Are you a Phd or Postdoc wanting to apply for a green card?

Do you want to know if you can apply for a green card on your own, without any employer sponsorship? Are you concerned about lawyer's fee? If you are a Phd, Phd student, Post doc, Researcher with a Phd trying to get a green card, this site is for you.

I was in a similar situation four years back. I had finished my phd and joined a national lab as a post-doc. One of my friend was just then applying for a green card with a lawyer's help for $4500 plus the application fee for himself and his spouse. I got interested and wanted to explore this option myself. I sent an email to the lawyer's office. They requested a copy of my Vita and a brief description of my work and set up a time for initial consulting, which was at that time free. The lawyer, very well known, called accordingly spent about couple of minutes going through my vita and suggested that I do not hold a strong case for a self-petition and I should look for employer to sponsor. The reasoning is of course simple, I had worked on optics and lasers none of which seem to show national importance to a non-technical person at a quick glance. Of course, my vita did not contain any popular buzz words of the time like nanotechnology which had lot of attention from the press. I would think any other person would come to the same conclusion as the lawyer did!! So I do not want to mount my grievances on him. The lawyer said "I do not see that your work can be considered national merit. I suggest you find an employment and I can help you as an outstanding researcher (EB1A) with the help of employer sponsorship". This was out of question since my post doc position was not permanent and the national lab cannot apply for green card on the basis of my job. They have to convert me to a regular staff, if they were to do a green card and alas, that's a whole ordeal in itself. The discussion with the lawyer took a total of 3-4 minutes and left me utterly confused as to my next step.

Here is the problem, my field was specialized enough that most jobs (except for academic jobs) require permanent residency in the first place. This situation is severely limiting my options. It appeared like the options I have are either to join a permanent academic position (other than a post doc) that allows for green card sponsorship or find a non-profit company willing to hire me and sponsor a green card.

For nearly five months I just left the hopes of applying for a green card on my own and just continued with my work, hoping I would find some solution later. Surprisingly the solution came simply acting to a retrogression announcement in the visa bulletin of October 2005. It meant if I did not apply for a green card in a span of 15 days, I would not have the choice of concurrent filing my petition which implies I cannot avail EAD for employment, and advance parole for travel.

Self sponsor a green card?

This put me under severe pressure to rethink about self-petitioning. I decided that I would self-petition (ie no employer sponsorship) without the help of a lawyer. Till then I did not know much about the green card application process and what it involves. I quickly studied several web sites to understand the overall picture. I carefully sat down to think if I can qualify under NIW and if my work can be justifed as "national interest" under the USCIS criteria. To my surprise it does qualify! Infact it occured to me that most Phd's work can. So I decied to do a NIW self-petition. I called a few friends who applied in the EB2-NIW and asked if I could look at their petition. With the help of couple of example petitions, I charted out what to do, how to do and started implementing my plan. I spent the next 12 days (nearly a total of 100 hours) like a marathon getting evidences of all sorts, reference letters, filling applications, writing a petition, and setting up medical examinations needed for I-485. I finally got everything ready and mailed it to USCIS Texas to reach just in time to avoid retrogression. After the two week marathon like work on the petition, I decided to forgot about my application for a while thinking I will hear from them in the coming months. I received an application receipt end of second week of the following month and an email by the end of third week saying my I-140 was approved!! That was a great joy. My EAD got approved in two weeks. So I could start to use EAD and look for jobs. My I-485 finally got approved two years after starting my first I-140 application. In the mean time I was not sure how long the actual green card would take and so I repeated the I-140 application process in the EB1A extraordinary ability category.

Since the begin of my green card journey, I have helped a number of my friends educate on the self petition and helped them apply successfully on their own. Many of them have green cards (some applied after me but got their GC's even before I did!!!), some of them are in the adjustment of status process. They have all navigated the applications (some even RFEs) on their own.

What I have learnt in the process is that you are a better judge of how your work fits in the national interest and most phd's can apply in EB2-NIW or EB1A-extraordinary ability. The purpose of this web site is to bring together my experience and that of my friends who successfully petitioned and got approvals in helping you with the process of self-petitioning your green card application.