Comment by int_19h

Many of them wish it were as short as 15 years! Here are the numbers.

US has a limit of 140k employment-based green cards issued per year, set by law.

Then per-country quotas (no more than 7% of the total number per country) are applied, meaning that the number of green cards issued to Indians per single year can be no more than ~15k/year for employment-based category. This is further broken down by meritocratically-worded categories such that the quota actually available to someone who doesn't fit the EB-1 "Einstein visa" category - i.e. someone with "merely" a master's, say - is ~8k/year.

And the backlog for this category for India is over 1 million. So, given an Indian applying today, and assuming everyone in front of them in the line will remain there, you get something on the order of 125 years wait. Of course, in practice this means that many people in the line will either abandon the wait or literally die of old age before their turn comes up, which moves it that much faster for those behind them. At current rates, this translates to the actual wait of ~50 years.