The USCIS is treating their inventory of pending adjustment of status (AOS) applications as a state secret of the highest national security interest. Putting aside their flat refusal to even discuss the accurate size of their backlog, it does not appear that they have made any serious effort to ascertain its makeup. Perhaps they fear that if Al-Qaeda ever learns how bad the backlog is, they can use that information to attack us. For whatever reason, they are protecting this information from disclosure as though their lives depended upon it.

Only last year, for the first time in their history, the USCIS began conducting a census of their pending employment based AOS cases pending at their service centers. As of their most recent report, they have now obtained priority date, preference classification, and country of charge information for about 75% of the AOS cases pending at the Nebraska and Texas service centers. The results of this partial service center inventory has been published on the USCIS web site.

Conspicuously absent from this accounting, however, is any information at all on the AOS cases pending at USCIS district offices around the country. According to the State Department's Visa Office, approximately two-thirds of the demand for employment based third preference visas came from USCIS district offices. This came as a surprise to the Visa Office, as they were previously unaware of these cases.

This secrecy presents a particular problem. Without accurate information as to the actual demand for visas, the Visa Office must guess as to how many visas are likely to be used during the balance of the current fiscal year. If it appears that the USCIS demand will be insufficient to use up the quota, then the Visa Office must advance cutoff dates in order to qualify enough people at overseas consular posts so that all authorized visas will be used before October 1st (the start of the next fiscal year).

Due to the secrecy lid imposed by the USCIS, it is impossible to determine how many visas have been used so far this fiscal year. Based on anecdotal evidence, however, it appears that they are lagging behind the pace they need to maintain in order to exhaust the quota. Over the next two months, if it appears to the Visa Office that the USCIS is not going to be able to adjudicate enough cases to exhaust the quota, then we can expect to see unusual forward movement in Visa Bulletin cutoff dates. This could start as early as May, but would definitely manifest itself by July at the latest.

Will this happen? No one knows. It all depends on the USCIS and what they do in the next 45 to 60 days. Since most employment based green card applicants elect to process through the USCIS by filing adjustment of status applications, the USCIS needs to adjudicate about 120,000 employment based AOS applications  by September 30th in order to meet their share of the workload. To the extent that they are not able to meet this production level, the Visa Office will have to advance cutoff dates faster than normal to qualify enough cases overseas to make up the difference.

It may well be that the USCIS is actually on target to adjudicate 120,000 employment based AOS cases this year. If so, then we will not see any unusual movement. If not, expect to see some temporary advances in cutoff dates. I want to emphasize that any such advances will be temporary, followed by a return to current dates or even a retrogression.