hi Boston ... I have a more optimistic view:
- according to tracker, the % of approvals at this point is around 30%, so from the original 350K, maybe 100K have already cleared.
- looking at the SWA/Regional processing times, you can see that for PBEC, the only states that had cases still in April/2001 were DC and MD. The other big states (NY, NJ) had already cleared Apr/2001. I didn't run the same exercise for DBEC, but I think the only state that was stuck in April/2001 was IN (correct me if I'm wrong).
- of course, there are a number of "complicated" cases still hanging around, but I honestly doubt they amount to more than 10K cases.
- also, if you look at the H1B approvals, the average was 100K new H1B's per year back in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, etc. We can imagine that at this point the distribution of labor cases could roughly be something like:
2002 - 100K
2003 - 100K
2004 - 100K
and the remaining 50K would be split between 2001 and 2005, which actually makes sense, considering only the pending cases from 2001 and 3 months of 2005 (before PERM). I personally think that 2002 and 2003 were the peak years for labor applications, so they could have even more than 100K each.
also, at this point, we can pretty much forget FIFO, I really don't think they will implement a single FIFO, I don't think it makes sense from a practical point of view. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it's just based on what we've seen so far.
I do think they'll have queues per state, as we're seeing now, and TR will be left way behind.
So, if this analysis holds true, the remaining cases from 2001 will not hold up cases from other years because they'll be working on different states at the same time.
just my opinion
