The Department of State has just issued the October 2016 Visa Bulletin.  This is the first Visa Bulletin of Fiscal Year 2017. As the fiscal year begins we are able to make some educated guesses at where the Visa Bulletin will be in the future.

October 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
12FEB12
15JAN07
 C
C
3rd
01JUN16
 22JAN13
15MAR05
 01JUN16
01DEC10

MU Law Analysis


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

China:   As expected, these dates moved forward 2+ years.  Unusually, the China EB-3 has a more favorable date than EB-2, although this phenomenon has happened often for China as a result of many Chinese EB-3 workers “upgrading” their applications to EB-2.

India:  EB-2 India had a notable progression from last month.  It will be interesting to see how this date moves forward.  In the Summer of 2007 hundreds of thousands of I-485 Applications were filed a result of VisaGate.  As a result of that bulk of filings, this number could slow in the forthcoming months.
EB-3 had its usual one month forward movement.  

Mexico: Mirrors All Other in all aspects.

Philippines: EB-3 moved ahead by another six months.  The Phillippine EB-3 number essentially cleaned out all 2010 EB-3 visas in just two months.  This is what we have expected.  (Our note from May 2016: “MU Law believes that Philippines EB-3 will continue to steadily move forward in the coming months. We expect it to move into 2009 in the by early summer, and may reach 2010 by the end of this fiscal year.”).  

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.