Case Summary:

Armed with an M.P.A. in Public Administration, an expert in the field of public policy came to our firm from Taiwan wanting to file his NIW petition. As is customary with new clients, we made a thorough inquiry into his academic and professional career thus far. This was followed by collecting evidence to help build a solid case for him.

We discovered the following from the documents he furnished:

• His proposed endeavor is to continue his research into analyzing and evaluating science, technology, and innovation policies in order to reduce digital inequality, foster civic engagement, and discover solutions to public health and policy challenges.
• His research advancing his proposed endeavor is of great importance because it sheds light on the important ways that technology and digital tools are changing communications and civic engagement.
• He has also been invited to conduct reviews for his peers and has completed at least 8 reviews to date.
• His research has resulted in 6 peer-reviewed journal articles (4 of them first-authored), 1 book chapter, and 2 conference papers.
• These publications have been cited a total of 203 times according to Google Scholar
• Upon reviewing his citation record, it is clear that he has had a major influence on other scholars’ understanding of topics such as digital inequality, organizational technology adoption, and political engagement.
• Finally, we used 4 letters of support written by experts who knew him personally and through his work. Two of them said:

“In addition to the barriers imposed by low digital literacy, which public policy expert [the client] has also researched, the adoption of e-government programs is challenging due to bureaucratic constraints. [The client’s] research into the particularities of these constraints has provided the first informative baseline for other researchers and policymakers to improve the implementation of e-government programs. The continuation of his research is therefore vital to the effective implementation of e-government systems the world over, which, in turn, improves the lives of citizens everywhere.”

“E-government services are the future of how the U.S. government interacts with its citizens. [The client’s] work with local governments has yielded highly informative data on the factors that make adoption of these programs more or less likely, with high applicability to a range of other technologies. By incorporating his feedback to address the factors that impact e-government services adoption, state and local governments better fulfill their role as laboratories of democracy, testing out policies and programs for later implementation on a nationwide scale.”

Based on this multifactorial assessment, it was clear that his education, experience, expertise, documented record of success, influence in his field, and his future plan have altogether well-positioned him to advance the proposed endeavor of analyzing and evaluating science, technology, and innovation policies in order to reduce digital inequality, foster civic engagement, and discover solutions to public health and policy challenges.

We were thus happy to hear of his approval in such a short period of time and that too without an RFE. We are grateful to him for his trust and we wish him the very best.