News Update - February 14, 2011Immigrant Visa Availability Yo-Yoing Up And Down - Does Anyone Have A Handle?The zenith was December 2010 when the Department of State ("Department") could not see much demand for family based visas and jumped the categories' availability dates tremendously. The question is whether we have reached a nadir in the visa bulletin for March 2011, or will the Department continue to retrogress the family based categories. In the latest disappointment, the family based preferences stayed at the levels to which they had descended in the February visa bulletin except for the F-2A category (lawful permanent residents petitioning for spouse & children under the age of 21) which retrogressed one whole year from January 1, 2008 to January 1, 2007.* For those who are stuck in the waiting lines, the backward movement of visa availability is tremendously frustrating. It almost appears as if the Department from April 2010-December 2010 attempted to ratchet visa availability dates as far forward as it could to see what demand was out there for immigrant visas from people who filed I-130 petitions long ago, and has now reversed direction at almost the same speed when it saw the demand coming in. The good news is that the Department believes that it is close to the bottom and that if its current and recent retrogressions have the intended impact to slow the demand for numbers, the cut off dates can begin to move forward slowly in the coming months. For all of its ups and downs during the past 12 months, the visa chart has only advanced haphazardly and some could even say slowly if one is looking at the entire year's movement from March 2010 to March 2011. For the entire year, only the F-2B category of lawful permanent residents applying for unmarried sons and daughters over the age of 21 advanced a year, from February 1, 2002 to April 15, 2003. Movement in the other categories as a whole was normal or substandard - six months for the F-1 category of U.S. citizens applying for unmarried sons and daughters over the age of 21 from June 22, 2004 to January 1, 2005; nine months for the F-2A category of lawful permanent residents applying for their spouse & unmarried children under the age of 21 from April 1, 2006 to January 1, 2007; a drop of almost five months for the F-3 category of U.S. citizens applying for their married sons and daughters from May 22, 2001 to January 1, 2001; and 15-day drop for the F-4 category of U.S. citizens applying for their siblings, from January 15, 2000 to January 1, 2000. What is one to make of all this when the people at the top also seem confused? Stay tuned for more surprises next month! * The dates being discussed in this article apply to the immigrant visa situations of the entire world except for natives of Mexico and the Philippines who have further retrogressed visa availability dates.
† The author is a 30+ year practitioner of immigration law based in New York City. He was awarded the Sidney A. Levine prize for best legal writing at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1977 and has written extensively on immigration over the past years for the ethnic newspapers, World Journal, Sing Tao, Pakistan Calling, Muhasha and OCS. He has testified as an expert on immigration in civil court proceedings and was recognized by the Taiwan government in 1985 for his work protecting human rights. His article, "The Bush Temporary Worker Proposal and Comparative Pending Legislation: an Analysis" was Interpreter Releases' cover display article at the American Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in 2004, and his victory in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in a case of first impression nationwide, Firstland International v. INS, successfully challenged INS' policy of over 40 years of revoking approved immigrant visa petitions under a nebulous standard of proof. Its value as precedent, however, was short-lived as it was specifically targeted by the Administration in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004. ‡ This article © 2011 Alan Lee, Esq.
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