How many of you still believe its just a mess. I believe its something more sinister, something deliberate and something totally avoidable if desired.
Even slow states like california used to process labors in 3 months in 2000 when the economy needed people like us. Now there is so much outcry about H1/L1's taking up all software jobs in this country. Most people who came in the boom time are now finishing up their 6 years. I think they just want people like us to leave. And they are doing it by making the law highly unfavorable to us. If they want to provide immigration relief, they can easily allow us to file I485 regardless of visa availability. The application can sit there and rot while we wait for the priority dates to become current, but it would make all the difference in our lives and provide relief to the hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants. Just having the ability to file an application would make all the difference in our lives. They gave relief to the undocumented workers. Why not do something in good faith for the legal immigrants too. Now they are processing cases for undocumented workers along with legal potential immigrants. Why the hell should an application for an illegal slow down an application for a legal potential immigrant family.
Students started going to other countries for higher studies so they made a seperate category for Master's and increased the number of H1B visas for Master's to 50,000 and made student visa dual intent.
When they had a shortage of nurses, they made a seperate EB category and recaptured the visas for nurces so that they were not affected by retrogression.
I think the backlog center was created to delay applications and not for processing them fast. All centers could have easily cleared the applications by now if there were no BEC's. This funding of 100M could have been better spent hiring few more people in the DOL's.
Now that the visa retrogression dates are badly screwed up and after you clear a 4 year old labor, you are hit with retrogression. How long can one hold on to his job at the same position/salary /designation. Most people cant. And this is why there are delays, so that we all get kicked out one by one.
Forming BEC was a fantastic idea. If I were the govt and if I wanted to cause delays, I would subcontract the job to a private contractor so that the blame goes there. Since there was such a big transition involved in moving 3,60,000 files and reentering data, they have good excuse that the task in hand is big and the files were sent in random order, software crashes in BEC's and so on. Then 45 day letter was another great idea to delay applications. Send 45 day letters at random to create confusion. And they cannot provide status and any processing timeframes aven after 1 year of forming BEC.
On top of that, they started PERM. What can I say. All of us could have been given the opportunity to convert to PERM but they made it so difficult for old timers and so easy for newcomers that people who start the process now can get labor approved in 3-4 months.
If I had the opportunity to go back in time and do it all over again, I wouldnt. I wouldnt waste my time and energy over something that has no timeframes, no fairness, where rules keep on changing daily. I have invested so much time and energy that its difficult to quit now.
Happy 2006.
I will try to convince my employer to file PERM ...