Visa Bulletins No Progress for Feb. 07 & Our Predictions

Department of State released the latest Visa Bulletin for Feb. 2007 on Jan. 12. There is no any progress compared to last month.

For people born in mainland China filing employment-based immigration petitions, cut-off dates remain the same as last month for EB1 (Current), EB2 (April 22nd, 2005), and EB3 (August 1st, 2002).

The situation is the same for people born in India. EB1 is CURRENT; EB2 remains the same (January 8th, 2003), and EB3 stops too (May 8th 2001).

We suspect that the large number of approved cases in BEC have a big impact on the progress of Visa Bulletins. Department of Labor announced on December 11 that the BEC then had 142,418 cases pending, while in September, the pending case number was 176,000. In the past three months, about 33,600 cases have been removed, with a pace of 11,000/month. Then, the number of I-140 & I-485 petitions soared up in the past several months. This fact stalls visa bulletins in department of state. We predict that it is hard to see a big progress in visa bulletin, given the hope that BEC will keep its current pace of processing cases. However, we don’t expect to see a big retrogression of visa bulletin in the next a few months either. Things may change in the second half of 2007.

(01/13/07)