Weekly Viz 2023-01-30
EB Green Card Waiting Time for Mainland China Applicants
The US Green Card application process is rather complicated – For an Employment-based (EB) Green Card, you first need to go through the long process of prevailing wage determination (PWD), recruitment, PERM and I-140. This process now takes ~2 years. Afterwards, it comes the long waiting time for your ‘priority date’(the date PERM was filed) to be ‘current’(when you can file I-485 and finally get the Green Card). You can learn more at the US Bureau of Consular Affairs website. This week, I found the data of historic movement of Employment-based visa bulletin for applicants born in Mainland China and made a visualization to show its progress.
My Visualization
This visualization is a combination of line chart and gantt plot – For each category, x-axis is the visa bulletin month, while on the y-axis, the black line shows the final action date (‘current date’) and the length of the bar is the time differences between final action date and visa bulletin date, so essnetially the waiting days for the applications became ‘current’ in that month.
Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.
Insights
- EB-1 category has the highest requirement (usually for people with PhD degrees or are critical to business), therefore, most of the time, it does not have a queue;
- However, for EB-2 and EB-3, the median waiting days is as long as 4 years in the past 10 years. Since people qualified for EB-2 can downgrade to EB-3 (and upgrade back), these two usually achieves a ‘dynamic equilibrium’, meaning sometimes EB-3 is faster, but then people will downgrade, and EB-2 became faster. So their final action dates are usually pretty close;
- We see a great progress in EB-2 final action date during the pandemic, this is because the unused Family-based (FB) quota was given to EB applications.
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