Additional Employment-Based Visas Expected Starting October 1 – One Silver Lining of the Pandemic

The State Department’s Visa Control and Reporting Division – the division that is responsible for establishing cut off dates in the monthly Visa Bulletin – estimates that there will be an additional 57,200 visas available for employment-based immigrants in the FY2021, which begins October 1, 2020. This is because there has been a significant amount of unused FY2020 family-based visa numbers, and the law requires that unused family-sponsored visas be added to the FY2021 employment-based annual limit. While this is good news for all employment-based visa categories, the EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3 categories would benefit most with most of the additional visas going to these three categories collectively. The additional visas translate to a 14,000 per country limit—a 21.5% increase over FY2020. The excess numbers will create the possibility of significant advancement for EB-1 China, EB-1 India, and EB-5 China, as well as the possibility of EB-3 Worldwide becoming current. We shall see…October 1 is not far away.