Trends in Priority Date Chart
Posted May 24, 2000

On March 30, 2000, representatives of AILA met with officials of the U.S. Department of State's Visa Office (VO). Many issues were discussed, but the item that is likely to be of the greatest interest to our readers was the update from Charles Oppenheim, Chief of the Immigrant Visa Control and Reporting Division, on movement of visa cut-off dates.

Mr. Oppenheim pointed out that the VO tries to allocate as many visa "numbers" as possible each year, to minimize the "loss" of visa numbers. (It is an annual quota; those not used in a given fiscal year are lost forever as they cannot be carried over to future years.) Over the past two years, INS has been extremely slow in processing adjustment of status (I-485) applications, so VO was able to advance the cut-off dates quickly. As readers of the MurthyBulletin probably remember, most employment-based categories were current from August 1999 up through March 2000. The result was that large numbers of people applied, and VO cautioned that as INS began to process more of the backlogged I-485 cases, there would be a retrogression of the dates.

The employment-based dates did retrogress for India and China in April 2000, and now VO predicts that during the summer of 2000 there may not be much forward movement. There is a possibility of another retrogression, depending upon how much progress INS makes with its I-485 caseload. Mr. Oppenheim does not expect retrogression at present in the family-based categories, but such an action may be necessary later in the fiscal year.