On May 26^th, 2016, we received another EB-1A (Alien of Extraordinary Ability) approval for a Physician in the Field of Clinical Medicine (Approval Notice).

General Field: Clinical Medicine

Position at the Time of Case Filing: Physician

Country of Origin: India

Service Center: Texas Service center (TSC)

State of Residence at the Time of Filing: Texas

Approval Notice Date: May 26^th, 2016

Processing Time: 10 months, 24 days

Case Summary:

A gifted physician from India hired North America Immigration Law Group (NAILG) to help him obtain a green card. His journey started at the end of 2012 and several months after an attorney-client relationship arose, we filed an EB-2 NIW (National Interest Waiver) petition on his behalf. Despite receiving an approval notice 4 months later, our client knew that if he didn’t want to wait several years for his priority date to become current in order to file an I-485 application, he had to obtain another petition approval that wasn’t subject to the priority date. Over a year later, our client contacted us to evaluate his credentials again. We found that his qualifications had significantly improved, making him a suitable candidate for EB-1A (Alien of Extraordinary Ability), a visa category with a very high standard of law whose petitioners need not worry about priority dates.

NAILG’s role in this case:

Our law firm was in charge of compiling the relevant information and presenting everything that we had gathered to the USCIS. Our goal was to prove that our client is an asset and that it would be great loss to the nation should he stop his research efforts in the US. His EB-1A petition packet contained information pertaining to his 15 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 5 presentations at national and international conferences, and 2 book chapters. It also detailed the 125 citations collected from his work and the 52 times he assessed the work of his peers. To strengthen our client’s EB-1A petition, we prompted him to gather signed recommendation letters from other experts in the medical field. We needed them to confirm that his leading role as a resident in the field of clinical medicine is beneficial to various other researchers working in the field. We also wanted them to verify the significance of our client’s research projects on spinal cord imaging for patients with spinal cord disease. Our client’s peers did not let him down and seven of them volunteered recommendation letters in support of his EB-1A petition. Here is what one of these experts said about our client’s work: “This research offers substantial value through the advancement of medical procedures decreasing both recovery time and the need for continual medical care, and through the improvement of the quality of life of many patients via a greater understanding of their specific conditions. If his research is not allowed to continue, further advances in this field will certainly be lost, at great cost to the many Americans who can be helped by [Client’s] work.”

Filing an I-485 application:

Exactly 10 months and 24 days after we filed the EB-1A petition, our client received notification of case approval. Besides raising one service request on our client’s behalf when the case was considered outside the normal processing time, everything moved smoothly. A little over a month after his EB-1A was approved, we filed an I-485 application to adjust our client’s status for permanent residence. We are currently waiting for the USCIS to contact us with good news, and in the meantime, we thank our client for trusting our law firm to help him navigate the complex green card process.