Important employment-based I-485 statistics

Jackolantern

Registered Users (C)
USCIS has published statistics of pending employment-based I-485 cases, broken down by priority date year, month, preference category, and country (all countries except India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines are lumped into Rest of the World).


On the page linked below, on the right there is a link named "I-485 Employment Based Inventory Statistics". For some reason a direct link to the PDF wouldn't work, probably because of the spaces in the URL.
http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/us...nnel=ae853ad15c673210VgnVCM100000082ca60aRCRD
 
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india EB3 prediction

I've attached it here in case USCIS moves it.

Guys,
based on this My case which has priority date of Feb 2003.I have approximately 12,000 application in front of me. EB3 india gets only 2800 visas per year. That mean I will get visa in next 5 years unless they reassign the unused visas from ROW or other contry to India.

Jack/ginnu and other experts what is your opinion ?

Thanks
 
Your analysis is essentially correct. Looking at the raw numbers, you're looking at a 4-5 year wait ... unless there is spillover from ROW or EB2 or EB1, and/or many people in front of you get denied or abandon their EB application (some will marry a US citizen or get a GC via another family-based category).

However, as we have seen in the past, sometimes they jump forward the priority date by a large amount and start approving newer cases while leaving the older ones pending. So if that happens again, you could get approved while people with PDs in 2002 and before are still waiting.
 
They are doing spill over

Lately they are doing spill overs otherwise how would you think that lot of EB2 cases are getting approved...I think they started doing it again from 2008 after stopping it from 2004 and wasting lot of Visas. Earlier they used to do spill over for high demanding categories like EB3 horizontally... but they changed the rules in the middle of the game... USCIS is known very well for those kind of tactics.

Your analysis is essentially correct. Looking at the raw numbers, you're looking at a 4-5 year wait ... unless there is spillover from ROW or EB2 or EB1, and/or many people in front of you get denied or abandon their EB application (some will marry a US citizen or get a GC via another family-based category).

However, as we have seen in the past, sometimes they jump forward the priority date by a large amount and start approving newer cases while leaving the older ones pending. So if that happens again, you could get approved while people with PDs in 2002 and before are still waiting.
 
They are definitely doing spillovers, otherwise the 140,000 would be far underutilized. Look at how small the pending numbers are for EB2 ROW and EB1; the large set of unused numbers has to go somewhere. The question is how they are doing the spillovers ... is it horizontally or vertically or both? And if it's both, which direction first?
 
Jack,
What is "As Of" date for this data? Is this pretty recent? So if we have only 718 cases for EB-1, does that mean 2800-718 would go to EB-2? I guess I am not sure what is horizontally and what is vertically. This is not a good picture at all. My PD is September 2006, EB-2. That means there are at least 29752 cases ahead of me. This could take 10 yrs at this rate. However, people from early 2005 in EB-2 are getting approved. Why is that when there are 7000 pending before 2005? I was not hoping this to take 10 yrs. Frustrating
 
I can't believe that there are people with PD in 1997, 1998 and even 2000 still waiting to get GC. I would be frustrated if I have to wait that long!
My 2006 PD pales to insignificance when compared to those early PDs. Nobody should have to wait for that long to get GC!
 
Jack,
What is "As Of" date for this data? Is this pretty recent? So if we have only 718 cases for EB-1, does that mean 2800-718 would go to EB-2? I guess I am not sure what is horizontally and what is vertically. This is not a good picture at all. My PD is September 2006, EB-2. That means there are at least 29752 cases ahead of me. This could take 10 yrs at this rate. However, people from early 2005 in EB-2 are getting approved. Why is that when there are 7000 pending before 2005? I was not hoping this to take 10 yrs. Frustrating


The data is as of August 2009.
 
be fair

They are doing vertically(EB1->EB2->EB3). I heard that they changed it in 2008 to Vertical from Horizontal. I am surprised that Jackolantern was not aware of this...USCIS needs to revise it's practice..
 
Thanks for sharing this info.

If they are spilling over it is good news. However, I read some where, pl. do not ask me the source that they are not going to spill over. They did in the past. May be my information is an assumption from some one.

With the current available stats, 2010 fiscal year EB-3 from India may end some tiime Feb/Mar 2002.

It is really frustrating to wait for so long. I am also concerned about the fee for my kids college eduction next year.

Thanks

SRK
EB3
India
02/21/2002
 
The total pending 485 applications are about 235,000; and yearly DOS/INS gives out 140,000 visas/GCs. That means within 2 years all the waiting people should get GC.

Am I correct? Is there any hope for us?

If my assumption is wrong then the 2007/2008 PD people need to wait for 10 to 20 years, that is a night mare ....

Further I see some numbers with PD of 2008 and 2009, when the PD is not current, how this can happen?
 
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They are doing vertically(EB1->EB2->EB3). I heard that they changed it in 2008 to Vertical from Horizontal. I am surprised that Jackolantern was not aware of this...
I also read that somewhere, but I also read other conflicting reports of how they were doing it, so I don't know what the real truth is. It's not a matter of being aware, it's a matter of what to believe.
 
I also read that somewhere, but I also read other conflicting reports of how they were doing it, so I don't know what to trust. It's not a matter of being aware, it's a matter of what to believe.

Assignment of visa numbers is dictated by statute, not by USCIS or DOS policy. I don't know of any changes made last year.
 
The total pending 485 applications are about 235,000; and yearly DOS/INS gives out 140,000 visas/GCs. That means within 2 years all the waiting people should get GC.
Not for oversubscribed countries like India and China. The per-country limitations will make it take more than 10 years to give GCs to all the EB2 and EB3 applicants of those countries, unless they get significant spillover.

And the Ombudsman noted that the USCIS workers had a preference to work on newer cases instead of prioritizing the older cases, because the older cases tend to be more difficult to work on. There is no good reason why the total pending for EB1 with PD before 2005 should be greater than zero. EB1 applicants were not stuck in a lengthy labor certification process, and their category has been current for years, so it is clear that USCIS is just lazily letting them collect dust. Those applicants need to file WOM.
 
Assignment of visa numbers is dictated by statute, not by USCIS or DOS policy.
But USCIS and DOS interpret the statute. The statute doesn't explicitly point out a spillover procedure; it is not clear whether unused numbers from EB2 ROW should first go to EB2 India/China or EB3 ROW. It says that second preference gets unused numbers from first preference, third preference gets unused numbers from second preference, and a separate law (included in the AC21 bill, if I remember correctly) says that countries exceeding the per-country quota get unused numbers from the other countries.
 
Further I see some numbers with PD of 2008 and 2009, when the PD is not current, how this can happen?
Those in EB2 India/China and EB3 ROW with PD in 2008-2009 must have been accepted in error and will be denied later. There are only a few hundred of them.
 
Those in EB2 India/China and EB3 ROW with PD in 2008-2009 must have been accepted in error and will be denied later. There are only a few hundred of them.

We all were quiet. But USCIS opened can of worms by providing this table. They should also provide the rules of spill over that will help all of us.
 
Those in EB2 India/China and EB3 ROW with PD in 2008-2009 must have been accepted in error and will be denied later. There are only a few hundred of them.
If you look closely, you'll see that tables are divided not by country of chargability but by country of birth. So that Indian by birth that claimed by spouse country can end up in India table with 2008 or 2009 PD.
 
If you look closely, you'll see that tables are divided not by country of chargability but by country of birth. So that Indian by birth that claimed by spouse country can end up in India table with 2008 or 2009 PD.
Good point. But that doesn't explain EB3, because no country was ever current for PD's in 2008 or 2009.
 
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