The Department of State has just issued the November 2016 Visa Bulletin.  This is the second Visa Bulletin of Fiscal Year 2017.  This blog post analyzes this month’s Visa Bulletin.

November 2016 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
12JUL12
01NOV07
 C
C
3rd
01JUL16
 22APR13
08MAR05
 01JUL16
01APR11

MU Law Analysis


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

China:   The China EB-2 date moved up 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 over ten months.  EB-3 actually retrogressed one week.  

Mexico: Mirrors All Other in all aspects.

Philippines: EB-3 moved ahead by another three months.  The Philippine EB-3 number essentially cleaned out all 2010 EB-3 visas in just two months and is now a trid of the way through 2011.  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.”).  

We expect more of the same fast progression in FY2017 for Philippine EB-3.  We expect that the Philippine EB-3 number will progress at least three years in FY2017.