Several Findings on Immigration Visa Usage in 2006
(1) The fiscal year 2006 limit for Employment-based preference immigrants calculated under INA 201 is 143,949. The total EB visa number actually issued in 2006 is 133,623. Therefore, about 10000 EB visa number was wasted.
(2) Total visa number issued for EB1 is about 28%. EB2 is about 17% and EB3 is 44%. Therefore, EB2 had not reached its limit which is 28.6% of the worldwide employment-based preference level, plus any numbers not required by first preference. The unused EB2 visa number was obviously spilled over to EB3 world rather to India and China because of country limit
(3) Section 202 prescribes that the per-country limit for preference immigrants is set at 7% of the total annual family-sponsored and employment-based preference limits, i.e., 25,896 for FY-2006. However, the country limit line is not that hard in 2006. The total immigration visa issued for India is 41254, which is more than 11% of the annual limit. However, the total immigration visa number for china was only 26452, just 556 over the country limit defined by INS. DOS just played a trick to against Chinese’s complaint.
Obviously, DOS didn’t have a fair policy for China. The situation for China EB2 may be significantly different if the unused visa numbers were spilled over to China rather than being wasted.
Data Source: http://travel.state.gov/pdf/FY06AnnualReportTableVPart1-3.pdf