Apparently USCIS requested tons of visa numbers in October, and the State Department decided to leave EB cutoff dates nearly unchanged for November.
The receipt of demand from Citizenship and Immigration Services Offices has far exceeded their earlier indications of cases eligible for immediate processing. As a result, it has been necessary to hold most of the Employment cut-off dates for November. At this time, it is not possible to provide any estimates regarding future cut-off date movements.
EB2 China will move forward by one week, while EB2 India stays steady at January 22, 2005.
EB3 China is the only category that will experience a rather sizable movement: from February 22 to June 1, 2002. Mexico EB3 will advance one month to June 1, 2002.
Certain religious workers and EB5 pilot programs are “unavailable,” awaiting legislative actions.
Below is a visa bulletin graph for employment-based third preference categories. Y-axis represents visa retrogression, in number of years.