Why We Built VisaVigilAI

It started with ten addresses.

A partner here needed to know whether any of ten project sites qualified as a Targeted Employment Area. For an EB-5 investor, that answer decides whether the minimum investment is $800,000 or $1,050,000. Nothing we could find would simply answer it, so we did it the slow way: one address at a time, pulling census tracts and comparing unemployment with the national average. Ten addresses took most of an afternoon.

Somewhere in the middle of the list, the obvious thought arrived: this is a script. We wrote one, and it is still running. It is the TEA checker on this site, which is why it takes a whole list of addresses.

Writing the numbers down

The Visa Bulletin is online, but it is spread across 130 separate pages. USCIS processing times change without notice and keep no history, so whatever that page said last August is gone. The Department of Labor’s PERM reports were scattered enough that we rebuilt years of them from web archives. You can research a question later; you can’t research a number nobody wrote down.

So we keep all of it, every day: every Visa Bulletin since 2015, daily snapshots of USCIS processing times across 43 forms, PERM queue history back to 2020, and employer sponsorship records back to 2009.

Answering the questions you ask us

When will my date be current? Can I file this month? Will my child age out? Each became a free calculator on this site, built on that record. They give the same answer every time, because they are calculations, not AI.

Rebuilding how our firm works

We replaced the software our firm ran on with our own, CaseVigil, built by our lawyers for immigration cases. Your forms are checked against the government’s printed page, box by box. Your questionnaires, documents and signatures come through one secure portal. Your filing fees are kept apart in our trust account. Our research assistant runs on VisaVigil, the immigration-law model our own lawyers trained, which answers from the law itself and cites its sources; an attorney still reviews everything. Every new case our firm opens now runs on it.

What it means for you

Fewer forms filled twice, fewer errors, and answers grounded in the current law. The company we formed to build it, VisaVigilAI, Inc., now offers the same software to other immigration firms.