Case Summary:

A client approached us in October of 2020 seeking help with his NIW petition. He explained that his proposed endeavor was to continue his research on health communication strategies and LGBT communication experiences through interview, content analysis, and survey research methods. His research goals are to identify personal, relational, and societal antecedents to higher rates of tobacco use in LGBT communities, and to develop effective interpersonal and public health communications strategies to reduce tobacco use in this population and address related health concerns and disparities. It became apparent to us that his work is of great importance because it works to provide new insights, tools, and resources, to develop effective communications strategies to reduce tobacco use and related health issues in vulnerable populations, including the global LGBT community.

Thus we moved forward after countersigning the retainer agreement to build a case that would win for certain. In this process we found that the client’s claims were supported by at least 5 experts in his field via letters of recommendation sent to him. Some of these are quoted below:

“[The client’s] research seeks to better understand the communicative coping methods that LGBT individuals apply in addition to studying how those communication experiences affect mental health and relational well-being. In this capacity, it aligns with the government’s Healthy People 2020 initiative, which seeks to improve the health, safety, and well-being of LGBT individuals. [Client’s] unique combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods render his research highly unique in the field. For these reasons, his research stands at the top of the field of communication studies.”

“[Client] has been able to make such strong contributions to the field and public health research in the United States due to his great expertise in not only communication studies, but also advanced survey methods and specialties like tobacco control, sexual health, and minority stress.”

This indicated very clearly for us that his work was of great value to the LGBT community and the world at large. In order to give more weightage to his claims our team dug into his academic and professional records as well.

It was here that we found that due to his knowledge and expertise in effective communication strategies to address public health issues, he has been regularly invited to conduct peer review for elite journals and conferences in the field. He has completed some 50 peer reviews till date.

On the other hand his research has resulted in 11 peer-reviewed journal articles (10 of them first-authored), 1 first-authored book chapter, and 1 first-authored book. These publications have been cited a total of 22 times according to Google Scholar and other citation sources, thereby demonstrating that these publications are widely recognized and relied upon in the field of communication studies.

We also discovered that his research has been supported by funding from the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP). All of which again prove the national value of his work.

We are thus proud of having been able to help him on this journey and we thank him for choosing North America Immigration Law Group to represent him in this case.