I understand that the EB-1 quota is limited to 7% per country per year. China and India clearly hit that ceiling, while countries with fewer applicants do not. Is there an official source where one can view the actual EB-1 issuance numbers by country for past years?
USCIS yearbook — it has everything: tables broken down by category and country of birth for each year. If you look at Russia, the numbers are small — EB2‑PERM is only around 150 per year. At the same time you need to understand that the real numbers are trickier than just 7%: at the end of the fiscal year, if there are unused visas from other preferences, they get released above the limit — so the final figures for India/China actually end up above the formal cap. That rule stops applying when there’s an excess from FB or other EB categories.
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Where exactly do you find the USCIS Yearbook — on uscis.gov in the Statistics section? And does it provide data by country of birth or by citizenship? That’s a big difference for us.
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By country of birth — not citizenship, that’s important. A passport from another country doesn’t change which quota you end up in. As for Russia — a few years ago, according to state.gov, they used less than 5% of the seven-percent limit, so for Russians the EB-1 quota is basically not an issue right now. One more nuance if you’re specifically looking at EB-2 NIW separately: relatively recently it started being listed on a separate line; before that it was lumped under the general EB-2 — so historical data from before then won’t give a clear picture for NIW.
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There’s another nuance — the Yearbook shows visas actually issued or AOS approvals, not I-140 approvals. There’s a difference: I-140s can be approved, and the person may then wait for years or never use it. For Russia that’s not significant — there’s no backlog and conversion works normally. But if you need statistics specifically on approved petitions broken down by citizenship and category separately, they’re not publicly available anywhere as far as I know. USCIS doesn’t publish that breakdown.
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State.gov also publishes a monthly report — “Immigrant Visa Issuances by Foreign State of Chargeability or Place of Birth.” It’s a different source from the USCIS annual report; it breaks the data down by month instead of by year. According to last year’s May data for Russia: E1 had 66 visas, E2 — 4, E3 — 2. Handy if you want to track the dynamics without waiting for the annual summary.
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On the State Department website, if you look at the annual statistics - EB-1 for Russia 185, Brazil 300, China 2000, India 400, other countries up to 150. It’s obvious why we don’t have a queue for us - we’re not even close to the cap.
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USCIS I-140 data for EB-1A shows about 70–80% approvals. This is without country breakdowns, only by category overall. For those for whom quotas aren’t an issue, it’s more interesting to look by field, because in IT approvals are noticeably harder than in academic science, based on what people here write.
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There isn’t a separate official figure for denials — USCIS only publishes approvals for I-140 forms and doesn’t list the denial rate as a separate line. From forum discussions I’ve seen that RFEs for EB-1A have been coming noticeably more often than a few years ago, especially if the petition lacks publications in top journals. If you need year-by-year data, you can obtain a more detailed dataset from USCIS via a FOIA request, though the process isn’t fast.
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the USCIS memorandum on adjustment of status (AOS) that was released recently — there was a lot of panic in the community at first, but then attorneys dug into it and found that USCIS is softening its stance, so it turned out not to be so bad. This only indirectly relates to the statistics: annual reports are always delayed, while real conditions change quickly when documents like this come out. I have an approved I-140; I’m currently preparing my I-485 and watching closely.
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With numbers like that (185 per year), the practical issue for Russians isn’t the quota but getting the petition itself approved. When I received an RFE on publications, I realized the queue is the last thing to worry about. The quota doesn’t act as a limit — the officer does.
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By the way, the EB-1 cap for this fiscal year has already been reached — the State Department officially said consulates won’t be issuing visas until October. But it’s important to distinguish: USCIS is still processing and approving I-140s, whereas you won’t be able to get the actual visa through a consulate for now. This doesn’t change anything for change-of-status inside the U.S., but anyone planning consular processing should factor this into their plans.
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I dug into the DHS AI Use Case Inventory - it’s the official list of all the AI systems USCIS uses; I counted them myself. Several systems are directly tied to the initial processing of petitions. I also looked at case dockets on PACER and CourtListener - in appeals this is starting to come up as an argument. I think this partly explains why RFEs about publications have become more frequent - it’s not just a person looking at the petition.
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You really feel it in IT — when I was putting together my EB-1 application package, half the work went into packaging evidence of my contributions without a strong publication record in top journals. In ML, achievements are Kaggle, GitHub, product metrics — explaining their significance to an officer is harder than to an academic with an h-index. I had to build the citation analysis almost from scratch, and that was the most labor‑intensive part.
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In film there are no peer-reviewed journals — there are festival programs, trade press, and commercial projects. When I put together an EB-1 package, I found services for finding journalists and getting free publications on your area of expertise — I used that to cover part of the publication evidence. I compiled citation analysis based on reviews in Variety, IndieWire and European industry outlets, rather than academic citations. USCIS accepted it without an RFE on publications. I think the same logic applies to IT — you can build evidence without relying on impact-factor journals if you clearly explain what the field is and why those outlets are significant.
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About the awards trap — the prizes won by your students or trainees won’t be counted for you. I handled a coach’s case who tried to satisfy the criterion with his athletes’ awards — the officer rejected it precisely on that logic: another person’s prize is not your prize, even if you coached them. When responding to an RFE about awards, a list of well-known people whom the same organization has previously awarded works well — names, achievements, and their standing in the field. That shows the officer that the award itself is meaningful, not that you inflated it in the petition. In our case, when three criteria were being addressed, the awards part ended up being the clearest for the officer.
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About VAK (ВАК — the Higher Attestation Commission) journals — in medicine here they’re the standard for obtaining an academic degree, but USCIS doesn’t recognize them as peer-reviewed publications for EB-1 purposes. The officer looks at Scopus, Web of Science, impact factor — most VAK journals aren’t indexed there. When I assembled my application packet, I had to explicitly explain that VAK is a requirement of the Russian attestation system, not a marker of international recognition; otherwise the officer simply doesn’t understand what it is. In the end, those publications were submitted as supporting material rather than primary evidence.
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In the oil and geological fields, the h‑index isn’t a metric at all — citation evidence is industry reports from SPE, references in technical standards, and patents. When I looked through EB‑1 materials for my field, I realized the main task is to explain to the officer why these sources are equivalent to peer‑reviewed publications — without that explanation, they simply won’t see them as citation evidence. In IT it’s a similar story, judging by what people write on the topic, except that instead of SPE it’s GitHub and product metrics.
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