bloreboy said:
Folks who have their 140 approved and are in EB3 category,
What is your understanding on the likely timeline for 485 approval. i am not able to interpret much based on past trends since we do not have any approvals for those who filed within the past year ?
Do you think it is likely to follow the established timelines of the USCIS ? . the reason i ask is that, I have seen several concurrent filers within the past year get FP notices. Are they near the approval process ? . Please let me know your thoughts ...
This probably belongs in the I-485 forum (
http://www.immigrationportal.com/forumdisplay.php?f=96) where questions like this have already been discussed somewhat but here's where things seem to stand at this point:
The official processing date for I-485's is now at 11/12/02. We seem to be seeing 2 "waves" of approvals lately for around Nov / Dec 2002 NDs and another wave for cases wtih NDs somewhere in Mar - Sep 2003. There have even been some approvals for people with ND's in Oct/Nov 2003 of even 2004 that I've seen.
The best guess at this point is that the VSC is skimming through all cases trying to approve "easy" ones if possible. If you aren't approved in one of these waves, then you may have to wait quite a while for your case to be approved (and definitely initiate an inquiry, once the official processing date is 60 days past your date).
I'm not sure what defines an "easy" case -- this might depend on your country of origin, the EB catagory and whether you have moved or changed jobs or done anything else that might suggest more detailed processing.
Of course, the approval pattern could change at any time, especially if the VSC starts to implement the F.O. memo more than they have so far (i.e. process concurrently filed I-140 and I-485 at the same time).
For my own ND (10/23/03) I expect that I could be approved in anywhere from 1 - 12 months (longer if I'm unlucky and my name check gets held up or something...).
See also the 2003 tracker (
http://www.immigrationportal.com/showthread.php?t=144822&page=3) and the information at rupnet (e.g.
http://www.rupnet.net/immigration/reports/enter_date_range.asp?place=100) can also be very useful as is the sampling scanning that nemessis and others have been doing (
http://www.immigrationportal.com/showthread.php?p=932576#post932576).
ETA
