How do you know if an EB-1A petition is strong enough to file?

Evidence you did not control carries the most weight

Adjudicators weigh evidence by how independent it is. A decision made by an institution with no stake in the immigration outcome — a company incorporating a business unit around someone's work, a competitive designation awarded among a large field, a standards body seating someone alongside industry peers — is difficult to characterise as self-generated.

By contrast, evidence the applicant arranged or commissioned tends to receive less weight, however impressive it reads.

Where petitions are most often exposed

Criteria satisfied by a single instance, or by activity that does not match how the criterion is usually met, are the common weak points. Judging is a frequent example: the criterion is generally satisfied by peer review, editorial boards, grant panels, or competition juries within the field, so a single unrelated judging appearance is thinly supported.

A seam between the field the evidence documents and the field the petition claims is another. Where a record spans two adjacent areas, the petition benefits from making the connection explicit rather than leaving an adjudicator to infer it.

Frequently asked questions