以下内容均发表于Immigration Voice,在四月份的排期公布之前:
02-20-2008, 02:54 PM
Googler
Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 193
I'd posted elsewhere about my Feb 13, 2008 conversation with the DOS official who sets cutoff dates:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Googler
And then there this piece of info from Ron Gotcher posted on Feb 14, 2008
http://immigration-information.com/f...ead.php?t=4285
"Last night, at a meeting of the American Immigration Lawyer's Assocation Southern California chapter, Charles Oppenheim spoke. Mr. Oppenheim is the officer within the Visa Office tasked with calculating visa bulletin cutoff dates each month. He offered the following thoughts as to cutoff date movement in the upcoming months:
In April, India and China EB2 will be set at 12/01/2003
EB3 for India and China will slow down for the rest of the fiscal year."
I am riveted by this because I spoke to Oppenheim just the day before this meeting (he referred to it). This was the conversation in which he told me that at present EB-2 India would only get numbers leftover from EB-1 India -- the problem is he doesn't know either exactly how many EB-2 India adjudicated applications there are in any specific PD range -- so every month he makes wild guesses, with the intent of using up visas. So I guess at least as of 2/14/08 he thought moving the date to 12/1/03 would more than mop up whatever was leftover from EB-1 India. Given the end of the FBI boondoggle (the effects of which have not been quantified by Oppenheim or USCIS) I'd predict that even a date in early 2002 would be good enough to mop up. Let us see if he changes his mind by mid March.
But his statement at the AILA meeting has been bothering me so I talked to him again today. Here is what he said -- that he is considering not only the EB-1 India excess, but the entire EB-1 worldwide excess being given to oversubscribed EB-2! I asked him about his earlier statement and he said that he had had a chance to look at the numbers and determine that unlike recent years EB-1 worldwide is not using numbers up at a rate that would max out EB-1 usage. BUT. He is waiting for USCIS to give him an estimate of the number of EB-2 India applications that would become eligible if he moves the cutoff dates up to 12/1/03, he will set the date ONLY after he gets that data and determines that there won't be too many within that cutoff date.
I also asked him to confirm that he was relying on his interpretation of Section 202(a)(5) of the INA in order to proceed with this spillover. This is his current interpretation of that section -- spillover from EB-1 to EB-2 IF there appears to be a worldwide excess in EB-1, when there is no worldwide excess in EB-1 then country specific spillover for example, from EB-1 India to EB-2 India only etc. In past years like FY06, EB-1 ROW was looking maxed out, so barely any spillover from EB-1 to oversubscribed EB-2.
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Last edited by Googler : 02-20-2008 at 04:49 PM.