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Comment by nighthawk24 | Hacker News Reader

"if I had been from India instead of Australia it'd be another 6 years or so before anyone even looked at my application."

For anyone born in India, it would be another 11~12 years(and 6 years for China-mainland born) or so before anyone would even accept a last-step document, even if approved for green card with I-140 approved today.

It is unbelievable and clearly discrimanatory that legal immigrants from India (and China) are expected to stick with the same employer for more than a decade.

https://travel.state.gov/content/visas/en/law-and-policy/bul...

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After I-140 is approved you will be able to apply for I-485 to get EAD which will allow you to change employers. Obama's executive order is making it so. You will now see two sets of date for adjustment of status filing in the visa bulliten. Execution of the order is still catching up.

President Obama announced the executive order in November 2014(https://www.uscis.gov/immigrationaction) Since then, the USCIS has just complicated the process by adding one more application "Filling for Employment Application" which is actually 5 years apart form the Final Action date(when the visa number is actually made available).

There have been numerous meetings to solve this mess which affects the USCIS and DHS too. But the Corporate-Legal/lawyers lobby tends to win over USCIS every time justifying to keep the dates as is, and not to use the un-used visa numbers from other countries, after-all they make more money when the legal immigrants are kept in limbo, and applying for various applications and are bound to stick to a single employer.

I was basing it on the priority date for my category (EB-2) when I first considered getting my green card.

For Indians in the EB-2 category the priority date is July 2009, so assuming that the demand remains constant it would be roughly 6 years until my hypothetical priority date would be current.

You are correct, it would be 6 years till someone would review the documents, but still 11~12 years till the visa number is made available towards the green card.

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