certification currently pending in the Labor Department's (DOL's) Backlog Elimination Centers. DOL has pledged to take action on each of these applications within the next 18 months. Even if only 200,000 of these applications are ultimately approved, if 50% of the applicants have a spouse and one child, the number of green cards needed to accommodate them would total 300,000. This is more than double the annual cap on EB green cards. Therefore, this has the potential to make the EB-2 and EB-3 numbers regress another two years.
Finally, present laws contain hard per-country caps. This means that countries like India and China which have populations of over one billion persons each have exactly the same quotas as Monaco and Mauritius, two tiny countries which supply the U.S. with virtually no immigrants. Given that most H-1B professionals are born in India and China, the per-country quotas will exaggerate the retrogression for persons born in these countries.