USCIS releases quaterly approval data. With those report, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services also provide a breakdown of number of I-140 approved and I-140 received by quarter. We use that to calculate the global approval and denial rates (see the latest data here). Unfortunately this information alone is not enough to directly calculate country’s approval rates (like we do for the aggregate of countries). So, we developed our own “Success Indicator” to establish a comparison between different countries of birth when it comes to I-140 adjudications.
Our method: Success Indicator
We take a good amount of data (right now: six quarters) and we add up all the cases received and all the cases approved, country by country. Then, we divide the number of cases approved by the number of cases USCIS received. This is not an approval rate (because we don’t know the number of denied cases, but it is a good proxy for it) and that is why we call it Success Indicator (SI) and not approval rate. We do the same with the agreggate of all countries so we can establish a baseline.
Again, the success indicator is not the approval rate of that country, but we can use it to compare between countries and each country to the global results.
- For example, in EB-2 NIW our latest global Success Indicator was 36%
- Then, we can take a particular country and compare it against this. For example Canada’s SI was 47%, clearly overperforming against the global SI average.
This report: what data we used
For this latest report we are using data from the latest six full quarters:
- Fiscal Year 2024, Quarter 2
- Fiscal Year 2024, Quarter 3
- Fiscal Year 2024, Quarter 4
- Fiscal Year 2025, Quarter 1
- Fiscal Year 2025, Quarter 2
- Fiscal Year 2025, Quarter 3
To calculate each country’s SI, we limited ourselves to those countries with a total of at least 100 I-140 cases approved in the above period of time. This is the reduce any bias in the data from countries with little information.
Results: EB-2 NIW
In the EB-2 NIW category the highest performing country was Japan with a SI of 57, followed by Sri Lanka, Italy and Jordan. These were all much higher than the global average SI of 36. On the opposite end of the chart, Venezuela was the worst performing country with an SI of 16, followed by Ecuador (18), Mexico (20), Colombia (20), or Brazil (21). Below is a graph and a table where you can find a specific country.
Results: EB-1A
In the highest category of employment-based green cards, the SI for the totality of countries was 52. On the high side of the table was again Japan with 72, followed by Germany (74), the UK (73) or Spain (72). The worst performing country in EB-1A was Kazakhstan with an SI of 32, followed by Brazil with 37, or Venezuela with 40. Below are the full results.
Are there countries that generally do better or worse in both categories?
The answer is yes. We calculated the top and bottom performers in each category; those countries with an Success Indicator 25% higher or 25% lower than the global SI. Then we looked for countries that show in the same end of both categories.
Consistent top performers (25% higher SI than average in both categories)
- Canada
- France
- Italy
- Japan
- Spain
Consistent bottom performers (25% lower SI than average in both categories)
- Brazil
And if we are less strict and we just look for countries above or below the global SI average, here is the list:
Higher than average SI in both categories
- Canada
- France
- Germany
- India
- Iran
- Israel
- Italy
- Japan
- South Korea
- Russia
- Spain
Lower than average SI in both categories
- Brazil
- Colombia
- Pakistan
- Ukraine
- Venezuela
Conclusions
While these statistics can be “fun” to analyze remember that:
- These numbers are NOT your probability of success
- Each case is unique and your success will depend on:
- Your profile
- Your proposed endeavor (EB-2 NIW)
- The quality of your petition package
- The officer who reviews your case
- …anything else you can think of?
