EB2-IC Visa Bulletin Movements FY 2012 - Is this how Mr. Oppenheim thinks?

We looked into if there is any analytical correlation between movements that Mr. Oppenheim did last year for Family Based Category (F2A) and current movement that we saw with EB2-India and China for Employment Based Category. Is there any correlation or equation or factor that can determine how Mr. Oppenheim would think in absence of demand or visible demand in case number of filings that he is receiving or available adjudicated case cases are less? Or if we can formulate a mathematical expression that outlines his approach to move dates. That is when we started digging into this.

Edited - December 20, 2011

We started looking at the movement that Mr. Oppenheim did for Family-Based Category last year in FY 2010 and FY 2011 to see how he moved the dates and then retrogressed them once he had enough demand. Some key difference that should be noted between two categories are a) annual visas for FB category vs EB category is 260K vs. 140K. When one will reduce these numbers per category, ratio between two visa numbers would be quite similar b) For FB category demand could be easily generated in couple months as long as NVC have enough cases documentarily qualified (majority of demand in FB category comes from overseas consular posts) vs. EB category which rely mostly on USCIS to generate demand. C) Mr. Oppenheim started doing such movement for FB category in June 2010 which was still recalibrating until last fiscal year.

Mr. Oppenheim started doing similar movement of EB2-IC from October 2011. If we will assume that Mr. Oppenheim have similar thought process that he had while determining cut-off dates for FB category, then we should have seen movements as suggested in the column “EB2-IC”. But this was the not the case. Factors a) to c) could be the reason for this. As two categories have different demand and different annual visa numbers, movement could not be just purely based on similar difference. We took first two movements that we saw in the last visa bulletin to fit the best correlation to the data, and equation we received was

Recalibrated EB2-IC Movement

It should be noted that there is a correction in the equation. As forward movement will be less based on factor a) to c), even retrogression should be less than anticipated compared to FB category.

Forward Movement

EB2-IC Date:Current Bulletin = EB2-IC Date:Last Bulletin + (((F2A Movement: Current Bulletin - F2A Movement:Last Bulletin)*140000/260000) – 60 days)

Retrogression

EB2-IC Date:Current Bulletin = EB2-IC Date:Last Bulletin + (((F2A Movement: Current Bulletin - F2A Movement:Last Bulletin)*140000/260000) +60 days)

This equation closely satisfied movement that we saw for December 2011 and January 2012 Visa Bulletin. We used this data to correlate Mr. Oppenheim thought process in order to extrapolate movement for next few bulletins; as long as he will continue to have same thought process for rest of the year.

Fallacy to above method, it does not take into account any EB demand, PERM numbers and assumes similar correlation will exist for rest of the year. Personally, I would request everyone to take this lightly and do not put lot of eggs into this basket. The correlation when outputted was very interesting hence we thought of sharing it with our readers, especially when there is no logic behind current movement (as far as I can tell). It can give better perspective to this process than just going by a gut feeling.

If this will make sense, and will start panning out in next few bulletin then cut-off dates estimated by equation does not make sense from June 2012 – November 2012, I would say in case spillover is enough, dates may stick around December 2008 until June 2012 and then retrogress to September 2007 in August-September 2012 for some time. By this time most of the folks should have received green card from the filings in October-December 2011. Successively dates will move back to June 2008 in October 2013 or beyond. In all, I would not care about movement shown in later half of the table.

Note : Results here are independent of demand and were shared because they looked interesting. By no means this suggests that this is what we may see in next visa bulletins.

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