Closeby,
When I filed my 485 couple of years ago, the PD was current, there was no retrogression for any country. 4-5 months later, all of a sudden, out of nowhere the regression came in. Everything went donw hill from there. I tried and tried relinking, with no success. I ended up paying $2000 (just for relinking) to a lawyer who claimed that he could get that done by calling, etc. The mere fact that I paid $2000 to relink will show you how hopeless the situation was. Fortunately, the PD became current now. However, with the new bill going on, they are threatening to cut down the immigration visas (check
www.immigrationvoice.com) which will make the PD situation worse. I am worried that they could roll back the dates and I might get caught in retrogression again.
Why go thro these uncertainties? Just file a second 485, get it thro (sure fire way). Lawyers discourage you to do it because they need to do the extra work again. They just want to send a letter and forget about it. Right now, you have the opportunity to file 485 with lower fees (it is going up shortly).
Even the couple of people who got it done did take up several different measures and so it is not easy or guaranteed. Most times, you accidentally get in touch with a sympathetic soul (whom you can rarely find) who fixes the proplem. You don't know how may times I had tried to call the customer service and tried so many different tactics to get it moving,, no luck. I tried to contact the local senator and have waited for two months with no response. Everybody backs off since this is out of the ordinary. I tried to go to infopass, no luck. I wrote the email address for the service center, they returned the email saying that they no longer accept inquiries thro email (which is not true - they sometimes do answer emails which is more straight forward). Time and again, all I saw was failures.
You probably should base your decision based on the majority of cases (which did nto succeed) rather than the minority who were lucky. We did not know the issues with the interfiling and so went and did it. Now that you know the plight of everyone, you should reconisder your decision. Do NOT depend on the lawyer's advice. How many relinks did he do in the past year (I bet close to zero). They talk about theory, practical issue is quite different.
If you ask me, paying $650 ( I think that is the refiliing fee is) is a extremely small price to pay for making your future certain. If your lawyer does not want to file again, you can always file it yourself using your old 485 package as template. I have filed mine on my own and there are several others here who have done the same.
Intially, the new immigration bill (which they are debating right now) looked positive for reducing the retrogression. However, they are introducing several amendments to alter the # of visas negatively.
Think about this, would you rather get your green card in 3 months or try your luck!! My single piece of suggestion is NOT to depend on lawyer's advice alone. They just want your money and do as little as possible. My lawyer told me that I needed to have like a Noble prize to get thro NIW as he was not experienced with NIW process and I proved him wrong. They don't necessarily have the experience in every possible scenario..
One more thing, even the people who got lucky, could not pin point their reason for success. They knew one of the routes worked and they don't know which one. I have tried each one of those routes, however, it did not work for me.
Sorry, if I sound very aggressive. I just want to save someone from agony.
Thanks
Ela
Thank you all, I got so many good responses. My attorney suggested to relink so that we can save some money on refiling. I read a couple of cases where people succeded in relinking without any updates before approval. It sounds scary without any updates, which probably will drive me crazy. Thanks for all your messages.