How many Indian nationals adjusted to lawful permanent resident status through employment-based categories each decade since 1990?

1. What the user is asking, and why official totals matter

The question seeks counts by decade of Indian nationals who adjusted to LPR status via employment‑based categories—a request for historical aggregation that requires joining year‑by‑year adjustment‑of‑status and arrival data across Fiscal Years and filtering by country of birth and EB class; those granular tables exist in DHS/Yearbook data but are not summarized in the provided excerpts, so the exact decade totals cannot be quoted from these sources alone ^{[1] [5]}.

2. What the supplied sources actually provide about employment‑based immigrants and Indians

Congressional Research Service reporting explains the EB preference system and notes that roughly 140,000 employment‑based green cards and dependents are available annually under current law and that certain nationalities—including India—account for a disproportionate share of EB admissions in recent years ^{[6] [2]}. Migration Policy Center data highlights that about a quarter to nearly a third of new LPRs in recent years received their status through employment pathways, a share that rose from 14 percent (FY2019) to about 27 percent by FY2022 ^[3]. DHS/OHSS publishes the detailed Yearbook tables that break adjustments down by country and class, which is where decade totals must be calculated ^{[1] [5]}.

3. Why credible, decade‑level counts require the DHS Yearbook/OHSS tables

The OHSS Yearbook and associated adjustment tables explicitly provide LPR counts by year, by type of admission (including employment‑based), and by country of birth—precisely the elements needed to sum Indian EB adjustments across any multi‑year span ^{[1] [5]}. The CRS and Migration Policy products summarize trends and shares but do not list decade aggregates for India; they instead warn that visa availability, backlogs, and per‑country limits shape who actually adjusts and when ^{[2] [3]}.

4. Observable trend signals in the reporting (but not a substitute for counts)

The reporting signals that Indian nationals increasingly dominated EB queues and backlogs—CRS and TRAC analyses document very long EB2/EB3 waits driven by a large volume of Indian petitions, and CRS notes India was among countries accounting for nearly half of EB immigrants by FY2023 ^{[2] [7] [6]}. Those trend signals imply decade‑by‑decade increases in Indian EB adjustments, especially post‑2000 and post‑2010, but the sources stop short of providing explicit decade totals that can be cited ^{[7] [6]}.

5. Transparent next steps to obtain precise decade totals

To produce the exact numbers requested, one must extract the “Adjustments to LPR” tables by country and class from the DHS Yearbook/OHSS for each fiscal year from 1990–1999, 2000–2009, 2010–2019, and 2020–2029 (as data allow), sum Indian nationals’ counts in employment‑based classes for each decade, and note whether counts include derivatives (spouses/children). The OHSS Yearbook is explicitly cited as containing those tables and is the authoritative dataset to query ^{[1] [5]}.

6. Caveats, competing narratives and potential agendas

Advocates, analysts, and immigration‑industry sources emphasize backlogs and long waits for Indian EB beneficiaries to press for legislative fixes; private immigration firms sometimes amplify “fastest routes” messaging that serves commercial interests ^{[7] [8]}. CRS and academic studies frame the issue as a structural mismatch between statutory per‑country caps and labor market demand, which is why policy proposals focus on quota reform rather than technical fixes ^{[2] [7]}.