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Hi klm,
IV (immigrant Visa) is the technical term for a green card. unlike the visa associated with H1, B1 or F1 which are non-immigrant visas.
If you look up the visa bulletin that is published by the state dept. and contains the priority dates, it defines priority date as the date beyond which an immigrant visa is not available. This is why people say your priority date has to be current (before the cutoff date) for you to get your green card i.e. IV.
Apparently, I824 is used for a variety of purposes but one of the well known purpose is to \'initiate a cable\' (State dept. terminology) which will effect a transfer of your immigrant visa petition (I140 for employment cases and I130 for family cases) to national visa center (NVC) in new hampshire. From there your case will be forwarded to the consulate, under whose jurisdiction your place of residence outside usa falls, whenever your PD is current and the consulate is ready to process. Given the distributed nature (of consulates across different cities in different countries), they seem to be faster in issuing your IV. Your choice for specifying AoS or CP is done thru section4 of I140, where you can indicate either AoS (first box) or CP (second box). If you file for CP during I140, your case will be automatically transferred to NVC, but to convert back to AoS you just need to file 485. However, your first choice was AoS and then you decide to file for CP, you need to file I824. I don\'t know why this asymmetric processing, but then I don\'t work for INS nor NVC.
If your lawyer is telling you can\'t file for CP after filing for AoS, he is either not a competent immigration lawyer or he is fooling with you.
For more information, check immihelp.com and imminfo.com. Also, check the message boards on consular processing on this website. Hope this helps.