The Department ofState’s Visa Bulletin guru, CharlieOppenheim, hosts monthlymeetings with the American Immigration lawyers Association. Charlie Oppenheim is the Department of State’sChief of the Control and Reporting Division. He is the officer who isresponsible for producing the Visa Bulletin each month. This month’s Check In With Charlie featuredpredictions about EB2 and EB3 in most of the popular categories for readers ofthis Blog. Here are some highlights:
Philippine EB3 – Charlie again offeredhis most optimistic predictions for this category. He said that he expects “consistent forwardmovement” in the EB-3 Philippines category. While he does not expect the Philippines EB-3 to catch up to theWorldwide date, he expects Philippines EB-3 to “recover significantly”. This is consistent with internal MU Law analysis, which sees thiscategory progressing at least into 2013 by the Summer of 2017.
India EB2 and EB3 – Unfortunately thenews is not so rosy for Indian nationals. Neither EB2 nor EB3 is expected to progress to any significantdegree.
Worldwide EB-2 and EB-3 – EB-2 willremain current for the foreseeable future. It is our expectation that WorldwideEB-3 will continue to see a slight retrogression, consistent with the recentpast. The Worldwide EB-3 date may stallin the Spring/Summer of 2017, as the full allotment of numbers gets used. It will then move quickly again into the nextfiscal year.
China EB-2 and EB-3 – Thesecategories are the most difficult to predict. The DOS is trying to be conservative in theforward progression of these dates in an effort to stop the see-saw progressionand retrogression of dates that we have seen in the recent past.