Country of chargeability: which column you read, and why

It follows country of birth

As a general rule, an applicant is charged to their country of birth. Not their citizenship, not where they live, not where they have worked for twenty years, and not where the petitioning employer is. Someone born in India who naturalised in Canada a decade ago is still ordinarily charged to India.

This is the opposite of the intuition most people bring to it, and it is the single most common reason someone reads the wrong row of the bulletin.

Why four countries have their own columns

No single country may take more than a fixed share of the annual limit in a category family. When demand from a country exceeds that share, its queue lengthens beyond the general one and it needs a separate cut-off. China, India, Mexico and the Philippines are the four that persistently do, so the bulletin gives each of them a column. Everyone else reads the column for all chargeability areas except those listed.

The per-country limit is a cap, not an allocation: it does not reserve numbers for a country, it prevents one country from consuming the whole category. This is why the general column can move quickly while a country column barely moves at all, in the same category, in the same month.

Each category page measures the current spread between the fastest and slowest country in that category, which for some categories is a decade or more. How far apart the columns actually are

Cross-chargeability

There are recognised exceptions that let an applicant be charged to a country other than their own birthplace. The best known is charging to a spouse’s country of birth, where a husband and wife are both immigrating and the spouse’s country has a shorter queue. A child may in some circumstances be charged to a parent’s country of birth, and there are provisions covering people born in a country in which neither parent was born or resident.

These are real and they matter enormously to the people they apply to: cross-chargeability can move a case from the India column to the general one, which in some categories is the difference between a wait of years and a wait of decades. They are also specific, fact-dependent, and exactly the sort of thing this site cannot tell you about your own case.

Whether cross-chargeability applies to a particular family is a question for a lawyer, not for a table. This guide can tell you the mechanism exists. It cannot tell you whether you qualify.

What chargeability does not change

• It does not change the priority date.
• It does not change the preference category.
• It does not change over time on its own. Country of birth is fixed; naturalising elsewhere does not move you to another column.
• It is not chosen. Where an exception applies it is applied because the facts fit it, not because it would be more convenient.