As many of you will know, we are able to extract the CEAC data which shows whether each case was approved, refused and so on. Xarthisius (a DV winner himself) created the software solution to do that, and a number of people have selflessly worked solving CAPTCHAS so we could get this data.  Xarthisius has just published the final file for DV2018. There might be some updates still being made to the data, but we have a good picture of what happened. Remember the issued numbers below are not including AOS (Adjustment of Status)  cases, so the final official number will be a little higher than this.

 

 

So – some thoughts….

 

  1. AF region has over 2400 approvals in the final 2 weeks. That is an excellent effort by the government to try and use the visas. Yes, many AP cases were left behind, but they did the best they could do. As I had mentioned before, I suspect that was why the initial DV2019 months were low, because that would have given more resources to closing out the DV2018 cases.
  2. Despite the big push in the final weeks, AF region still did not hit its quota.
  3. AS region also did not hit the quota (due to the travel ban). Whilst some people from the banned countries were able to get their visas, the majority of affected people had no possibility to be approved.
  4. In taking nearly 20k visas (over 20k once AOS is added in) EU region was allowed to use more than its quota. This shows there was a redistribution to that region in particular, and shows a very high number of visas for relatively low number of cases.
  5. OC region met the quota nicely within a very predictable final number.
  6. SA region also met the quota – again, fairly predictably.

This was a year of many ups and downs. There are always cases where people don’t make it through – and although 48000 have had a positive, life changing success, there are thousands left in the cold. It’s a brutal process, but that is made clear from the first letter that points out the Green Card is not guaranteed.

 

Those interested in more data, and country specific details can go to Xarthisius’ site. A BIG thanks to him for his efforts in providing the data in a format that is easy to understand.

A BIG thanks is also due to the people who have scraped data this year – shown below is the names and scraped count for the “top” 25. I truly hope some of these folks got their Green Cards this year, they deserve it for their selfless work!

DV2019 CEAC data will be available in the system on January 1, so the scraping will be needed then. For now, we can rest our fingers!