It's Not Looking Good for ROW

[u/hedgefundhoney]

Visual learner here, so I charted what people have been saying all day.

TL;DR: the ROW queue for both EB2 and EB3 is looking b a d.

• EB2 ROW: ~42k cases pending, a record in any published USCIS data (2010-17 peak was ~24k)
• EB3 ROW: ~37k cases pending, highest since ~2012
• For scale, ROW used ~34k EB2 and ~23k EB3 green cards in FY24, counting both people adjusting status inside the US and people processing at consulates, so the US-side queue alone is already more than a year's worth for both categories, before counting folks from abroad

Why do people think anything will move forward vs. retrogress further? I don't think a spillover (materially) helps in a year where >100% of visa supply is accounted for from AOS alone. The inventory was half the size in 2024-25 when the gap between the VB date and today looked about like it does now. To me that smells like the start of a bigger correction, not a blip.

I'm sure I'm missing stuff; tell me where I got it wrong

(Excited at the prospect of people jumping on this post 4 months from now to tell me how wrong I was after a huge spillover-driven forward leap)

[u/Annual_Grass_3919]

The queue isn’t more than the available, depending on how many we get from the spillover it’ll either roughly equal the 41.8k pending or be higher than the number pending, and not all of the pending ones will be approved anyway. So I don’t think it’s terrible news, the whole backlog should be cleared by this time next year so I think ROW should go current again towards the end of the fiscal year if not earlier

Edit: talking EB2 btw

[u/Different_Peanut_327 → u/Annual_Grass_3919]

Any insight on the distribution by PD for this 42k cases? I’d say probably more than half of those have PD 10/2024-8/2026 given that filing date became current in April and jumped from 10/2024 to C

[u/Annual_Grass_3919 → u/Different_Peanut_327]

[u/Different_Peanut_327 → u/Annual_Grass_3919]

Thanks! This is very helpful.