“Thank you for your great work! I am very happy with your service.”

Case Summary:

A Ph.D. student engaged the legal services of North America Immigration Law Group (WeGreened.com) for help with his I-140 petition (first step in the green card process). After thoroughly going through his credentials, we verified that the best course of action to get a green card would be to file his I-140 petition under EB-2 NIW (National Interest Waiver). As soon as an attorney-client relationship arose, we immediately set out to prove to the USCIS that our client’s research is important to the United States and that not many other researchers can mirror his success.

Steps Leading Up to Petition Approval:

As strong as our client’s credentials were, and as skilled as our legal team was at putting together successful EB-2 NIW petitions, it did not change the fact that gaining petition approval was a challenging task. We started off by asking our client to gather recommendation letters from other researchers in his field. The handful of letters that he managed to obtain were strong and certainly served their purpose of proving to the USCIS that our client’s work positively impacts the nation. For instance, one of the letters stated that: “[Client’s] work is applicable to not only fellow researchers and policymakers, but to all Americans that contribute to U.S. household consumption. His results raise awareness of a major global issue that particularly concerns the United States. Since many consumers tend to not participate in environmental impact surveys, [client’s] research provides the United States with extremely useful data that is practical for governmental and scientific action.”

These recommendation letters were accompanied by summaries of our client’s portfolio: his citation count, publication record, and research projects. When we filed the case, our client’s work on the optimization of economic, societal, and environmental benefits of emerging transportation systems had amassed 57 citations, and he had published 10 peer-reviewed journal articles (4 of them first-authored). He had also conducted more than a dozen peer reviews for various scientific journals. We used these accomplishments and other evidence that we had collected to firmly establish that our client’s investigations are essential to the United States’ efforts to pave the way for the adoption of autonomous electric vehicles. In addition, his work also addresses how to best leverage the change in vehicle type to achieve environmental and societal benefits at a system-wide level.

In Conclusion:

The USCIS spent 6 months and 13 days reviewing this NIW case before granting their approval. We are pleased at the outcome and would like to thank our client for placing his trust in us. We congratulate our client for overcoming this hurdle and wish him the best as he continues to advance the field of transportation sustainability with his extensive research.