The Situation
My client had built an entire career inside a single multinational energy company, seventeen years, rising to one of the most senior supply-chain roles in a department of more than a thousand. The work was substantial: re-engineered global supply chains, tens of millions of dollars saved. She wanted to bring that expertise to the United States, and her family along with it, as an independent consultant to the energy industry.
There was just one problem. None of the work was public.
A private corporation does not publicize what its supply-chain managers accomplish. No papers, no press, no citations, no awards: none of the record a national-interest petition is normally built from. Seventeen years of consequential work had left almost no verifiable trace.
The Invisible Record
A national interest waiver is usually won on a documented record, ideally a public one, the kind of past achievement that makes future contributions, and their impact, likely. She had the record all right. But none of it was public. It was as if her entire career was in a safe deposit box.
The EB-2 National Interest Waiver was the only feasible strategy. It rests on three questions. See Matter of Dhanasar, 26 I&N Dec. 884 (AAO 2016). Two of them were never in doubt: energy supply chains are nationally important, and a self-employed consultant cannot obtain a labor certification at all, an impracticality that under Dhanasar favors the waiver. This case lived on the remaining question, whether she was well positioned to advance the work, and that was where her invisible career gave me nothing to work with.
So I built the case by collecting the missing evidence from two sources. Her former supervisors provided long and detailed statements describing what she had accomplished at the company and what those accomplishments meant in context.
The other source was expert opinions, the kind an examiner would find compelling and credible. You cannot order those online; where you can, you shouldn’t. I went looking for supply-chain professors across the country, reached several, and persuaded two, at different universities, plus a working consultant in the field. These were the reluctant experts, not professional witnesses, which is what made them worth asking, and their opinions worth having. Each reviewed her credentials, answered my detailed interrogatories in writing, and put a CV on the record; the consultant interviewed my client at length before issuing an opinion. The question they all answered was how valuable a specialist with this exact profile really was, whether she would find a market, and whether she could command a fee high enough to support full-time work as a consultant.
Between the supervisors’ statements and the experts’ opinions, the invisible record took on a shape and a voice.
The advanced-degree classification had a vulnerability of its own. Her degree was in environmental engineering, not the obvious credential for a supply-chain consultant, and that is the kind of occupational mismatch examiners challenge. The professors took care of that, too. In energy supply chains, they explained, an environmental-engineering degree is not a liability but an asset: hazardous materials, their transport and disposal, and the industry’s sustainability requirements are engineering problems before they become logistical.
Two Doors, One Record
I did not just file one petition; I filed two, one in each EB-2 category, the advanced-degree professional and the individual of exceptional ability. Both rested on the same evidence, filed at the same time. The reason for filing twice was the degree: the advanced-degree category was exposed on its relatedness, and I was not taking any chances, while exceptional ability did not turn on the degree at all. Two petitions also meant two sets of motion rights and two separate appeals, in case either ran into trouble. If one door stuck, the other opened on the same record.
The Result
Both petitions were approved in about twenty-two months, before premium processing was available for these cases, and neither drew an RFE.
Her employer had kept her work to itself. Independent experts put its value and potential on the record. USCIS found it to be in the national interest.