For employers
Retaining Talent Without Sponsoring Anyone
Two employment-based green card categories are filed by the employee, not by you. No labor certification, no recruitment, no job offer, and no commitment on your balance sheet.
Your employee can petition
In EB-1A and in the EB-2 national interest waiver (NIW), the individual can be petitioner. There does not have to be an employer petitioner, no job offer requirement, and no labor certification.
That means the categories carry none of the obligations employers associate with green card support: no recruitment cycle, no prevailing wage determination, no ability-to-pay showing, no public access file, and no commitment to employ the person permanently in a defined role.
Who plausibly qualifies
Fewer people than are hopeful, and more than most employers assume. The profiles worth a second look:
- Researchers and engineers with publication records, citations in context, and evidence of independent influence on the field
- People who have served as peer reviewers, journal referees, grant reviewers, or competition judges
- Named inventors on patents that others have adopted or licensed
- People whose work has been covered by trade or general press
- People whose work maps cleanly onto an articulated national priority, which is the national interest waiver question rather than the EB-1A one
When it will not work
- Strong-but-conventional records: a good scientist is not, without more, an extraordinary-ability petitioner
- Early-career profiles where the evidence exists but has not yet accumulated; often an eighteen-month problem rather than a permanent one
- Fields where the employee's contributions are genuinely real but commercially confidential and cannot be documented
- Cases where the employee needs status certainty on a fixed date: a self-petition offers no such guarantee
Related
Let's talk about your matter.
Consultations are scheduled directly with me. If you're facing a filing deadline say so first and I'll prioritize it.
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[email protected] · (508) 591-0775 · Kingston, Massachusetts