F4-India: Visa Bulletin Predictions

What is happening with F4-India?

The trajectory of F4-India over the last 2 years has been unique when compared to other ‘preference’ classification.

The first notable difference is with F4-All Countries. Back in October 2018, the U.S. State Department realized that the ‘response rate’ to the ‘Welcome Letters’ of the National Visa Center (NVC) to Worldwide F4 applicants was very low. This lead to a rapid advancement of the F4-All Countries, followed by a massive retrogression in February 2020.

But this did not happen to F4-India, probably because the applicants chargeable to India did in fact reply to the Welcome Letters sent to them.

The other notable difference, this time between F4-All Countries & F4-India and all the other family preferences (especially F1, F2B, and F3) is that the Final Action Date was not advanced at a rapid pace during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Interviews were simply not taking place.

In other words, although the advancement of F4-India has been disappointing, there has been no recent crazy move by the Visa Office that would make a retrogression highly likely in the future. To illustrate this let’s compare the advancement of the ‘Final Action Date’ of the Visa Bulletin from October 2020 to September 2021 ( in RED) with the average of the decade prior (2010 – 2019, in GREEN), and the 2000’s (2000 – 2009):

As you can see:

• Yes, the advancement of F4-India tends to diminish over time. The decade of the 2010s produced significantly less advancement than the decade of the 2000s. There is no doubt that the annual numerical limit is just too low to even just ‘absorb’ the number of new applicants;
• But the advancement of the last 2 years was even lower, which means that F4-India Visa Bulletin dates are probably closer to where they should be than other preferences.

How did the Final Action Date move in the past few months?

Predictions for F4 All Countries, Mexico and the Philippines.

What can we say about ‘time to current’?

Time to current measures the time it takes an applicant to have their ‘priority date’ current when compared to the ‘final action date’ of the Visa Bulletin. Although not factually correct, time to current is often used by applicants as an estimation of how long it is going to take them to get their Green Card. We also make predictions about time to current for our Green Card dynamic timeline predictions: the process of scheduling a Green Card interview cannot be initiated before the applicant’s date is ‘current’, so it is one of the key ‘anchor’ of the process.

Let’s note that before the pandemic, ‘time to current’ was not heading in the right direction:

The incredibly sad news here is that family Green Cards that were not issued over the last two years are gone forever. They are not coming back for family (they were transferred to ’employment’ based Green Cards). As a result, time to current will go up:

I am going through adjustment of status, what else applies to me?

Applicants going through Adjustment of Status are often allowed to use the ‘Filing Date’ of the Visa Bulletin to determine when they are allowed to file Form I-485. Here is the latest:

When will Immigration Planner update its predictions?

We expect to update our predictions the day after the next Visa Bulletin is released. Our best guess as to when we will update these predictions is as follows: