The December 2013 visa bulletin was just released by the U.S. State Department, and the news is a mixed bag for work and family-based green card applicants. The priority dates for the F2A family visa category, which was current in August, continue to stay put. All family-based green card categories besides the F2A and Mexico groups saw advancements in their priority dates.
For work-based green card applicants, there was major advancement in the EB-3 category in all countries except India. Green card applications from India suffered serious retrogression in the EB-2 category as well – priority dates moved back to 2004 from 2008. China and Mexico saw their priority dates jump ahead one full year.
What does “retrogression” mean in the December 2013 visa bulletin?
As we explained previously, visa wait times by category and country are outlined each month by the U.S. State Department in the visa bulletin. The different categories (F1, F2A, EB-2, etc.) are defined in our blog about visa wait times. Categories for each visa are supposed to go forward in time from month to month (called “advancement”), reflecting that more recently submitted applications are being processed as time goes on. However, this is not always the case when USCIS is overloaded with an unexpected number of applicants, as is what happened with Indian EB-2 and EB-2 applications a few months ago.
Retrogression most often occurs right after a visa category moves forward significantly, inciting a large wave of new applicants looking to take advantage of faster processing times. Retrogression is a way for USCIS to “put on the brakes” for new applications, so to speak. Priority dates for work-based green cards in India recently advanced several years, and there were so many new applicants as a result that the category was almost immediately penalized with retrogression. Normally, visa categories with the most applicants (in this month’s case: Indian work visas and Mexican family visas) have the slowest advancement and are the most vulnerable to retrogression.