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

January 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 
15OCT12
15APR08
C
C
3rd
01AUG16 
08SEP13
15MAR05 
01AUG16 
22JUL11
MU Law Analysis

All Other:  The EB-2 has been current for many years.  The EB-3 progression continues.  For Consular processing cases an August 2016 date is effectively Current.

China:   The China EB-2 date moved up about one month. The China EB-3 date progressed three months.  The China EB-3 continues to have a more favorable date than EB-2, as a result of many Chinese EB-3 workers “upgrading” their applications to EB-2.

India:  EB-2 India had another impressive progression from last month, moving forward two months.  EB-3 stayed the same unfortunately.  

Mexico: Mirrors All Other in all aspects.

Philippines: EB-3 moved ahead by another seven weeks.  The Philippine EB-3 number essentially cleaned out all 2010 EB-3 visas and half of the 2011 EB-2 visas in just four months.  This is what we have 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.”).