Department of State released the latest Visa Bulletin for April 2007 on March 12. There is no any progress compared to last month. This is the third month without any progress since January 2007.
For people born in mainland China filing employment-based immigration petitions, cut-off dates remain the same as last month for EB1 (Current), EB2 (April 22nd, 2005), and EB3 (August 1st, 2002).
The situation is the same for people born in India. EB1 is CURRENT; EB2 remains the same (January 8th, 2003), and EB3 stops too (May 8th 2001).
We suspect that the large number of approved cases in BEC have a big impact on the progress of Visa Bulletins, and will have more impact in the coming year. Department of Labor promised to eliminate all backlog cases by 9/30/07. With labor certification cases released from BEC, the number of I-140 & I-485 petitions will keep soaring in the near future. This fact will stall visa bulletins in department of state. We predict that it is hard to see a big progress in visa bulletins in the next several months. The best we can expect now is that there will not be a big retrogression of visa bullet in 2007.
Applicants should consider EB-1(a), which belongs to EB1, and visas for EB1 immigration applications are available now. An applicant can submit I-140 & I-485 at anytime currently.