The Department of State has released the April 2023 Visa Bulletin. D&S provides a Monthly Summary of the employment-based priority dates. In April 2023, USCIS will return to accepting adjustment of status applications based on the Visa Bulletin Final Action Dates chart, rather than the Dates for Filing chart that it had been using the past few months. The Department of State is no longer including a separate column covering applications in El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras. Final action dates and filing dates for these countries are now included in the “All Chargeability Areas Except Those Listed” column.
With respect to Final Action Dates, EB-1 China and India will maintain their Final Action cutoff date of February 1, 2022. All other EB-1 categories will remain current. For the EB-2 categories, India will retrogress by eight months, to January 1, 2011 while China will remain at June 8, 2019. All other countries will retrogress by four months, to July 1, 2022. With respect to the EB-3 Professional and Skilled Workers category, China will advance by 3 months to November 1, 2018, India will remain at June 15, 2012, and all other countries will remain current. The demand in the EB-4 category has continued to grow, which has required the USCIS to even further push back priority dates for all countries in this category. In addition, for the Final Action date for the EB-5 Unreserved categories, China will remain at July 8, 2015 and India will remain at June 1, 2018. EB-5 Final Action dates will remain current for all other countries and EB-5 “Set Aside” categories.
As with the employment-based cases, we are seeing retrogression in family-based cases. For the spouses and children of the Permanent Residents (F2A) category, all countries will have a final action cutoff date set to September 8, 2020, besides Mexico, which will have a final action cutoff date set to November 1, 2018.