Visa Bulletin: Top 5 Insights from DOS

Maggio Kattar

Top 5 Visa Bulletin Updates from Charlie Oppenheim at the Department of State’s Visa Office

  1. The cut-off date for EB-3 China is expected to continue to advance which will increase the filing of EB-3 “downgrade” petitions with USCIS. The Visa Office expects a significant increase in the number of downgrade petitions given that the EB-3 China cut-off date for January 2015 is 13 months later than the EB-2 China cut-off date. This expected increase in filings will slow advancement of for EB-3 China and likely result in retrogression down the road depending on demand.
  2. Charlie Oppenheim expects there to be a cut-off date for EB-5 China – it’s just a matter of time. He should be able to provide an estimate of when the cut-off may occur by the beginning of February once he has obtained sufficient information from the USCIS’s EB-5 unit and the U.S. consular post in Guangzhou which processes the immigrant visa requests for EB-5 China applicants. An update should be posted in the March 2015 Visa Bulletin which will be released in early February 2015.
  3. President Obama’s recently announced Executive Action will not likely have any impact on priority dates. The Executive Action called on USCIS to create a plan to permit individuals whose priority dates are not yet current to pre-register their adjustment of status applications. Thus, this would only allow individuals to only submit filings to USCIS. It would not make them eligible for a visa number which therefore would not impact priority dates.
  4. EB-2 India has remained stagnant at February 15, 2005 since November 2014. Movement of EB-2 India typically does not occur until the summer when information about unused visa numbers for other EB categories is more easily available. However, the Visa Office is considering advancing EB-2 India earlier in the fiscal year than it has done in the past.
  5. The monthly Visa Bulletin provides an “Annual Report of Immigrant Visa Applicants in the Family-Sponsored and Employment-Based Preferences Registered at the National Visa Center” section, which provides the total number of immigrant visa applicants registered at the National Visa Center. Due to the constantly changing demand for immigrant visas, the Visa Office is not able to break this list down into the number of applicants with priority dates within the next 6 months, next year, and next 18 months. Although this breakdown seems like it would be beneficial for predicting when an individual’s priority date might become current, there just isn’t sufficient data from USCIS or the National Visa Center to determine this breakdown. In addition, because there are many variables that go into determining the monthly cut-offs, knowing the number of cases with certain priority dates within a particular category would likely be misleading. So, for not, the report will only provide a general list which can still be helpful.

The above information was provided by the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s Department of State Liaison Committee based on their conversation with Charles (Charlie) Oppenheim, Chief of the Visa Control and Reporting Division at the U.S. Department of State to obtain his analysis of current trends and future projections for immigrant visa categories (AILA InfoNet Doc. No. 1407401 (posted Dec. 16, 2014)).