The Department of State has just issued the May 2017 Visa Bulletin.  This is the eight Visa Bulletin of Fiscal Year 2017.  This blog post analyzes this month’s Visa Bulletin.

May 2017 Visa Bulletin

Final Action Dates

Applications with these dates may be approved for their Green Card (Permanent Residency card).

Employ-
ment
based
All Charge-
ability 
Areas Except
Those Listed
CHINA-
mainland 
born
INDIA
MEXICO  
PHILIPPINES  
1st
C
C
C
C
C
2nd
C 
08FEB13
22JUN08
C
C
3rd
15MAR17 
01OCT14
25MAR05 
15MAR17 
01JAN13
MU Law Analysis

All Other:  The EB-2 has been current for many years.  The EB-3 progression continues, moving an additional one month.  Consular processed EB-3 are effectively current.

China:   The China EB-2 date again moved up, but only a few weeks. The China EB-3 again date progressed about six weeks.  This was a smaller progression than the last few Visa Bulletins.  The China EB-3 continues to have a more favorable date than EB-2, as a result of many historical Chinese EB-3 workers “upgrading” their applications to EB-2.

India:  EB-2 India moved up about one day, which is the first one day progression that I can recall.  EB-3 India stayed the same, unfortunately.  

Mexico: Mirrors All Other in all aspects.

Philippines: EB-3 moved ahead by nearly four more months.  The Philippine EB-3 number essentially cleaned out all of the 2010, 2011, and 2012 EB-3 visas in about 6 months.  This is even more positive than we expected.  (Our note from September 2016: “This is consistent with internal MU Law analysis which sees this category progressing into 2013 by the Summer of 2017.”).