I appreciate you digging into this subject and I will try to respond in good faith as I see it.

I think we are reading 'wait time' differently.

Neither I nor these articles are saying that the average wait time is 150 years.

There is still some lucky Indian out there who applied for his green card in say 2013 who is going to get it soon.

The 150-year wait time applies to the poor Indian soul who applied for one in say 2020, after graduating even let's say top of his class with an MS from MIT in 2019 and is now working on an H1B on cutting-edge AI systems at Tesla.

This latter sucker will never receive a green card in his lifetime because he will die long before he ever gets to the front of the 'Indian line'. As you correctly point out, the '150-year wait time' to him is meaningless and rhetorical and really just means it is not possible.

And the wait time for the guy graduating in 2024 may be 200 years, and that for the guy graduating in 2027 may be 250 years, and so on. The math just gets more arbitrarily untenable.

It is like if the Google search engine, by decree from CEO Sundar Pichai, decided it will only process 1000 search requests per hour from Australia. Well, that would pretty much make Google search unusable for Australia. Yes, by your reasoning, some Australian search requests will always be processed, but the vast and ever-increasing majority will starve.

And when the Australians complain that Google is being unfair to them, the Googlers and say the Norwegians and the Kiwis will gang up against the Australians and self-righteously scream: "get in line like the rest of us!", not really knowing, or knowing but preferring to ignore, that the Australian line is set up to starve by design.

By the way, to make this slightly more interesting, the 10,000 applications approved per year you refer to apply to all family members of the individual requesting the green card. Which means if there are 1,000,000 professionals in the queue, and each professional in the queue has 3 other members in their household, say a spouse and 2 kids, then only 2,500 professionals may be processed for that year, and not the banner headline of 10,000, making the unprocessed queue even longer and longer and longer every year.

And if that is not enough, the agency in charge of processing these applications claims it is 'understaffed', and so if it has 10,000 applications it is approved to process in a given year, it will only process 5,000 applications and precious approvals for the other 5,000 applications will be 'wasted' and 'lost forever' because there is no legal provision to recover them.

Note that advocacy groups have been pushing for legislation to fix this since at least 2011. But there are many powerful interests who benefit greatly from a large group of servile tech workers. And those interests have access to politicians who can hold up such inconvenient legislation indefinitely in exchange for easier and generous fundraising, making for a very profitable quid pro quo.

To the people stuck in this queue, watching this system play out raises feelings similar to that of the little kid on the playground where two larger bullies have grabbed a ball he wanted to play with and are now tossing it to each other just to taunt that little kid. And that kid has pretty much no recourse.