Every month the State Department publishes a spreadsheet nobody reads: how many immigrant visas each consulate issued, broken down by country of birth and visa category. The February 2026 spreadsheet is the one that finally got attention, because the New York Times ran the numbers in October and the White House reposted the result as a win. The headline figure is that U.S. consulates issued 26,483 immigrant visas in February 2026 against 51,058 in February 2025. That is a drop of 48 percent in a single year.
I went back to the State Department tables myself, because headline numbers hide what matters for the people who read this blog. The national figure is a story about halving. The figures for the countries my clients come from are a story about something closer to zero. I will walk through what the data shows, what caused it, what has changed since February, and what it does and does not mean for a case that is pending right now.
What the numbers actually say
The decline was not gradual and it was not spread evenly across the year. In October 2025 consulates issued 52,400 immigrant visas, in line with the roughly 52,000 monthly average of the two years before. November fell to 42,720, December recovered slightly to 46,478, January 2026 dropped to 34,599, and February landed at 26,483. Half of the normal flow disappeared in four months.
Nor was it spread evenly across the world. The Times analysis, comparing February 2026 to the 2023 to 2024 monthly average for each region, found Central Asia down 99 percent, Africa down 89 percent, Eastern Europe down 84 percent, the Middle East down 81 percent, South Asia down 63 percent, and Western Europe down 16 percent. Two countries went up. Mexico received 7,346 immigrant visas, a 17 percent increase, and Canada received 459, a 142 percent increase. Together those two accounted for roughly 30 percent of every immigrant visa issued that month.
The regional figures are useful, but for the families I work with the country rows are what count. Here is February 2025 against February 2026, straight from the State Department's tables, summed across all visa categories.
| Country of birth | Feb 2025 | Feb 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Russia | 433 | 19 | down 96% |
| Uzbekistan | 404 | 1 | down 99.8% |
| Armenia | 221 | 4 | down 98% |
| Georgia | 209 | 5 | down 98% |
| Kyrgyzstan | 162 | 2 | down 99% |
| Kazakhstan | 134 | 4 | down 97% |
| Belarus | 81 | 4 | down 95% |
| Moldova | 53 | 17 | down 68% |
| Ukraine | 143 | 105 | down 27% |
Source: U.S. Department of State, Monthly Immigrant Visa Issuances by Place of Birth and Visa Class, February 2025 and February 2026. All visa classes combined.
Nineteen immigrant visas for the entire Russian-born population of the world in one month. One for Uzbekistan. Look at how the Russian nineteen break down and the picture gets sharper still: six were parents of U.S. citizens, five were spouses, one was a child, and the rest were employment-based cases, including a single investor visa. This is a consulate system that had, for practical purposes, stopped issuing immigrant visas to people born in these countries.
Ukraine is the exception in the table, and the reason it is the exception tells you what happened to everyone else.
Why it happened
Two policies were in force in February 2026, and they hit different countries in different ways.
The first was Presidential Proclamation 10998, signed December 16, 2025 and effective January 1, 2026. It expanded the country-specific entry restrictions from the summer of 2025 to 39 countries, with full suspensions for some and partial suspensions for others, and it removed the exception for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens that the earlier version had kept. Of the countries in my table, only Turkmenistan is on that list. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova are not.
The second was the one that did the damage for Russian speakers. On January 21, 2026 the State Department stopped processing immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries, on the stated ground that people from those countries were at high risk of using public benefits. The list included Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Moldova. It did not include Ukraine, and it did not include Tajikistan or Turkmenistan. Interviews were cancelled, pending cases were refused, and new cases were not scheduled. The government later told a federal court that more than 43,000 applications were refused under the policy between mid-January and late August.
Put the two lists side by side with the table and the pattern is exact. Every country in my table that fell by more than 90 percent was on the 75-country list. Ukraine, which was on neither list, fell 27 percent, which is roughly the general decline everyone experienced from slower processing. Moldova was on the list but fell less than the others, probably because of cases already in the pipeline. The data is a map of the policy.
It is worth pausing on what that means. The 75-country pause was not a visa ban in the sense most people use the word. It did not say that Russians or Uzbeks were inadmissible. It said their immigrant visa cases would not be processed. The effect on a family waiting for a spouse or a parent was the same.
What has changed since February
Here is where the February data stops being a forecast and becomes history, because the legal landscape in November looks very different.
The 75-country pause is gone. On August 21, 2026, Judge Jeannette Vargas of the federal district court in Manhattan vacated it in a case called CLINIC v. Rubio, holding that the Secretary of State had exceeded his authority and that the policy conflicted with the Immigration and Nationality Act's prohibition on nationality-based discrimination in issuing immigrant visas. The State Department confirmed on August 28 that the pause was no longer in effect. The government appealed, asked the district court to pause its own ruling and was refused on September 25 in an order that called the appeal arguments "largely insubstantial," and then asked the Second Circuit for an emergency stay.
On October 19 a single Second Circuit judge split the difference. He refused to stay the vacatur itself, so the pause remains dead and no consulate can refuse an immigrant visa on that ground. But he did temporarily stay the part of the judgment that ordered the government to reopen and re-decide the roughly 43,000 refusals that had been based solely on the pause, citing the doctrine that consular visa decisions are generally not reviewable in court. A three-judge panel is now considering the full stay motion and had not ruled as of early November. So if your case was refused under the pause, the policy that refused you is unlawful, but the court order forcing the government to look at your file again is on hold. The government has said it is reviewing those cases anyway under its September guidance, without committing to a deadline.
Proclamation 10998 remains fully in effect. For the 39 countries on that list, nothing in the court rulings helps, and the removal of the immediate-relative exception means that spouses and parents of U.S. citizens from those countries are still blocked unless they fit one of the remaining exceptions or obtain a national interest waiver.
And then there is the third thing, which did not exist in February and which is the reason I would not expect the March, April or any later numbers to look dramatically better once they finally appear. In late August, within days of the CLINIC ruling, the State Department paused immigrant visa interviews worldwide, describing it as a global training initiative for consular officers. Some posts resumed in September, and I wrote in October about the new interview preparation addendum that some consulates began sending out, with its detailed questions about housing, income, debts, insurance and public benefits. But as of the State Department's own update on November 3 and reporting on November 11, there is still no announced date for a general restart. Many posts are scheduling nothing. A family from a country that was never on any list is waiting just as long as a family from Russia.
One more fact belongs here. February 2026 is still the most recent month the State Department has published. In a normal year the monthly tables appear with a lag of six to eight weeks. It is now mid-November and there is no March, no April, nothing through the summer. The State Department labels these reports preliminary and has not explained the delay. Whatever the reason, it means that the effect of the court ruling and the interview pause cannot yet be measured, and anyone telling you they know what the summer numbers look like is guessing.
What this means for your case
If you or a family member are in the immigrant visa process, here is how I would read all of this.
The February numbers are not a prediction about your file. They describe what happened to tens of thousands of cases under a policy that no longer exists. A spouse of a U.S. citizen born in Russia or Uzbekistan can be scheduled, interviewed and issued a visa today as a matter of law. The question is not whether the consulate is allowed to issue it but when it will get around to interviewing you, and that question is currently governed by the worldwide interview pause, not by your nationality.
If your case was refused between January and August and the refusal cited the public benefits policy or came as a bare 221(g) with no other reason, keep every piece of paper. The refusal was based on a policy a federal court has declared unlawful. The mechanism for re-review is tied up in the Second Circuit, but the government has said it is reviewing these files, and when a path to re-decision opens, the people who are ready will go first.
If your case is at the National Visa Center and documentarily complete, do not assume the silence means something is wrong with your file. Check the case status, respond to anything the NVC asks for within days rather than weeks, and start assembling the kind of financial evidence the new interview addendum describes, because the officer who eventually interviews you will be trained on it. Public charge is the lens the State Department is applying to everyone now, whatever country you are from.
If you are eligible to adjust status inside the United States rather than process at a consulate, this is the year to look seriously at that option. The interview pause, the training initiative and the re-review backlog are all consular problems. USCIS has its own delays, and the new public charge rule for adjustment applications took effect on September 18, but it is a different system with a different queue.
And if you are from one of the 39 countries under Proclamation 10998, the analysis is different and harder, and it depends on your category and whether an exception or waiver is realistically available. That is a conversation to have with an attorney, not something to take from a blog post.
Lower issuance in a State Department spreadsheet is not, on its own, a sign that any individual case will be refused. But the spreadsheet does tell you what the system was doing, and the court filings tell you what it was told to stop doing. Knowing both is the difference between waiting and waiting well.
This post is general information about immigration law and is not legal advice for any specific situation. The policies described here have changed several times this year and may change again. If you have a pending immigrant visa case, talk to an immigration attorney about your own facts.