• November 2015 visa bulletin.
• Final action dates and family-based preference categories.
• A new chart called Final Action Dates.
• EB visa updates for China, India, Mexico, Philippines.

Raw Transcript:

Jacob: Hello everybody and welcome to Ask an Immigration Lawyer Podcast, you ask, we answer, simple. Your host, Jacob Sapochnick here.

Today, beginning of November, I want to talk about the November 2015 visa bulletin. Department of State reports November 2015 visa numbers. We’ve seen that bulletin, it’s out. First of all, I always tell people check the bulletin every month to see if your date are current. If your dates are current, if you’re working with an immigration attorney, you need to let your attorney know so action can be taken because sooner is better than later.

Quick update. Final action dates and family-based preference categories. The family-based categories continue to progress kind of slowly. Moving, I would say, one month in most cases. Category F1 for the Philippines jumped by a year from June 1, 2001 in October, to June 1, 2002 in this particular bulletin.

The advancement is kind of interesting because F1 Philippines retrogress at the end of the fiscal year. They move from February 1, 2005 in May 2015, to dates in 2000 from June through September 2015. The October and November movements kind of show somehow a bump, a bounce back from that retrogression that we’ve seen before.

Officials in the State Department predict that this category is likely to continue to advance for the next month or so. Obviously it depends on demand numbers and things like that.

Now, as far as the final action dates, as you know the new visa bulletin since October has different categories. One category is called and it’s a new chart called Final Action Dates, an employment-based preference categories.

So if you want to talk about that EB-5 regional center and also religious workers, they were originally listed as unavailable in October and then Congress considered an extension of these programs. But in September 30th 2015, both of these programs were, again, reauthorized until December 11, 2015. This resulted in those cut-off dates, cut-off like right away becoming current.

I think the only exception was China in EB-5 because, as you know, Chinese EB-5’s were exceeding. And so for October … Yeah, that kind of looks like China was the only one.

China EB-5 advanced to November 22nd 2013. This is in this current bulletin. Now China EB-2 category is going to advance one month in November from January 1st, 2012 to February 1, 2012. China EB-3 will advance, I would say, two-and-a-half months in November from October 15, 2011 to January 1, 2012.

As far as India – a lot of inquiries from India – India EB-2 will move forward about, I think, 14, 15 months from May 1, 2005 in October to August 1, 2006 in the November bulletin. This seems to be a kind of a big jump but it’s actually because of this correction that they made based on the retrogression of this category – it was last fiscal year – as the number of available visa numbers kind of, in a way, essentially went down.

The final action day for EB-2 India reached October 1, 2008 in August 2015. But then retrogressed to January 1, 2006 in September. Again, State Department assumes that this category will likely to continue to progress and move forward.

Let’s see. Let’s talk about Mexico. Final action dates for Mexico categories are going to remain the same in November, with all categories current except from the EB-3 and EB-3 other workers which are almost current at August 15, 2015 which is not too bad.

Philippines EB-3 and other workers, they’re going to advance five-and-a-half months in November, this bulletin, to June 15, 2007 and all other Philippine EB-5 categories remain current, which is pretty cool.

All in all, it looks like we’ve got some good movements in the visa bulletin. All employment base filing dates listed in the revise October 2005 visa bulletin are the same for November. Not much changes here. We’ll continue to update you as we get more information for December visa bulletin. But, again, I encourage everybody to check their dates and let’s hope for some better movements in the next few months.

Thanks for listening. You ask, we answer, simple.