Visa Bulletin and Predictions

Tanya Freedman, CEO Connetics USA: We get this question every week. Mike, can you maybe tell us a little bit about the Visa bulletin and the latest update and what you anticipate going forward?

Immigration Attorney Michael Hammond: Sure. So, I think the good news relative to the Visa bulletin is that no one is really anticipating any retrogression for the rest of this fiscal year, and probably beyond that for quite a while.

But the fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30. So that's the year that we look at. In theory, there are two charts. There's the date of Filing chart and a Final action date chart to get actually your green card approved, you need to be what they call current. You need to be at the front of the line for the final action date chart.

We've seen a lot of movement in categories since last fall or the fall of 2020 and that is a byproduct of COVID. So there is a rule that had not been used since the 70s, I believe, that says unused family cases, immigrant visas,or green cards for the family category kind of spill over into the employment category and with COVID and with consulate shut down and with people not Immigrating, there were a lot of unused family-based immigrant visas, which most family-based cases come from overseas that were unused. So they trickled over, floating over into the employment-based side that's created this flux.

Matter of fact, if you go to the USCIS website and you go to their page about 485 or getting a green card here in the US, they have a big, huge announcement at the very top that says we have a lot of immigrant visas available this year, please apply as quickly as you can. So that's why there's no retrogression. It's likely to continue on for a little while. It doesn't necessarily speed things up at the consulate, obviously, unfortunately. But we are seeing some movement there.

So I think, that's the bottom line we want to hear is retrogression is not expected anytime soon.

Okay. So those are very encouraging, positive words from Mike and I know for many nurses, they worry about that dreaded R - word retrogression.

So that's good news! If you are watching today and you have not yet taken your NCLEX exam, please do so. There are so many opportunities in the United States.

Please go ahead and apply to our nursing recruitment agency. We have many opportunities all over the United States and there really is more demand than this ever. All of us on this panel have been doing this for many years, and we've never seen the demand like it is today in the United States. So as Mike says, no better time to come to the United States.