EB-5 visa issuance in February 2025
April 8, 2025 6 Comments
Finally a bit of data to report: Department of State has added Monthly Immigrant Visa Issuance statistics for consular processing in February 2025. I made a few charts to highlight EB-5 numbers.
February data shows set-aside visa issuance continuing to pick up steam but very gradually, with visa issuance still extremely low in context of set-aside visas available this year. If this trend continues, then I guess that Rural and High Unemployment visa supply may not be maximized this fiscal year, and thus Rural and High Unemployment may not get visa bulletin dates this year. I may revise this guess if and when USCIS ever starts reporting data again for I-526E approvals (indicating how many people are potentially qualified for visas) and I-485 approvals (indicating the number of visas being allocated through status adjustment). USCIS 2025 data reports are now very delayed, but I keep checking — hoping that the USCIS Office of Performance and Quality still exists! Also waiting on the delayed 2024 NVC waitlist report. If set-aside visa issuance remains low throughout FY2025, that would be good news for the concurrent filing window, and bad news for the pipeline backlog — especially for applicants from China and India who depend on getting through the visa gate as soon as possible before more rest of world applicants have a chance to get I-526E approvals. Actual visa wait times could be worse than calculated in my EB5 Backlog Analysis model in case of low set-aside visa issuance. (I’ll revise the entire model when the next USCIS and NVC reports finally come out.)
Looking at Unreserved visa issuance through consulates, I note that Department of State remains on track to issue all Unreserved visas available for the fiscal year. Good! But the rate of Unreserved visa issuance to rest-of-world countries did not increase in February — as I think it should have, given that ROW applicants are so numerous that DOS might even have to impose a ROW Unreserved a cutoff date this year (according to the April 2025 visa bulletin note). A number of consulates seem to be having problems with scheduling EB-5 interviews — for example in Nigeria, which has many EB-5 applicants but no EB-5 interviews at all this year. Can consulates be given a push to act on EB-5 cases? On the bright side, low EB-5 visa issuance to ROW meant that China-born applicants were able to continue to pick up “otherwise unused” Unreserved visas in February.
In other news, IIUSA has posted a letter from their lobbyist on advocacy efforts.
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Hi Suzanne, Could there still be visas available for India under the unreserved category this April for an AOS? Can visa issuance exceed the theoretical limit 0f 803 visas by using visa from ROW, etc..
India is indeed limited to about 7% of Unreserved visas — because any Unreserved visas unused by Rest of World go to the oldest priority dates, and the oldest Unreserved PD are all China-born applicants. Since the 7% limit applies across the EB-5 category, India can get >7% Unreserved when they get <%7 Rural and High Unemployment visas. That happened in 2023, when India Unreserved got 7% of total EB-5 rather than 7% of Unreserved, since there was no one taking visas in other categories. But it might not in 2025, now that Rural and HU visas are starting to be issued. Looking at the pace of visa issuance to India through February 2025, and also at the April 2025 visa bulletin, I guess that Department of State has probably already issued most of the Unreserved EB-5 visas available to India this fiscal year. But we shall see.
Thank you, Suzanne, for your detailed explanation. I agree that visas for Rural and High Unemployment areas are now being issued. Based on my calculations from the monthly visa issuance report, it still appears to be significantly below the allotted limit. This gives me hope that the DOS might make some visas available for the unreserved category. I truly wish they processed applications on a first-in, first-out (FIFO) basis.
Only 182 set-aside visa issued in 5 months.
can uscis issue 6800 visa in next 7 months?
@Suzanne
Could you please address & analyse new retro for May 2025 in a new blog post? what it means? what will be impacted? does that cause additional delays.
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