F4-All Countries: Visa Bulletin Predictions

What is happening with F4-All Countries?

To understand what is happening today with F4-All Countries, we need to take a step back and look at the last ~40 months.

Back in October 2018, the U.S. State Department realized that the ‘response rate’ to the ‘Welcome Letters’ of the National Visa Center (NVC) to Worldwide F4 applicants was very low. In other words, the NVC was sending documents to F4 applicants to get them to assemble and submit documentation to the NVC so that they could be come ‘case complete’ (or ‘documentarily qualified’) and be scheduled for an interview at a U.S. Consulate or Embassy outside the United States.

The problem was that few applicants were acting on these Welcome Letters, and the ‘Visa Office’ which is in charge of the Visa Bulletin became worried about ‘unused’ visa numbers at the end of the year (essentially not fully using the 65,000 visa numbers available under the F4 classification).

That is why they advanced the Final Action Date so much during FY2019, that it became the strongest advancement seen by F4 in the last 20 years.

But of course things eventually change: the Visa Office advanced the date too much, the response rate started picking up and suddenly the situation was no longer tenable. If all the Worldwide F4 documentarily qualified candidates were allowed to schedule Interviews, suddenly the number of F4 Green Cards issued would far exceed the 65,000 annual numerical limit.

That is why we had this massive retrogression in February 2020. It was totally self-inflicted by the Visa Office, which created this situation by not advancing the dates enough in prior years and then overcompensating. But it also set F4-All Countries (and F4-India) on a different trajectory than most other preference categories (such as F1, F2B, and F3): because it was dealing with a backlog of ‘interview-ready’ applicants, the Visa Office did not advance the Visa Bulletin Dates at a rapid pace during the Covid-19 pandemic, and F4 Final Action Dates might be more in line with the reality of the situation than other categories.

The following graph is a good summary of our anlysis. We compared the advancement of the last 3 years (in blue) with what the average advancement of the last 3 years would have been (in green). You can see of fast it started, the retrogression, and how F4 is slowly making its way back to its 20-year average:

How did the Final Action Date move in the past few months?

Predictions for F4 India, Mexico and the Philippines.

What can we say about ‘time to current’?

Time to current measures the time it takes an applicant to have their ‘priority date’ current when compared to the ‘final action date’ of the Visa Bulletin. Although not factually correct, time to current is often used by applicants as an estimation of how long it is going to take them to get their Green Card. We also make predictions about time to current for our Green Card dynamic timeline predictions: the process of scheduling a Green Card interview cannot be initiated before the applicant’s date is ‘current’, so it is one of the key ‘anchor’ of the process.

Let’s note that before the pandemic, ‘time to current’ was not heading in the right direction:

The incredibly sad news here is that family Green Cards that were not issued over the last two years are gone forever. They are not coming back for family (they were transferred to ’employment’ based Green Cards). As a result, time to current will go up:

I am going through adjustment of status, what else applies to me?

Applicants going through Adjustment of Status are often allowed to use the ‘Filing Date’ of the Visa Bulletin to determine when they are allowed to file Form I-485. Here is the latest:

When will Immigration Planner update its predictions?

We expect to update our predictions the day after the next Visa Bulletin is released. Our best guess as to when we will update these predictions is as follows: