March 2023 Visa Bulletin Explained

This post explains Sections D and E of the March 2023 Visa Bulletin. The Dept. of State has signaled it will implement cut-off dates to "patch the holes" for EB-2 and EB-3 ROW. They are leaking!

This post is written for people who have some background and familiarity with the Visa Bulletin. If you are new to the Visa Bulletin and cut-off dates, I encourage you to read my primer here.

To review:

• There are a limited number of green cards available each year in Employment-Based (“EB”) immigration.

• Those limits start each year on October 1, which is the first day of the fiscal year. So we are currently in fiscal year 2023 which began on October 1, 2022.

• March 2023 is the 6th month of FY2023.

• The annual limitations for green cards are subdivided by category (EB-1 versus EB-2 versus EB-3), and nationality (country of birth).

• Cut-off dates exist in the Visa Bulletin to monitor and control the number of green cards approved, consistent with the annual limits.

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In finance, market participants often focus closely on the Federal Reserve since so much depends on interest rates. Analysts review carefully the minutes of meetings and study the speeches made by senior officials within the Federal Reserve to try to divine what will happen in future meetings.

In EB immigration law, the equivalent of the FOMC meeting minutes are the Supplemental Sections which sometimes follow the charts in each Visa Bulletin. Those Supplemental Sections provide official commentary on why dates have moved (or not moved) and what might be coming. The Sections are often brief and a reader is left with some conclusory statements without a lot of context or background.

In the March 2023 Visa Bulletin, the U.S. Department of State (“DOS”) provided clear guidance on what will be happening to cut-off dates for EB-2 Rest of World (“ROW”) as well as EB-3 ROW.

The rest of this post (beyond the paywall) will provide background and analysis about these 2 relatively obscure sections (D and E) and anticipate what is coming for the rest of this fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2023.

I make predictions on where cut-off dates are going for EB-2 and EB-3 ROW. Read on and contact me in early April to tell me how wrong I was!