The new Visa Bulletin has been released. This one would normally be the bulletin controlling interviews in March, but of course we can assume that KCC will not schedule interviews in February because nothing has changed, from their perspective. The ban is still in place.

Even with the new administration it is not clear whether KCC will start scheduling interviews in the remainder of January (for March interviews). The next “changes” that could cause them to start scheduling will be:

  • The 10014/10052 ban being successfully challenged in court or removed by executive order.
  • A change by the Biden administration of the status of the embassies to instruct them to schedule DV case interviews. Again, this could also come from a court order.

AS I mentioned last month, the Annunciato case is a good opportunity to have the 10014 ban removed. There is a hearing today on that case at 10am Pacific. We will not get a decision today, but the hearing should be interesting. Here are the meeting details.

https://cand-uscourts.zoomgov.com/j/1606595725?pwd=OExjRVA5N01TQjRSRDZNM25PSThjUT09

Webinar ID: 160 659 5725
Password: 466459

We are also waiting for the Gomez appeal outcome, which again seeks to challenge the ban itself.

So here are the VB numbers:

RegionAll DV Chargeability Areas Except
Those Listed Separately		 
AFRICA14,000Except: Egypt  10,000
ASIA6,200Except: Iran      3,800
              Nepal  4,200
EUROPE9,400 
NORTH AMERICA (BAHAMAS) 6 
OCEANIA900 
SOUTH AMERICA,
and the CARIBBEAN		1,175 

Again, we can see the numbers have only increased slightly, and is lower after six months than normal. That should not be a surprise really because this is an abnormal year where NO cases are being scheduled yet. That means the VB should not be increased much as there were already enough cases that were ready for scheduling from the earlier numbers. That is how the VB works, and you should NOT be calculating expected final VB numbers based on the month to month progress. To understand why that means case number increases had to be small this month, watch the video posted below.

To those new to looking at VBs, let me explain what the “except” XXX country means. Some countries have been called out as “exceptions” meaning that selectees chargeable to those two countries (regardless of where they will interview) are subject to a lower VB number for the month than the rest of the region. This is done to slow down processing for countries with a high number of selectees to spread out the workload over a longer time. Please read this linked article on how to read the visa bulletin.