DECEMBER 2022 VISA BULLETIN: ANALYSIS AND PREDICTIONS

The Department of State has recently issued the December 2022 Visa Bulletin.  This blog post analyzes this month's Visa Bulletin.  The FY 2023 employment-based immigrant visa limit is 197,000, as compared with 281,507 in FY 2022.  These quotas are greater than the usual 140,000 employment-based limit because of spillovers of unused family-based immigrant visas in the prior fiscal year.  Slowdowns related to COVID caused the allocation of family-based visas to be short of the limit.

Visa Bulletin

Table A:  Final Action Dates -- Applications with these dates may be approved for their Green Card (Permanent Residency card) or Immigrant Visa appointment.

 

EB	Worldwide	CHINA	INDIA	PHILIPPINES
1st	C	C	C	C
2nd	01NOV22	08JUN19	08OCT11	01NOV22
3rd	C	01AUG18	15JUN12	C
Other workers	01JUN20	22JUN13	15JUN12	01JUN20

Table B: Dates of Filing

The USCIS is using the Table B Dates of Filing chart for I-485 employment-based filings. See: USCIS Visa Bulletin Dates

MU Law Analysis

As expected, there was a retrogression in India EB2 in the coming months due to high demand.  All categories of EB-2 retrogression, which reflects a smaller allocation of employment based immigrant numbers than in the past two years. 

On the other hand, India EB-3 progressed two months, which was unexpected good news. 

The WW and Philippine EB-3 remain current. We expect these categories to be current through much of the current fiscal year. 

EB-3 Other Workers, which is the category for occupations such as Nurse Aides, remains retrogressed but held steady to June 2020 for Philippines and ROW.  We do not expect further retrogression in these two categories.  We would not be surprised to see some progression in these categories throughout this fiscal year.

China EB-3 advanced by six weeks, but a note at the end of the Visa Bulletin said that EB-1 China and India should expect a retrogression in the in the coming months.