How long will it take to get our GC (employment-based)?

[Totalnewbie]

My husband and I (both Canadians) have appied for an adjustment of status under employment based 3 (EB3)(skilled/professional category). We've already gone through labor certification and received our EAD (employment author. doc) in Oct 2007. We're still waiting for our AOS (I-485).

I heard from people that because the current visa bulletin (unfortunately the forum won't let me post the link because I'm new) shows EB3 as U = unavailable, the immigration department is not processing our AOS at this time.

1. Is that true? Do we look at the bulletin to gauge whether immigration is processing our category (even though we are not applying for a "visa")?

2. I've always been looking at the case status service online for the service centre where we filed our application to see the dates they were processing, but somebody told me that EB3 has to first be current before they will continue processing.

3. And how come all the other EB categories are either current or have a date 2003 or 2004, but EB3 is the only one that is unavailable!?

Please help as I'm baffled! Thanks!

[Steven]

This is the current visa bulletin: http://travel.state.gov/visa/frvi/bulle ... _4252.html

Read the subparagraph in the notes, you have to look at the June bulletin which says they're processing applications received prior to March 2006. How much that tells you though is unclear, these things are difficult to infer wait times from. If they've already run out of numbers after nine months, that means they're processing nine months worth of applications a year, so if you applied today that would take three years for your number to come up.

Assuming the quota use remains constant, which is unlikely. Might get worse. Might get better. But roughly, around three years.