What's a Visa Bulletin and Priority Date?So you want to come to America, but don’t know if you are eligible for a visa? Well, every month, the U.S. Department of State issues what’s known as the visa bulletin? The United States places a legal limit on the number of foreign nationals that are allowed to enter and stay permanently each year. To keep potential applicants abreast of the available visas, the visa bulletin is published and contains information regarding the amount of available immigrant visa numbers for potential applicants. For example, if you are interested in applying for an employment-based visa, you would at the chart provided on the website and scan the multiple categories until you find the area you are interested in applying. Once you find the area you are interested in, you will be aware of the amount of visas available for your particular area of interest. In order to control the rates of immigrants intending to permanently reside in the U.S., a system was created by the Immigration and Nationality Act. They set a limit per-country, and per category on the amount of visa offered. There are certain procedures that you must go through to determine eligibility. For example, the employment-based category we mentioned above uses the date that the case was initiated and submitted the first appropriate filing, (known as the priority date) to the USCIS or the DOL. There are also cutoff dates listed in the charts according to date, category, and country under the employment-based category. Therefore, in order to be eligible for a visa, your priority date must fall prior to the cutoff date, and is what’s known as “being current”. Generally, the demand for a visa number is higher then the amount of visa’s allocated for areas such as employment based or family based visas. If the demand should exceed the amount of visas allotted in certain areas, they will be oversubscribed. Certain high demand countries such as China, India, Mexico and the Philippines have a much longer wait time compared to the rest of the world. The cutoff dates in the visa bulletin are established by the DOS and based upon estimates of demand. This is just a brief outline explain the visa bulletin. If you are interested in learning more about the multitude of various visas that the United States offers, please visit their website here. If you have any questions or would like to schedule a one-on-one consultation with one of our attorneys, please do not hesitate to contact us. The Law Office of M. Ray Arvand, PC The Standard Oil Building 26 Broadway, 21st Floor New York, NY 10004 212-323-7435
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