It's all part of the grand design!
Santaji (Is it the Claus kind or Banta's twin kind....just kidding),
I realized that fact years ago. This also explains why they have over four levels (or stages) of processing before one gets their green card. Local labor, regional labor, I-140, I-485, not to mention each one of them having their own requirements of RIR, non-RIR, newspaper ads, HR letters, Namecheck, security check, in addition to EAD's, AP's etc etc.
The biggest game (or trick) they play with applicants is how they modulate and control different stages in this process. If they expedite labor processing, they will certainly slow down I-140 and I-485 or vice versa.
If labor is approved in due time (few months to few years), and I-485 is ready to be approved, you could be put into a never-ending Namecheck. If everything else is ready and the case is approvable, you will meet the Retrogression "monster".
The woes are endless. But the lessons are not. I, for one, believe that for every one individual who will take an extra 2-4 years (on top of what the "normal" timeframe may be) to get his Green card, he/she will also be away from their citizenship by the same time, and any potential sponsorship of family members. This is what I suspect is USCIS policy, maybe not so explicit. Even family based ROW is as slow as India or China or any other EB retrogressed country. The bottomline: USA wants to severly limit the number of people it wants in. And I don't disagree with that bit.
Most people that I know who have green cards or are citizens or close to becoming one, don't appear too enthusiastic about sponsoring kith and kin from India. I guess they remember the travails and tortures of their own process and unless desperate, will not put their loved ones through this "Black Hole".
I give much more credit to the guys at USCIS/DOS/DHS and have no doubt that there are some very smart guys, albeit hawkish when it comes to immigration issues. They know how to regulate the valve and flow of immigrants to this country.
Since Visa numbers have reverted to normal levels for H1-B's in the last few years, and whatever "extra" income USCIS can make is from those 2-3 some years of H1-B increase applicants, maybe the present mess is a combination of case overload as well as "extra" revenue model that they are milking to capacity. In a few years, there will not be over 100,000 extra applicants paying renewal EAD's and renewal AP's to USCIS.
Roll the dice and await your turn...that's what it's all about.
santa4u said:
It's so frustrating .......
first you wait for your PD to become current and then
if that becomes current, then you wait for your Namecheck to clear....the saga never ends...
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PD: Aug 02 (EB2/INDIA/TSC)
485 ND: Sep 05