Each year the US Department of State publishes a “yearbook” giving data on visas and immigration for the fiscal year previous. They are just now publishing their data and some (not all) tables can be found here. The data is preliminary, i.e. subject to small changes.

 

Why is this interesting? Well as some will know we are able to extract data from the CEAC system and I have published some of that data. In particular I had published the final year numbers in this blog post.

 

The Yearbook provides this report which lists among other things the visas issued for each country and region. This is critical to our understanding of the data because the CEAC data can only be extracted by embassy whereas the Yearbook data is by country of chargeability. So – the CEAC numbers would show a French selectee that lives in London as being allocated to the London Embassy whilst the yearbook would correctly report the cases where they belong. The extracted data should be accurate by region therefore, but somewhat compromised by country.

 

What is startling is how accurate the extracted CEAC numbers are. They are accurate within a handful of cases which is very good news since it validates that the extract process is accurate – thanks to Rafikbo76 for that!!! The confirmation is also proof that they allowed the DV program to take NACARA visas back – something we had guessed a almost year ago. We also have validation of the other numbers that I have published on posts like the embassy league table. This gives me very high confidence that we have a good understanding of the process and the results (and were able to publish the data 2 months faster than the US DOS! 🙂

CEACcomnparison

Interestingly this report does not yet give Adjustment of Status numbers – these are only Consular Processing cases (both the yearbook and the CEAC numbers). Other reports will give numbers on AoS cases.

As of today the DV2015 CEAC data is not loaded. Once it is loaded I will be providing the data here to allow understanding of the process. I can’t wait to start getting that data!!!

DV2014 numbers published