The EB-3 unskilled visa for Bangladeshis: what the government's own numbers show

Ask around in Dhaka about the EB-3 unskilled visa and you get one of two answers. Either the whole thing is a scam, or someone's cousin got one so you can too.

Both are partly true, and neither is enough to decide on.

So I went to the source files. Everything below comes from documents the US government publishes itself.

258 people in four years

The State Department publishes an annual report showing how many immigrant visas each country received in each category. Table VI, Part II.

Note the shape of it. FY2023 was the peak at 104, and the next year it fell to 78. This is not a number that is climbing.

For comparison, the Philippines received 1,022 in FY2024 alone. They have had real employer pipelines running for years.

But how many people are applying?

The first step in employer sponsorship is PERM. DOL publishes every PERM case as a file each year, and that file records the applicant's citizenship.

The FY2024 file holds 92,258 cases. Bangladeshi applicants account for 1,612 of them, which makes Bangladesh the ninth largest source country.

The same file lists the jobs:

Cleaning alone is 330. Software development is 53.

What actually happened to those 1,612

This is the part nobody shows you. The right column is every nationality filing PERM in the US, 92,258 cases. The left is the 1,612 Bangladeshi ones.

Two things stand out.

Bangladeshi cases are denied about three times as often. Across all nationalities the denial rate among decided cases is 5.4%. For Bangladeshis it is 15.1%.

And most certifications die anyway. Of every Bangladeshi case that was certified, 64.9% expired without being used. Once PERM is certified the employer has a window to file the I-140. They didn't. The certificate sat there until it lapsed.

Out of 1,612 applications, 477 are still alive with a valid certification. Roughly 30%.

That 477 does not mean 477 people got visas. It means they cleared the first step. After that comes the I-140, then the queue, then the interview. The actual visa count that year was 78.

Filing from home or from inside the US is not the same bet

The DOL file records what status each applicant held when the case was filed. Split the 1,612 Bangladeshi cases that way:

Two things fall out of this.

First, you can do it from home. 731 people, close to half, were not in the United States when their case was filed. The idea that you must somehow get into the country first is simply not true.

Second, filing from home is a much worse bet. 20.1% denied from outside, against 2.4% for people holding H-1B status. Eight times the risk.

When the employer dies, the whole batch dies

This is the finding that stopped me. The same file names the employer, so you can count how many cases each company filed and what became of them.

150 Bangladeshis joined the queue through GDI Services. 140 certifications came through, then not one of them was used and all of them expired. The other 10 were denied. Out of 150 people, nobody advanced.

HES Facilities and Cleanstar National are starker still. 41 cases and 34 cases, every single one denied. No exceptions.

Which means your case depends less on how good your paperwork is than on which employer you attached yourself to. Tied to the wrong one, your own qualifications count for nothing.

The file also states what these jobs pay

Every PERM case carries a prevailing wage, the legal floor for that role. Annualised, here are the medians across the Bangladeshi cases:

Now set that against 20 lakh taka, roughly 16,000 dollars. A janitor's job pays 23,000 a year before tax, rent and food. Clearing the agent's fee alone takes years.

One more thing from the file. 1,216 of the 1,612 cases, 75% of them, are at "Level I", the government's own entry-level wage tier. And 1,286 of them record the minimum education requirement as "None".

So do people get rejected, or something else?

Some do, and more than average. But rejection is not the main thing.

At the I-140 stage, EB-3 approval runs at 97.3% (FY2022: 53,096 approved against 1,487 denied). Most cases are not blocked. They are abandoned. 883 certificates that nobody ever used.

The real enemies are time and attrition.

The queue moves slower than the calendar

Take the whole of FY2026. In October 2025 the EB-3 Other Workers final action date stood at 15 July 2021. By September 2026 it had reached 1 April 2022.

Eleven calendar months elapsed. The queue advanced eight and a half months. A rate of 0.78.

Now do the arithmetic. That cutoff sits 53 months behind today. If your PERM is filed today, today is your priority date, and the queue has to cover all 53 of those months to reach you, at 0.78 months per month.

53 ÷ 0.78 comes to about 69 months. Just under six years, if the rate holds.

Now look at the skilled queue

This is the part nobody mentions, and it matters more than any of it.

Over those same eleven months, the EB-3 skilled and professional cutoff moved from 1 April 2023 to 1 September 2024. Seventeen months.

Read that again. The skilled queue is moving faster than real time, which means it is shrinking. The unskilled queue is moving slower than real time, which means it is getting longer.

The gap between them is 28 months and widening.

And PERM itself takes a year

All of that is just the visa queue. Before any of it, PERM has to happen.

The DOL file records both the filing date and the decision date for each of the 1,612 Bangladeshi cases. Subtract one from the other and the median is 392 days. One case in ten took more than 627 days. The longest ran 1,099 days, nearly three years.

So the first step alone averages over a year.

A lot can happen in six years

• The employer can close. For a small cleaning firm or a pizza franchise, five years is a long time.
• The employer can withdraw the petition. If that happens within 180 days of I-140 approval, the priority date is lost and you start again.
• The annual cap can close the category mid-year. It did in both FY2024 and FY2025.
• Policy can change. From 21 January to 21 August 2026, immigrant visa issuance was frozen entirely for nationals of 75 countries including Bangladesh. A court struck it down; the government has appealed.

About the 20 lakh

Twenty lakh taka is roughly 16 to 17 thousand dollars.

20 CFR 656.12(b) says the employer must not seek or receive payment for anything connected to obtaining the labor certification. Advertising, the DOL filing, the employer's attorney fees: all the employer's. The same rule says explicitly that the worker may pay for their own attorney.

Add up everything a worker may legally pay and you land in the low thousands of dollars. Not sixteen thousand.

So most of a 20 lakh fee is a placement or brokerage charge for finding the sponsor. That is not automatically illegal. But it means the money buys an introduction and a filing, not a visa.

Why there is no refund

• The agent's deliverable is the sponsor and the filing. Both can genuinely happen while the visa never does.
• There is no rejection letter to point at. The case simply sits pending.
• When it fails, the failure is usually the employer's: closed, withdrew, or couldn't prove ability to pay. You have no contract with the employer.
• The agent is in Bangladesh, the employer is in the US. You have standing in neither.

What to check before paying anyone

• Is there a named employer you can verify yourself? Not "a hotel in Texas". A name, an address, a registration you can look up.
• Who does the attorney represent? In a PERM case, normally the employer. That is structure, not fraud, but it means nobody represents you unless you hire your own. The regulation permits that.
• Get the fee broken down in writing. No line item should be PERM advertising, the DOL filing, or the employer's attorney.
• Can the employer prove ability to pay? Nationally this is the single largest cause of I-140 denial. A real sponsor has thought about it.
• Is anyone promising under four years, or guaranteeing approval? Nobody can do either.

The honest summary

The route is real. 258 people did it. Legitimate agencies and attorneys exist, and the Philippines sends over a thousand people a year this way.

But decide with the numbers in front of you: about 65 visas a year for Bangladesh, a denial rate three times the average, two out of three certifications expiring unused, a year just to clear PERM and close to six more in the visa queue, and a non-refundable 20 lakh at the start of it.

I am not an immigration lawyer. This is published government data, not legal advice. Talk to a licensed attorney about your own case. Litigation and processing in this area change month to month.