December 2012 Visa Bulletin: Predictions for Fiscal Year 2013
On November 7th, U.S. Department of State (DOS) issued the December 2012 Visa Bulletin. Cutoff dates for Employment-Based second preference (EB-2) India remains at September 1, 2004 and for Employment-Based third preference (EB-3) India moved one week to November 1, 2002.
In a recently meeting, Mr. Charles Oppenheim, the Chief of the DOS Immigrant Visa Control and Reporting Division stated that due to high demand, the DOS does not expect cutoff dates for EB-2 India to move anytime soon. For the EB-3 India, the DOS expects a movement of up to two weeks each month.
As previously stated, DOS continues to see large number of EB-3 to EB-2 upgrades and that is putting extra pressure on EB-2 India priority dates. Additionally, EB-5 (Investor Visa) too is seeing huge demand from Chinese investors thereby necessitating EB-5 China cutoff date sometime soon. We would like to remind our readers that unused EB-5 numbers “fall-up” to EB-1, unused EB-1 numbers “fall-down” to EB-2, and the unused EB-2 numbers “fall-down” to EB-3.
We will continue to monitor developments on this front and will provide our readers with additional information once we receive it from the DOS.