lifehack.guide

• Notes -
  1. Carry all your documents in a transparent "Harmonium" file to your VISA Interview.
  2. This is a full list of any and all documents that you may require to bring to your VISA Interview, you will only need to bring the documents that are applicable to your VISA application as not ALL of these documents are required, but they are recommended.
  3. These documents will definitely increase your chances of VISA approval as they can satisfy the Visa Officer beyond doubt about the legitimacy of your application.
     
     

• Basic Visa Documents -
  1. Passport (with the sticker attached by Biometric team)
     (Your current and all old passports)
     (should be valid for travel to the United States with validity dates at least six months beyond your intended period of stay in the United States)
  2. DS-160 Confirmation
     (with a clear and legible barcode, the barcode number on this page is required in order to book your interview)
     (So, preferably a colored printout)
  3. Visa Fee payment Receipt
     ($160 Fee to be filled after filling DS-160 form and Form I-901 SEVIS)
  4. Interview Appointment Letter
     Appointment confirmation page
     Get a printable copy from ustraveldocs website
     This has the schedule, address and timing of your Bio-metric (identification) appointment and your visa interview
     
     

• Liquid Assets -
  1. Proofs of Savings:
     1. Bank Passbook(s) of Savings and Current Accounts
        (Bank Account(s) Transaction Statements, IF your bank doesn't issue a passbook)
        (of all your sponsor(s)' account(s) which hold your funding money)
        (with entries from the last 3-6 months at least)
        (If most of your funds are in FD's, with very little money in Savings accounts, then you dont need to carry Bank Passbook(s) or Bank Account(s) Transaction Statements)
     2. Fixed Deposit(s) Certificates (Original) 
     3. Private Fixed Deposit(s) Certificates (If you have Private FD's) (from Company, Credit Society, etc)
     4. Confirmation Letter of Balance
        (Bank Statement of Fixed Accounts)
        (Bank Acknowledgement Form)
        (Issued by the bank(s)' of your sponsor(s), stating that the sponsor has "XXX" amount of (sponsorship) money in their account(s))
  2. Provident Fund (PF) Certificates & Bank Passbook(s) (of any or all or your sponsors)
     Personal Provident Fund (PPF)
     General Provident Fund (GPF) 
  3. Rental Agreement (if you have given any of your property on rent)
  4. Gold Valuation Report (From a Government certified gold shop/professional) 
  5. Summary of Bond Policies with their Policy Surrender Values
  6. If you or any of your sponsors invest, carry the following if available:
     1. Share Certificates (Original)   
     2. Bonds Certificates (Original)   
     3. Stock Statements or DEMAT account statement
     4. Certificates of Other Investments like NSC/NSS/IVP/KVP/Mutual Funds
        (of all your sponsors who hold shares)
        (with entries at least from the last 6 months)
        (online prints acceptable)
        (showing the shares &/or mutual funds your sponsor(s) own and their current market value)
  
  

• Documents to Prove your Financial Security -
  1. Chartered Accountant (CA) Report with Asset Summary
     (Report of all your Financial Funds and Assets from the CA you hire)
  2. If you or any of your sponsors are salaried/employed, carry the following:
     1. Salary Certificate of all sponsor(s) (Latest, Preferably last 2 recent ones)
        (online prints acceptable)
     2. Your own Salary Certificate if you were previously or are currently employed
     3. Employment Certificate of all sponsor(s)
     4. Job details of your sponsors
  3. If you or any of your sponsors own a business, carry the following:
     1. Their Business Cards,  
     2. A Brochure or a Product Catalog of the company.
     3. Fund Flow Statement and Turnover Reports for the last 3 years 
  4. If any of your sponsors are farming, carry a complete J Form with you
  5. Previous Years' Income Tax Returns
     (preferably of the last 3 years)
     (Form 16, if your sponsor(s) are salaried)
     (TDS Certificate(s), if your sponsor(s) are employed and Tax is deducted by the employing company at the source)
     
     

• Immovable Assets -
  Note - These assets indicate a plan to return to you home country. These assets also prove financial security for the expenses of the of your study after your first year, if you don't have enough "liquid assets" to show for all the years of your study.
  1. Agricultural Land Documents (also needed if you are showing agricultural income)
  2. Residential Home & Ancestral Land/Home Documents (if applicable)
  3. Commercial Property Ownership Documents (if you own a factory, etc)
  4. A deed proving that you own property in your home country
  5. Property Valuation Report
     (Evaluation of your house(s), land(s) and factories)
     (From a property evaluation consultancy, however if you have taken a loan from the bank on a certain property, the bank will evaluate the property value)
  6. House Tax Bill (if you pay it in your state/country)
  
  

• Your Identity & Proof of relationship to your Sponsor(s) -
  1. Your own colored Photographs
     (You need them sometimes)
     (2x2 inches in size)
     (Showing your full face, without the head being covered by a cap/hat, no sunglasses, Power glasses are accepted)
  2. Driving License (Original & Photocopy)
  3. Family Photos (Pleasant photos with all the members of your family)
  4. Birth Certificate or Other Identification Cards
     
     

• You should bring the following documents to your interview (IF APPLICABLE):
  1. Invitation letter from a US sponsor to visit them in US for XYZ purpose.
  2. VISA/citizenship proof copy of the US sponsor you may be visiting.
  3. Documents demonstrating strong financial, social, and family ties to your home country that will compel you to return to your country after your stay in the United States ends.
  4. Financial and any other documents you believe will support your application and which give credible evidence that you have enough readily available funds to meet all expenses while you remain in the United States. 
  5. Originals of bank documents, as, photocopies of bank statements will not be accepted unless you can also show original copies of bank statements or original bank books.
  6. If you are financially sponsored by another person, bring proof of your relationship to the sponsor.
  7. If you, as the principal applicant are taking your spouse and children with you to USA, you will need prove your relationship to them using your marriage certificate, wedding photos and the birth certificates of your children.
  8. If your family owns a business, provide evidence that you plan to return to your home country to work in your family business after your education is completed in the US.
  9. Documents that provide evidence that you and/or your family members (from your home country) have previously gone overseas (Example- to USA) for travel or study and have returned.
  10. Carry proof that you have been offered a job when you return to your home country or that you will be retained in your current job after you return.
  11. Letters from prominent government officials (mayor, principal, congressman, etc.) showing faith in your potential and offering assurance that you plan to return to your home country after your education.
  12. Documents that provide evidence that you have family remaining in your home country and that you have a plan to return to them.
  13. Evidence of confirmed flights "from your home country to USA" and "from USA to your home country".
  14. Evidence of confirmed health insurance for days of stay in US

• Document repository

  • Even before you begin your petition, I’d start collecting all the documents in one place online to make the process easier. From visas, to I-797 petitions, EADs, marriage certificate, birth certificate, paystubs - you’ll literally need all of them

  Number of criteria

  • Some people apply with just three (like me) and others apply with six. The general advice that I received for the number of criteria is quality and not quantity. Do ensure that the ones you have are watertight vs. simply aiming to add more criteria for the sake of making your petition look better

  Letters of support:

  • The most important part of your petition (imo) will be the letters of support that ascertain why you are extraordinary. These letters should ideally be signed by someone who is “famous” and is an expert in their field. It should be easy to google them - focus on folks who have been in the press or have a lot of publications

  • If you don’t know many people, start networking today to get to know them. A lot of people will sign these letters even if they don’t know you since they know how much of a pain this is. Pre-write all the letters to make sure it covers the points you want to cover and makes this extremely easy for them to sigh

    • Besides networking, you’d be surprised on how a cold email or cold DM on Twitter can work wonders. Don’t be afraid to reach out to experts in your field who’d be perfect candidates for your letters

  • Get letters from people who can ascertain that they don’t know you. One of the reasons for my RFE was my letters of support was only people I had worked with which led them to believe that my contributions didn’t make a “dent” in the industry

  Premium processing

  • There is a lot of debate whether premium processing helps (or negates) a decision since you are pushing USCIS for a quick decision. Having talked to 10-15 immigration lawyers, everyone has their own opinion. My advice is to apply for it so that you can get a quick answer vs. waiting months simply waiting for the USCIS to come back

  Final Merits

  • Between 2016-2020, I had heard a lot of cases where USCIS would accept the criterias but deny you based on “final merits” consideration. There are a lot of strategies to get ahead of this - make sure you ask the lawyer on how you are planning to tackle this in the initial petition itself

  • Have urgency Throughout the entire EB-1A process, I did not have any urgency. The reason was because I knew I could port over my priority date of 2018 from my EB-2 and renew my H-1B indefinitely in the interim. Because the EB-1 priority date, even for Indians, was current, I didn’t think I needed to move quickly. That was a bad decision because in August 2023, it has retrogressed).

• Start the grunt work early Despite having a lot of external media references, I didn’t realize that legally these don’t really help me. What does help me, according to the law, is extremely specific types of “Judging” events, patents, articles written about me in my field of expertise, and other such things. There are a lot of little things you can do — events to go to, things to ask for — that you can do over 6-12 months prior to your actual application in the background to “strengthen” your case.
• After seeing 5-10 friends as well as myself go through this journey closely, I truly belief the process is quite random and has no correlation with how genuinely valuable or impressive a person is. Plenty of people who are just generic L4 / L5 engineers at BigTech (and sometimes even much lesser known firms) managed to get their EB-1A. You can even see examples online. If you’re reading this, I’d highly advice you do not go through paid EB-1A services that anyone provides except a lawyer. 
• I genuinely believe that anybody can get an EB-1A. Don’t be demoralized by the “Extraordinary Ability” clause. Just because a lawyer, especially your employer’s lawyer on retainer, tells you that your resume or background is “not suitable” for it, does not mean you should give up. These things held me back for many many years. Anyone can get this visa if they focus on it religiously.
• The EB-1 is a zero sum game. Any good advice here merely hurts those who do not read the advice. At the end of the day, the number of people who will be granted this visa is capped and more people knowing how to do it just means the line is going to get more and more crowded. The sad reality is this — someone who has an already approved EB-1 with a recent, say 2022, priority date might have to wait longer because someone with an older EB-2 priority date reads this and applies to an EB-1 and ports over their 2018 priority date. To those people, I apologize.
• Don’t listen to the rumors, embrace the randomness. There’s a lot of misinformation around the EB-1 process. “X doesn’t count.” “My lawyer is awesome because they did ABC which made my case go through.” “This guy is really good cause I (a non-lawyer) read his response to my RFE, and it was so well written.” “You might have a hard time with this category if you say X” Rumors around the EB-1 spread easily. Every lawyer has a different take. Every applicant has a singular data point that they generalize. And every RFE / rejection from an immigration officer cites reasons that other officers wouldn’t cite. As a result, everyone who has a successful application touts all the things they did as good advice. They’re almost always not — from all the data points I’ve seen, EB-1A is random and at the behest of your granting immigration officer. I’ve seen really strong people get denied and really weak applications get accepted. Remember — what is legally a strong case has little to nothing to do with how “impressive” someone is to you in real life.
• Generally it is better to put on a strong showing for fewer criteria, than trying to do more but less well.
• If you have a previously accepted I-140 from a lower preference (EB2 or EB3), you can use that date to accelerate your EB1 if your country is not current.
• It helps to have access to famous people: senior executives, well-known professionals in your field, professors, public figures, etc. Cultivate these relationships early.
• If you don’t already clearly meet these criteria, plan for one to two years to go meet them.
• Get your letters on official letterhead, even if it’s not technically required. It can be a cause of RFE. In a pinch, a “personal” letterhead could do.
• If your EB1 is approved, this means you’re almost guaranteed to also get approved for the O1 visa, which can be convenient if you need to work in the US while your green card is processing.
• For people who are very likely to agree to sign a letter, it is better to pre-write the letter for them before you even ask if they want to do it. This way, you can immediately give them something to sign once they agree, saving yourself the back and forth from your lead going cold while your legal team works on the letter. You’ll be getting a lot of letters, so this adds up.
• On non-immigrant visas like the TN, it is inadvisable to leave the country from the day you submit your application until you get your travel authorization, even if your application is accepted. This could last anywhere from 6–8 months. You should plan for this.
• The country of the green card applicant is not based on their citizenship, but place of birth. A British citizen born in India is Indian from this perspective.
• Spouses also get a green card if you file together. Ideally, you are already married when the I-140 is filed, but in a pinch, a spouse can be added after the I-485 is submitted, and before the green card is officially issued.
• When challenging an RFE, it is best to also respond to the request, even if unreasonable, as a show of good faith.
• USCIS publishes a policy manual with a detailed explanation of how adjudicators should think about EB1 eligibility and references specific articles of law.
• One increasingly popular form of denial is granting all the criteria, but denying the final merits. In anticipation of this, it is helpful to explicitly address this requirement in I-140 application.

Prior to an acceptance, there’s a reasonably high chance (~50% anecdotally) that you may get an RFE (Request for Evidence) or a NOID (Notice of Intent to Deny). In the several I’ve seen through my friends, they’re rarely based on the merits of your case but nitpicking at legal language. In the case of a NOID, my lawyer asked me to withdraw and refile since changing the decision is unlikely. In the case of an RFE, you typically submit more evidence.

Even though there’s some self-selection here (e.g. plane with bullet holes picture, completion rates for the marathon are usually way higher than completion rates for the easier half-marathon), the point I’m trying to stress on is that not all EB-1A applicants are super well qualified and the approval rate is actually pretty high compared to other more selective processes, like college admission.

As far as I know, there’s also nothing prevent you from applying again in case of a denial.

What is a reasonable timeline?

Your timeline for preparation of the application will vary drastically depending on (a) how much of a perfectionist you are (b) how many of the criteria you can meet with no additional effort (c) how much free time you have.

With focus, even if you have to put in some legwork to meet more criteria, I’d say:

Total: 24 months

After you’ve received your approval, you can check processing times here and check the last status of your application with your receipt number here.

As of Oct 4, 2023, the EB-1 “Final Action Date” was Jan 1, 2017 and the “Date of Filing” is July 1, 2019. My old priority date, which I retain was July 13, 2018. This means I can begin filing for my EAD (Employment authorization document, a work document) and AP (Advanced Parole, a travel document) and be able to travel and work outside my H-1B. However, I need to wait for the Final Action Date before the government official grants me a green card / permanent residence — depending on how quickly the visa bulletin moves, this could mean 1-1.5yrs. And I can become a citizen 5 years after that. Now, apparently they are granting EADs and APs for 5 years at a time. Here are some advantages of even an EAD and AP over an H-1B:

• You can change jobs without additional paperwork
• You can be unemployed (for more than 2 months)
• You can start a company. Your employer no longer needs to sponsor you.
• You can travel internationally without having to worry about getting your H-1B renewed every 3 years and stamped — a process which can take a really long time for Indians too. — Your dependents are covered by it

How do you qualify for an EB-1A?

To get an EB-1A, you have to pick a “field of expertise” and justify your excellence in that field. It is “self-petitioned” and does not need to be supported by your employer.

Once you build this evidence and file your application, USCIS uses a two part system to adjudicate its decision:
a) it checks if the evidence provided against each criteria is satisfactory and if so then b) it looks at the total evidence to determine if the applicant has “extraordinary ability” which it calls the final merits determination.

• Meeting at least 3 of the 10 criteria.
  • Awards — Receipt of lesser nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence in the field of endeavor.
  • Membership in “outstanding” associations — Membership in associations in the field for which classification is sought that require outstanding achievement of their members, as judged by recognized national or international experts in their disciplines or fields.
  • Published Material — Published material about the person in professional or major trade publications or other major media relating to the person’s work in the field for which classification is sought. Such evidence must include the title, date, and author of the material, and any necessary translation
  • Judging — The person’s participation, either individually or on a panel, as a judge of the work of others in the same or an allied field of specification for which classification is sought
  • Original Contributions — The person’s original scientific, scholarly, artistic, athletic, or business-related contributions of major significance in the field
  • Scholarly Articles — The person’s authorship of scholarly articles in the field, in professional or major trade publications or other major media.
  • Artistic Exhibitions — Display of the person’s work in the field at artistic exhibitions or showcases
  • Leading or Critical Role — The person has performed in a leading or critical role for organizations or establishments that have a distinguished reputation
  • High Salary — The person has commanded a high salary, or other significantly high remuneration for services, in relation to others in the field
  • Success in Performing Arts — Commercial successes in the performing arts, as shown by box office receipts or record, cassette, compact disk, or video sales

  • Commanding a high salary: With the Opendoor IPO, I had an abnormally high income year in 2021 so this one was an easy criteria to satisfy. Even without a major liquidation event, if you work in tech, you should be able to satisfy this criteria relatively easily. Your lawyer will give you benchmarks and you can justify this by looking at salary information on Glassdoor, LinkedIn and others

  • Original contributions: We were able to showcase that my contributions were unique and industry defining by pointing to examples that competitors copied (e.g. Zillow copying iBuying, Amazon copying address-free shipping) and by press that the features I launched received

  • Leading a critical role: By this stage of my career, I had worked in 4-5 companies holding an important product role in all of them. Through letters of support mostly from my employer’s CEOs, we were able to ascertain that my role was critical to the success of the company

  Other criteria we considered that we could build potentially towards:

  • Judging: I had started asking around on how I can take part in hackathons and events to build up evidence for this criteria

  • Publications/patents: Although USCIS defines articles as “scholarly”, I had a few friends with successful petitions who built it on the back of a few “viral” articles and podcast interviews as evidence

  • Making major and original contributions to your field: My contribution to the field was the creation of a popular Figma plugin called Autoflow. At the time of application, it had been installed more than 250,000 times and was used by teams at large well-known companies. I was lucky to have met Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma, at an event at a time when they happened to be opening up the plugin program to alpha developers and managed to become one of the launch plugins six months later, leading to a ton of organic growth. The supporting evidence in my package included install and usage statistics, and a letter from the CEO of Figma speaking to its importance, and screenshots from blogs discussing the plugin.

    Performing a critical role in well-known organizations: In my day job, I’ve led the design of several high-profile projects at Coinbase, most notably the rewrite and redesign of both mobile applications. We also included several projects I’ve been a small contributor to as a contractor at Google. The final evidence includes a letter from the CEO of Coinbase and letters from a product manager and design executive at Google.

    Commanding a high salary: thanks to the recent Coinbase IPO and generally competitive bay area tech designer salaries, we were able to demonstrate that I was paid well above the average of my field by drawing comparisons to several salary aggregator websites like Glassdoor.

    Judging the work of others: I judged five university hackathons. Two hackathon organizers issued letters detailing the merits on which the applicant was selected as a judge, as well as a list of other judges, which included executives of well-known companies, professors, and public figures. This criterion seems generally pretty easy to hit as it’s worded fairly generously, though meeting the strict minimum as I did might not contribute as much to your final merits.

    Writing articles in professional publications: I spoke in a mix of podcast, local, and online events, both individually and as part of a panel. Though the criteria technically asked for scholarly articles, we figured that if we can get a reputable academic (we got a VC and lecturer at the Stanford d.school) to say how the product design field shares professional findings in podcasts and talks instead of journals, that we can make my public appearances count.

• Final Merits determination — a subjective evaluation of your application in its entirety to determine whether you’re eligible. This is the section where you list all your accomplishments cohesively and ascertain that you have “sustained national or international acclaim and recognition in the field of expertise, and is one of that small percentage who has risen to the very top of their field of endeavor”

Note: There’s some different rules regarding the criteria for professors/researchers (EB1-B) and for managers/executives working in other countries (EB1-C)

When you build an application, you also need to provide 5-8 letters of recommendation from experts in the field who both know you directly and indirectly who can attest to your work and ability to meet these criteria.

Eventually, the core of my case was a 44 page written argument about the 8 criteria I applied for (all except Success in Performing Arts and Artistic Exhibitions), although many recommend applying with a few stronger criteria.

I don’t think I meet any of these. How can I change that?

Don’t fret. Most applicants go out and do things specifically so they can get evidence to meet these criteria. In my experience, there are people with barely any evidence for 3 categories who get approved on the first try and others with tremendous evidence and a long history of success who take multiple attempts to get approved. Ultimately, the decision is made by a single officer within 10-15 minutes and is not reproducible, just like admissions into a college. That officer has little to no understanding of what consitutes “impressive” or meaningful in your field. They just read your application and attempt to insurance that it meets a legal definition.

Here are some things you can do to build your profile for an EB-1A:

• Judging
  • You can simply go online and apply to be a judge in the following awards. They’re pretty pointless awards but they help strengthen your app. While I was applying to these, I found so many of my friends’ profiles on these websites and realized that they did it for their EB-1! These award programs typically have one of their many categories active at different times of the year. I would estimate ~3 months to register, be accepted, judge ~50 submisions and get a public or private certificate.
    • The Stevie Awards — Elizabeth McGinn (elizabeth@stevieawards.com)
    • The Webby Awards — Denise Gilley (denise@iadas.net) and Evey Long (evey@webbyawards.com)
    • The Globee Awards — San Madan (help@globeeawards.com)
    • The CODiE Awards — Jennifer Baranowsky (jbaranowski@siia.net)
  • You can use code reviews of popular open source repositories as “reviewing the work of others”.
  • You can use judging hackathons here, as long as they’re not student events.
• High Salary
  • Your salary + equity has to be above 90% for your job code. You can check at OneStop and the BLS website. You can find a suitable job title to make your case stronger. For example, if 15-1252 Software Developers shows too high a salary for you, you can always try 15-1251 Computer Programmers or any of the other Category 15 Job Codes.
  • Venture funding can count towards high salary and USCIS says so too.

  For entrepreneurs or founders of startup businesses, officers consider evidence that the business has received significant funding from government entities, venture capital funds, angel investors, or other such funders in evaluating the credibility of submitted contracts, job offer letters, or other evidence of prospective salary or remuneration for services.”

  • You can use equity according to the USCIS too.

  As another example, if the petitioner demonstrates that receipt of a high salary is not readily applicable to the person’s position as an entrepreneur, the petitioner might present evidence that the person’s highly valued equity holdings in the startup are of comparable significance to the high salary criterion.

• Leading / Critical Role
  • This is pretty easy to prove through letters from people who are familiar with your work. Many jobs can count towards this, including
    • Senior research position at academic or non academic institutions
    • Founder / cofounder of startup with distinguished reputation
    • Leading / critical role of a distinguished organization, as explained by a letter from a director / principal investigator of the org.
  • Well-funded startups count as distinguished reputation
  • The letter should contain
    • Intro and background of author
    • About the company and its own accomplishments
    • Description of your leading role
    • Description of your critical role
    • How your work impacts the company as a whole
    • Why the petitioner is “top” of their field
  • When getting letters, I would draft the letters myself and ask them to sign it. Most expert reviewers do not have the time or knowledge to draft a useful letter.
• Original Contributions
  • Patents help here — both pending or granted!
  • Published and cited research can also help here
  • Proof that the product you’ve built is commercially used widely.
  • Can use published material about the significance of your work.
  • Letters from experts talking about the nature and significance of your contribution, with info about the author’s expertise.
• Scholarly Articles
  • You can get articles published in fairly low quality journals such as IJMRA (International Journals of Multidisciplinary Research Academy). They’ll publish your work for $50-70. Here are some more:
    • Redgate SimpleTalk
    • CodeGuru
    • SQL Server Central
    • MSSQL Tips
    • IIOAB Journal
    • International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology
    • Scientific and Academic Publishing
    • American Journal of Computer Architecture
    • SQL Pro
  • I worked with Gerri Knilans (gerri@tradepressservices.com) at Trade Press Services to get published in AllBusiness and IEEE Computer Society Tech News. Their firm will help you draft articles in your area of expertise (as if you wrote them) and submit them for publication.
    • I wouldn’t recommend them because they’re too expensive. It’s $3500 for 1 article, $6700 for 2 and $9600 for 3. They’re also quite slow — I decided to use them in mid-December and the articles came out in May and June, 6-7 months later. One reason for the delay was the time it takes for the publications themselves to publish an article they receive.
  • You can substitute this category for “speaking at conferences” using the Comparable Evidence clause listed below. For engineers, go speak at tech conferences!
• Membership in Associations
  • IADAS (International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences) is trivial to apply to and get membership in, but is a well-recognized association that meets the EB-1 criteria. You can get this as a part of the Webby Awards which is used for Judging.
  • The criteria for this is open to interpretation. The USCIS uses this example as sufficient:

  may include membership as a fellow in a scientific society dedicated to artificial intelligence if the membership is based on recognition of a nominee’s significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, and a panel of current fellows makes the selection of new fellows.

  • You should be able to use Y Combinator, certain “hacker” group memberships, company memberships and more.
  • You can try to become a member of various open source organizations based on the merit of your contributions.
• Published Material
  • You can use Trade Press Services, as mentioned above in “Scholarly Articles”, to aim to get articles written not just by you, but about you.
  • You can appear on podcasts, try to work with media organizations to get them to write about you, or be written about in a book.
  • Being written about even on tech blogs and several lesser known online articles can help, but you will have to cite readership numbers.
• Awards
  • While many think this award has to be of “Nobel Prize” level, it does not according to USCIS themselves:

  however, there is no specific requirement that an award be open to all members of the field, including the most experienced, in order to meet the requirements of this criterion. While limitations on competitors can be a relevant factor, in some instances the evidence may establish that an award or prize is nationally or internationally recognized despite being limited to youth, amateur competitors, or early-career professionals.” as well as “an award available only to persons within a single locality, employer, or school may have little national or international recognition, while an award open to members of a well-known national institution (including an R1 or R2 doctoral university) or professional organization may be nationally recognized.

  • You can count certain kinds of funding or membership to startup incubators like Y Combinator and South Park Commons as “awards”.
  • You can definitely use winning hackathons as an award, so long as they’re not “student” hackathons.

Most of the friends I know use Leading / Critical Role, Judging and High Salary. The other criteria may also be relevant to you. If you’re an artist, the two criteria I didn’t cover for artists I hear are fairly easy to prove with some effort.

Recently, USCIS introduced the Comparable Evidence clause which states that if a certain criteria doesn’t apply to your profession, you can change it. This can be used to your liberty, but the USCIS calls out certain things explicitly

• Presentation at a conference / trade show is a substitute for scholarly articles

For instance, if the publication of scholarly articles is not readily applicable to a person whose occupation is in an industry rather than academia, a petitioner might demonstrate that the person’s presentation of work at a major trade show is of comparable significance to that criterion.

• Equity counts as high salary

receipt of a high salary is not readily applicable to the person’s position as an entrepreneur, the petitioner might present evidence that the person’s highly valued equity holdings in the startup are of comparable significance to the high salary criterion.

• Use open-source as comparable evidence One could argue that Github code reviews for important open-source repositories are evidence of “Judging”, that forks on a repository you own or contribute to are examples of “Published Material” about it. Or that a lot of stars is representative of wide use and that it can count as an “Original Contributions”. Or that being an owner of a popular widely-used repository can count as “Membership in Associations”.

Here are a couple of miscellaneous other tips that can help your application:

• Read through the Kazarian vs USCIS case in detail. It is the case USCIS officers will cite the most often to make your decision. If you study the case, you’ll have the same information the officers do to assess whether you meet a criteria.

• Draw attention to relevant parts of evidence When submitting evidence, make it amply clear with outlines and arrows where your name is and any other relevant information. Don’t give the officer more work.

• Use ChatGPT! I find it helpful to rephrase technical language in letters in ways that audiences unfamiliar with the material can understand.

• Email screenshots are evidence Use of emails inviting you to events or thanking you for judging an award, or accepting you as be a member of an association.

• Use the NSTC CET (Critical and Emerging Technologies) document Another part of securing an EB-1A visa is proving that your entry to the US will substantially benefit the US. To that extent, use the NSTC (National Science and Technology Council)’s CET list to reinforce the value of your area of expertise. Some broad buckets they list include:

The 19 Critical and Emerging Technologies as determined by the NSTC that can prove that your area expertise is valuable to the US.

What do I do for my letters of recommendation?

The 5-8 letters of recommendation that are required with your application not only help your entire application but can be specifically used to make a case for several categories, such as leading and critical role. The general structure of a letter is:

• Should be about 2 full pages in length.
• Introduction of the recommender to show that they are an expert in the field and qualified to write a recommendation letter.
• How well the recommender knows you and your work, whatever it may be.
• What the recommender thinks about the importance of your work and specifically your contribution to it, using as many objective numbers as possible.
• Whether the recommender thinks you are indeed at the top of your field.
• Conclusion: an explicit recommendation.

It is very critical to abide by the above structure for a successful application. Usually, the strategies to pick recommenders are:

• The more important they are, the more valuable.
• Pick a variety of people including your manager now, but not more than 1-2 persons from the company you work at, as well as general industry experts from other companies, different geographies and of varied insight into your work.
• Have a couple recommenders who do not personally know you, but know of your work.
• Write your letter and send it to them and have them sign it — few people have the time to draft an entire letter.

• Reference Letters

  I had 8 reference letters from professors in academia as well as industry managers. They are ideally from people that are well-known in their field of endeavour (e.g. professors known in their research fields, people in mid-/upper-management in companies, etc …). They should also provide substance by talking concretely about your projects, so it’s important that they know you or have heard of you. It is also important that they provide evidence towards those specific criteria that you chose: so if you choose to provide evidence for the leadership criterion, they need to talk concretely about specific organizations/key-projects/etc where you were a leader.

  Reference letter writers should also ideally not be in your immediate collaborator circle. Rather it can be someone who cited your work, used your work for developing a downstream project, or who used your work towards building a product in their company, etc … It is important that they not only describe your work, but highlight the impact your work had in the academic field or in their company.

  If any of them were very busy, I offered to draft the letters myself, and they had the option to change anything before putting it in letterhead.