One Week Approval for EB-1A Exceptional Talent Engineers

Year: 2020
Nationality: Chinese
Professional talent: Engineering
Highest education: PhD
Applicant: Ms. Qi
Petition Type: EB-1A for Distinguished Immigrants
Processing time: 7 days approval without additional documents

Difficulties in this case:
– Ms. Qi has published many academic articles, but the number of citations per article is small.
– Ms. Qi has no clear plan to work in the U.S. in a few years, and her intention to come to the U.S. has yet to be discovered.
– (a) Most of Ms. Qi’s patents belong to the category of unused utility models, with fewer patents for inventions.
– Ms. Qi received the highest award to the national level, but the award is for collective achievements, she is not the first in line for the award, and the award was given 10 years ago.

Brief background:
Ms. Qi worked her way up from undergraduate to PhD in China, and then worked as an academic engineering consultant in universities. Over the years, Ms. Qi has published many academic articles, served as an engineering consultant for major projects, and accumulated many awards and patents, gradually making a name for herself in the industry. She decided to try to apply for an EB-1A Green Card for Distinguished Professionals because of her future development plans and her son’s education. However, she did not know much about the application process and was not sure if she could really meet the application criteria with her qualifications.

After asking around, Ms. Qi came to Tsang & Associates and paid to evaluate her EB-1A possibilities. Joseph Tsang and Ms. Qi worked together to sort out her case, develop a filing strategy, and explain the steps and timeline for filing. At the same time, Mr. Tsang also shared with Ms. Qi our previous EB-1A success stories and tips. After the case consultation and evaluation, Ms. Qi decided to appoint Tsang & Associates to handle her EB-1A petition on the spot.

Keys to success:

By compiling the data provided by Ms. Qi, Tsang & Associates found that Ms. Qi’s strengths lie in Authorship, Contribution and Judgement, which we have highlighted.

1. Outstanding ability to meet the “three out of ten” criteria
1) Authorship: This is Ms. Qi’s strength, as she has been publishing intermittently since she was a doctoral student and participated in local academic forums and published several academic articles in English during her study visits to the United States. Although Ms. Qi’s articles were not cited very often, we submitted 30 copies of Ms. Qi’s published academic articles to USCIS and explained that most of these articles were published in reputable industry journals and were highly read and downloaded, indicating strong professionalism and wide dissemination; as well as her bilingual academic writing ability, which meets the EB-1A requirement for publication.

2) Judgement: Ms. Qi has been involved in a wide range of reviews, from national awards to provincial awards, as well as journal paper screening. Tsang & Associates guided Ms. Qi to select the most important projects for review and prepared a lot of sufficient information. In addition, we conducted an in-depth background check of the projects and previous candidates, and gathered additional materials to demonstrate that the projects Ms. Qi reviewed were valuable in their own right, and that the previous candidates were among the best in the industry, demonstrating that Ms. Qi’s own outstanding abilities made her qualified for the position. This is a testament to Ms. Qi’s outstanding abilities that make her qualified for the position.

3) Outstanding Contribution: Although most of Ms. Qi’s patents belong to the category of unused utility models and fewer invention patents, each patent has a corresponding application letter to support it. It is easy to see from the application letters of her invention patents that the engineering party praised her patents, proving that by using Ms. Qi’s invented devices, many difficult problems in the construction process have been solved and her outstanding personal ability has been recognized. In addition, we also conducted further research and submitted an extranet presentation of Ms. Qi’s patent to further prove to the immigration officer that her patent would have a profound beneficial impact on the engineering community.

Now that the USCIS has significantly raised the bar for EB-1A processing, it is not safe to just meet the “three out of ten” criteria. In following up with Ms. Qi, Mr. Zang found that her performance in the areas of Awards and Critical Role was noteworthy and there was much room for improvement.

4) Awards: Even though the national level award Ms. Qi received 10 years ago was for a collective achievement, Tsang & Associates proved the weight of the award by submitting the background of the award and the social contributions of the previous winners of the award. Even if it is only a collective achievement of 10 years ago, it has played an important role in the development of the whole industry over the past 10 years.

5) Critical Role: After Ms. Qi graduated from her PhD, she mainly worked as an academic advisor in universities, so it was difficult to prove her leadership ability. Tsang & Associates took a different approach and learned that Ms. Qi, as a senior consultant, had participated in many joint engineering projects of universities and had given many professional guidance, which was crucial to the external cooperation of the university. We started from this perspective and made a reasonable argument to prove Ms. Qi’s leadership ability and value


2. How to continue to use her talents in her field of expertise to benefit the United States after entering the United States

Ms. Qi had not previously considered what she would do after coming to the U.S. because the early EB-1A petition did not require a high level of intent to come to the U.S. She also did not have a good understanding of the development and needs of the engineering industry in the U.S. because of the short period of study visits. She struggled with how to continue her expertise after coming to the United States.

Attorney Zang reminds: How do I write my intention to come to the United States? This is a difficult issue for many EB-1A applicants during the petition process. With the gradual increase in processing standards, the previous “false” intent to come to the U.S. is no longer effective in convincing the immigration officer, but may be counterproductive and leave a bad impression on the immigration officer. It is recommended that applicants communicate with their attorneys to brainstorm and enrich their intentions to come to the United States to be more realistic and reliable.

The law firm team also conducted in-depth background investigation and document search on the development and needs of the U.S. engineering industry, and finally compiled hundreds of pages of professional news reports and analysis materials, proving that the development rating of the U.S. engineering industry is still low and lags behind other developed countries, and needs the help of talents. Tsang & Associates was able to complete and enrich Ms. Qi’s intention to come to the U.S. based on these professional materials. Ms. Qi also went to the U.S. to visit a local Chinese expert working in a well-known engineering firm and asked him to issue a letter of recommendation to strengthen her intention to go to the U.S. again.

Case results:
Tsang & Associates submitted nearly 2,000 pages of application materials for Ms. Qi after the New Year 2020, and received an email notification of approval of her case with no addendum only one week later. Ms. Qi was very excited to receive this good news, and admitted that she had been very nervous about the RFE after the submission, and she was even psychologically prepared for it, but she really did not expect it to be approved so smoothly. Ms. Qi also expressed her gratitude to us again and again. She was very fortunate to have found us to handle her EB-1A case, and our professional services and rigorous attitude were the key to her case being approved quickly.

Lawyer Comments:
USCIS typically uses a 2-step analysis when assessing whether a petitioner has outstanding EB-1A ability.
1) Whether the basic “three out of ten” conditions are met OR a one-time international award.
2) After the first item is met, USCIS will also evaluate overall.
– Whether the applicant is among the top talent in a small range of industry fields.
– Excellence has continuity: for example, an athlete who won the National Games at the age of 18, then retired from the sport and did not work on it, and now in his or her 30s to use the 18-year-old medal would not have continuity. In addition, it is necessary to demonstrate that.
– Come to the U.S. with the intention of continuing to work in your field of study and will bring substantial benefits to the U.S.

Therefore, it is usually not enough to think that you only need to meet 3 of the 10 requirements to obtain EB-1A approval.

EB-1A is a window for the United States to attract outstanding talent from around the world. Therefore, it has unique advantages over other green card immigration methods. However, with the implementation of the Trump Administration’s new immigration policies, EB-1A has become more stringent in terms of scheduling and review. It is recommended that prospective applicants begin with a case evaluation or development of an EB-1A program to explore the feasibility of the application.


*To protect customer privacy, customer names are pseudonyms.