When it comes to VB retrogression, I recommend reading this article: https://immigration.net/2023/10/19/the-visa-apocalypse-is-upon-us-welcome-to-the-future/ In short, there are way too many pending LCs and approved I-140s and not enough visas for everybody, so the wait times are going to keep getting longer and longer, we’re talking several years here. And the situation is even worse for the EB-3 Unskilled due to the 10,000/yr visas cap. There are no spillovers from other EBs or Family Based visas to this category, and none of the proposed immigration reform bills which raise EB and FB numbers contemplate the EB-3 Unskilled. So we’re stuck with 10,000 visas a year with an ever growing number of applicants. The end result will be ridiculously long wait times up to 10 years or longer possibly. The fact that the VB for this category has only moved forward 8 months in the last 2 years is a major red flag of this scenario building up. We’ve been stuck in 2020 PD’s since late 2022. Another indicator of how big the current backlog is, is the number of approved I-140s for the EB-3 Unskilled (“Other Workers”) awaiting a visa, this number was 18,177 as of september 2023: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/eb_i140_i360_i526_performancedata_fy2023_q4.pdf This number is for main applicants only, it doesn’t include the dependents of each petitioner. However, if we consider that the percentage of EB green cards issued to actual workers (AKA main applicants) in previous fiscal years accounted only for 45% of the total EB green cards issued, the other 55% being used by dependents (FY2022: 55%, FY2021: 55%, FY2020: 54%): https://www.cato.org/blog/only-45-percent-employment-based-green-cards-went-workers-2022 Then, in reality we’re looking at not 18,177 people awaiting for an EB-3 Unskilled green card as of September 2023 but 40,394 people (18,177 workers + 22,217 dependents). And since the max number of green cards that can be issued to this category each year is 10,000 then someone who’s had their I-140 approved in, say, October of 2023 has roughly 40,394 people awaiting for a green card in front of him, which translates to a visa wait time of slightly over 4 years from October 2023. Now keep in mind that this is merely an estimate and, although based on official USCIS numbers, there’s no way of knowing for sure how many dependents there are, among other things. The major take away here is that there’s a huge backlog going on which won’t clear anytime soon, but will only get worse with time.

I personally think USCIS will compete all 2020 PD before starting of new FY 2025

@sam young And they spend another 3 years to finish all the 2021 backlogs.