EB-2 National Interest Waiver research
Every finding here links back to the exact page of the government decision it came from — open the PDF yourself and check it. We’re not a law firm. We don’t tell you whether you qualify, and we don’t predict how your case will go. We show you what USCIS actually wrote in published decisions, and leave the judgment to you and whoever you hire.
Across the 2,369 searchable NIW cases where USCIS reached this analysis, 79.9% never got past the first question — substantial merit and national importance.
Source: immigrate.io’s own structured dataset (2024–2026 archive), not a USCIS publication. 2026 is a partial year and is treated as preliminary. 57.3% of REMANDED cases never reached this analysis at all and are excluded from the rate above. Full breakdown in the methodology.
USCIS decides a National Interest Waiver case by testing it against three questions, in order: substantial merit and national importance, then whether the person is well positioned to advance it, then whether waiving the job-offer requirement still benefits the US on balance. USCIS calls each of these three questions a “prong” — you’ll see that word below, in quoted decision text, and elsewhere on this site.
3,625
decisions structured in the database
2,369
searchable NIW decisions
Example result
advanced computing, cloud computing, data processing and analysis
- Legal element
- Prong 1 · National importance
- Finding
- Not established
- Appeal outcome
- REMANDED
- Decision date
- 2025-03-19
Quoted from the USCIS decision
“the Director's analysis on the third prong did not sufficiently address the guidance specifically provided by the USCIS Policy Manual with respect to those asserting a beneficiary's eligibility with a proposed endeavor advancing a critical and emerging technology in a STEM field”
In Re: 35495011
Read decision →The broader US filing context
This archive contains published, denied-then-appealed decisions -- not a representative sample of all filings, and it does not estimate the approval odds of an individual petition.
EB-1A case research is on the way — we’re validating that classification framework before publishing it (see methodology).