Here's a quick summary of the bill.
a) It eliminates per country limits for EB by FY 2015, but it drastically increases it right away.
b) While the split of EB1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 does not change (40K each for EBs 1 through 3), for 2012, all but 15% is now open to all countries (6K reserved in each category, so 34K open; increasing to 36K in FY 2013 & FY2014).
c) That 6K (dropping to 4K in 2013 & 2014) is reserved for all countries other than India and China, whereas for the remaining 34K visa numbers, all countries can compete based on PDs (its basically India and China for at least FY2012 and probably most of FY 2013 too since the others are all current right now).
d) There is also a limit of 28K (28,028) per country, that may or may not apply for EB2 India in the first few years. I wasn't able to tell based on the analysis Spec & Q and others have done what the split is between India and China post July 2007.
e) The biggest winners will be EB3 India (should move to Sep 2004), EB2 I & China (should move to Sep 2009) and to a lesser extent EB3 China, Mexico and Phillipines (should catch up with EB3 ROW and move to around Sep 2005) all by the end of FY 2012. The biggest losers would be EB2 ROW which will retrogress to around Sep 2009.
Here's the fundamentals of my analysis for EB2. EB2 I & C will now have 34K of available visa numbers + 20K of estimated spillover falls down (will be lower than previous estimates because there will no longer be EB2 ROW FA; Q estimates in the first post of this thread that 22.6K of EB1 + EB5 FD came to EB2 I & C last year, i assumed a slight discount to that in FY 2012) to provide 54K visa numbers for EB2 I & C.
Using Spec's sheet (
http://www.qesehmk.org/forums/showth...oved-in-FY2011) and his assumptions of 8.1K backlog, 1.5K left over applicants from FY 2011 (pre April 2007) and 3K porters (midway of his range), we get to the bottom of his chart (Jan 2009) having used up only 49.5K visa numbers. It looks from the bottom of that chart that we are looking at roughly 500 applicants per month, so the remaining 4.5K available visa numbers (54 - 49.5) should move us another 9 months to Sep/Oct 2009.
Even without spillover, this bill would permit 8.5K of movement per quarter, allowing movement to Sep 07 by Q2, Jan 08 in Q3, and May 08 by Q4. Nothing but good news if this bill becomes law. Something to keep our eye on.
Kanmani, i'm nominating you our legislative process coordinator. Please keep us informed as and when you find out more.