In June 2008, we helped a client, Dr. Lee, get four green cards for his family, all within one year from when he first contacted our firm about his I-140 petition.

Dr. Lee obtained both his B.S and M.E degrees in Computer Engineering in Asia, then got his M.S and PhD degrees in Computer Sciences at a distinguished university in the U.S. When he originally contacted our office in July 2007, he was working as a postdoctoral associate in one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s largest research centers.

Initially when Dr. Lee first contacted Attorney Jerry Zhang, he was not confident about his petition. At the time, he only had two journal publications and a few conference papers, and he had never received any significant awards in his field. However, based on his extensive experience in immigration law, Attorney Zhang believed that an immigration petition under a National Interest Waiver (NIW) was still a viable option for Dr. Lee, if he could get at least five strong and convincing recommendation letters. In addition,it would be essential for Dr. Lee to have a compelling and professional petition letter for his case in order to convince the immigration officer that he was qualified for an NIW green card. Attorney Zhang believe that this was all well within Dr. Lee and the firm’s capabilities and suggested Dr. Lee file an NIW petition.

During late June and July 2007, one of the busiest times ever in firm history, our firm was working at full capacity. Because the visa bulletin at that time was open to all employment-based immigration categories, numerous aliens rushed to submit their immigration petitions to USCIS. Nonetheless, our attorneys and supporting staff worked hard to prepare Dr. Lee’s case.

In the petition letter, we demonstrated that Dr. Lee’s research has already made a significant and noteworthy impact on the field of computer science, particularly as it relates to automatic differentiation and automatic vectorization. We briefly presented Dr. Lee’s scientific research projects and their impacts on the national interest of U.S. His research would directly serve the nation by helping the U.S. take the lead in the area of automatic differentiation and, subsequently, scientific computing, which is clearly beneficial and of substantial intrinsic merit. We emphasized that his employment would benefit the U.S. on a national scope and that his skills and abilities satisfied the requirements for an NIW petition. In addition, we used the recommenders’ high evaluation on Dr Lee’s work to prove Dr. Lee’s achievement and its influence in his field.

We started to prepare Dr. Lee’s case in middle of July, and all the materials were well prepared by 9/7/2007. During the less than two month period, our attorneys and assistants communicated closely with Dr. Lee through mail, email, phone and all other methods in order to file his petition with USCIS completely and efficiently.

We filed Dr. Lee’s NIW petition through the E-filing system on September 7, 2007. And the petition package was mailed out three days later on September 10. The entire package included the petition form, one petition letter, five letters of recommendation one of was drafted by an independent recommender, more than 20 citation documentations showing instances where Dr. Lee’s work had been used by other researchers and other important supporting documents.

After filing the NIW petition, we began to prepare the I-485 petitions for Dr. Lee’s family. Note that at the time, there was no retrogression in the visa bulletin for Dr. Lee’s home country. All four I-485 applications for Dr. Lee’s family were submitted to the USCIS on November 29, 2007, and the USCIS received the petitions on December 3, 2007. And on June 11, 2008 after waiting for less than six months, Dr. Lee was extremely lucky and received his I-140 approval notice. Five days later, USCIS approved the I-485 applications for Dr. Lee’s family. All told, it had been less than one year since Dr. Lee contacted us for his I-140 immigration evaluation.

Dr. Lee was quite excited to hear this good news. Our attorneys and supporting professionals were also very happy with this result. We attribute the success of Dr. Lee’s application to his cooperation and our firm’s teamwork.

We must admit that Dr. Lee’s case is very lucky. Most cases do not get approved within such a short time; it usually takes USCIS about one year to process I-140 petitions and one to two years to process I-485 applications. The I-140 and I-1485 process can be especially long for petitioners born in China Mainland or India who need to wait for an available visa number to file the I-485 application for EB-2 and EB-3 cases. However, we still believe that responsible, hard work of an experienced attorney is extremely helpful for an immigration petition, and will eventually leads to a happy result.

*In order to protect our client’s privacy, all identifying information has been changed.

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An attorney’s expertise and experience play a critical role in an NIW green card application. Our attorneys have extensive experience in NIW applications. In the past 12 years, we have successfully handled thousands of NIW applications with an extremely high overall approval rate.

If you plan to file an NIW application, please send your CV to Attorney Jerry Zhang (info@hooyou.com) for a free evaluation.
Zhang & Associates, PC.
Houston ∙ New York ∙ Chicago ∙ Austin
Tel：1-800-230-7040, 713-771-8433
Email: @hooyou.com">info@hooyou.com
website：http://www.hooyou.com