New Delhi, May 19: The long and agonising wait for green cards for people from India, China, Mexico and the Philippines is mainly due to the country-based quota system in its allocation which can be changed only by the US Congress, a senior official has said.

A Green Card, known officially as a Permanent Resident Card, is a document issued to immigrants to the US as evidence that the bearer has been granted the privilege of residing permanently. The per-country caps are numerical limits on the issuance of green cards to individuals from certain countries.

Immigration law provides for approximately 140,000 employment-based green cards to be issued each year.

However, only seven per cent of those green cards can go to individuals from a single country annually.

Douglas Rand, the Senior Advisor to the director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), said the annual limit established by Congress on family-sponsored preference green cards is 2,26,000 for the whole world while the annual limit on employment-based green cards is 1,40,000.

On top of that, the per-country limit is set at seven per cent of the total annual family-sponsored and employment-based preference limits, he told Indian Americans during a virtual town hall organised by the State Department on visa and consular issues.

"That means 25,620. That is why individuals from India, China, Mexico and the Philippines typically face such long wait times than people from other countries," Rand said in response to a question.

"There is demand for so many more than 25,620 green cards for both family and employment-based every year. Unfortunately, only Congress can change these annual limits. So our job is to do everything we can within these constraints to ensure that when those Green Card numbers are available, we make sure that they're utilised each and every year," Rand said.

For hundreds of thousands of Indian professionals, the wait for Green Card has currently been more than a decade and many a time the visa wait time goes back by years.-Agencies