Well yes, the reason for his video was to point out that she was mostly wrong and/or misinterpreting the CEAC data. But he did have a guess as to why her AOS client was not able to be scheduled for an interview. He said it could be due to local caps being met or that no more visas were being distributed through IVAMS. Surely it couldn't be the latter? That would be outrageous.
To address the outrageous or impossible comment. I should probably have made things more clear.
We know that AOS cases rely on the assignment of a visa from the IVAMS system, and that only happens during or after the IO has approved the case (i.e. interview or the point at which the interview is waived).
We have long believed that CP cases are assigned a visa when the interview notice is sent - which is weeks before the interview. We know there is a "recycling process" to reclaim and reallocate visas at the end of each month from the embassies where the visas are left unused (due to refusals, 221g or no shows).
So - with what we believed to be the case it is possible that the cap could be enforced by KCC based on scheduled interviews, and that would remove the availability of visas from IVAMS.
HOWEVER. In the world I describe, it should have been possible to identify that they were overscheduling in DV2022, and therefore they should have avoided exceeding the 55k cap. We knew they were doing it before the end of September, and yet they kept scheduling interviews and in the end they busted the cap by about 1000 issuances (including AOS).
In DV2023, they have scheduled too many new cases. If they clear/issue 221g cases in August (which I believe they will), they will certainly create a re-run of DV2022 - they will be faced with exceeding the cap again, or cancelling interviews (in September). It is that certain - either exceed the cap or cancel interviews. No other possibility.
So - this challenges what we thought we knew - i.e. that they exercise careful control of the visa numbers and do that by "reserving" visas for scheduled CP cases. But that doesn't explain how they screwed up in DV2022 (which I assumed to be last minute chaos), or why they are screwing up again in DV2023 (when they have much more time to control things better). So - that makes us question the whole theory of CP getting reserved visas. Maybe something changed. Maybe it never existed. Maybe it does exist but the staff can't count.
Why is all this important for AOS - because the unavailable visas in IVAMS thing only makes sense for a country cap, a region cap, or a global cap, but regional/global caps would rely on the reserved visa theory. If visas are NOT reserved, then there is no justification to deny an AOS case at this point based on exhausted visas (apart from Algeria).
