National Interest Waiver Approvals – Part I
National Interest Waiver – Part I
I’m going to introduce a new segment to my blog readers. Many current and potential clients contact me or my office to discuss whether or not they can qualify for certain applications like the national interest waiver. I wrote one previous entry describing the typical qualifications for our NIW clients but I would like to start a periodic series describing particular NIW cases that we have successfully handled in the past.
National Interest Waiver Requirements
- That the alien seeks employment in an area of substantial intrinsic merit;
- That the proposed benefit will be national in scope; and
- That the national interest would be adversely affected if a labor certification would be required for the alien.
National Interest Waiver Approved Case Part I
Degree: PhD in Physics
Position: Research Associate
Field of Expertise: Materials Science
Publications: 14
Citations: 11 including self citations
Conferences: 21
Recommendation Letters: 4
The applicant in this case was a South Korea national. It was approved without a request for additional evidence and because the visa numbers were current for the EB2 category, the applicant obtained her residency approximately 1 year after filing. Current NIW processing times are much faster and since the second half of 2009, we are regularly seeing approvals in less than 3 months.
This applicant surpassed the minimum requirements for an NIW application. Most of our clients have 4 publications or less and are employed as a post doc at a University. However, the applicant had a very poor publication to citation ratio. This could lead the adjudicating officer to believe that her work was not well regarded and of poor quality. In a sense this was true but we were able to overcome this issue by highlighting her other accomplishments and through her recommendation letters.
In: National Interest Waiver · Tagged with: National Interest Waiver, NIW