(a) I most certainly am not logiclife!!
(b) I was not giving false information. My original post is from February 2007, a nearly verbatim report of a conversation with the DOS official who sets the cutoff dates. If you read the
April 27 Murthy Bulletin, you know that after discussions with multiple sets of stakeholders in April 2007, DOS/USCIS revised its estimate of EB visa demand. My conversation happened before this revision.
DOS sets visa cutoff dates based on its expectation of how many applications will be ready (i.e. all done and will use up a EB visa) in a given month. However, since USCIS does not gather concrete data on EB applications (by PD, preference and country; see
2007 Ombudsmans Report, p. 35-36), DOS is essentially operating in the dark, making guesses. And boy, did they screw up!
This DOS official is not picking up his phone these days, so I don’t know his public position on why this screw up persisted for so long.
Here is what seems like a not unreasonable bit of speculation
(1) If you read the 2007 Ombudsmans Report you know that as of May 2007, it looked like about 40K EB visas would be wasted (see p. 33).
(2) We also know from the 2007 Ombudsmans Report that only about 37% of pending applications get through the name check in less than 3 months (see table on p. 38). Starting July 2007 they only have 3 months before the fiscal year ends on Sept 30, 2007.
So in order to use up those 40K EB visas with new applications, they would need a huge number of new applications to hit (at least 100K) so that enough of them get through to the end.
Nobody can be more pissed off than I am about the scale of this screw up. After a multi year wait at the BECs, an overlong wait at the I-140 stage despite premium processing, I spent 9 months with my PD just 2 weeks away from the EB-2 cutoff date. Recent events have shown that this last 9 month wait was *completely* unnecessary,