The US has the EB-1 visa, commonly known as the "Einstein Visa", which is designed to let in only the top 0.01% of a field.
Here are the requirements for straight from
United States Customs and Immigration Services (archive):
Criteria for Demonstrating Extraordinary Ability
In order to demonstrate you have sustained national or international acclaim and that your achievements have been recognized in your field of expertise, you must either include evidence of a one-time achievement (major internationally-recognized award) or 3 of the 10 listed criteria below (or comparable evidence if any of the criteria do not readily apply):
- Evidence of receipt of lesser nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence
- Evidence of your membership in associations in the field which demand outstanding achievement of their members
- Evidence of published material about you in professional or major trade publications or other major media
- Evidence that you have been asked to judge the work of others, either individually or on a panel
- Evidence of your original scientific, scholarly, artistic, athletic, or business-related contributions of major significance to the field
- Evidence of your authorship of scholarly articles in professional or major trade publications or other major media
- Evidence that your work has been displayed at artistic exhibitions or showcases
- Evidence of your performance of a leading or critical role in distinguished organizations
- Evidence that you command a high salary or other significantly high remuneration in relation to others in the field
- Evidence of your commercial successes in the performing arts
Examples of Documentary Evidence That a Person is an Outstanding Professor or Researcher
In order to demonstrate you are an outstanding professor or researcher, you must include evidence of 2 of the 6 listed criteria below (or comparable evidence if any of the criteria do not readily apply):
- Evidence of receipt of major prizes or awards for outstanding achievement
- Evidence of membership in associations that require their members to demonstrate outstanding achievement
- Evidence of published material in professional publications written by others about the noncitizen's work in the academic field
- Evidence of participation, either on a panel or individually, as a judge of the work of others in the same or allied academic field
- Evidence of original scientific or scholarly research contributions in the field
- Evidence of authorship of scholarly books or articles (in scholarly journals with international circulation) in the field
Certain Multinational manager or executive
Your petitioning employer must be a U.S. employer and intend to employ you in a managerial or executive capacity. The petitioner must have been doing business in the U.S. for at least 1 year, as a legal entity with a qualifying relationship to the entity that employed you abroad in a managerial or executive capacity.
No labor certification is required.
Sounds like you need to be either an executive of a major company, Nobel Laureate, a Fields Medalist, an Olympian, etc. to be admitted right? Maybe a pro athlete or a top researcher/specialist with decades of experience could be admitted as well.
Well, if you're Indian, the bar for being in the top 0.01% is a lot,
lot lower:
I don’t think I meet any of these. How can I change that?
Don’t fret. Most applicants go out and do things specifically so they can get evidence to meet these criteria. In my experience, there are people with barely any evidence for 3 categories who get approved on the first try and others with tremendous evidence and a long history of success who take multiple attempts to get approved. Ultimately, the decision is made by a single officer within 10-15 minutes and is not reproducible, just like admissions into a college. That officer has little to no understanding of what consitutes “impressive” or meaningful in your field. They just read your application and attempt to insurance that it meets a legal definition.
Here are some things you can do to build your profile for an EB-1A:
Just claim that reviewing open source code, administering an adult hackathon, or handing out some meaningless awards to YouTubers makes you a judge of a nationally recognized competition:
Judging
- You can simply go online and apply to be a judge in the following awards. They’re pretty pointless awards but they help strengthen your app. While I was applying to these, I found so many of my friends’ profiles on these websites and realized that they did it for their EB-1! These award programs typically have one of their many categories active at different times of the year. I would estimate ~3 months to register, be accepted, judge ~50 submisions and get a public or private certificate.
- You can use code reviews of popular open source repositories as “reviewing the work of others”.
- You can use judging hackathons here, as long as they’re not student events.
Don't make more than what 90% of the people in your field do? Just claim that you're actually in some lower paid field or that the equity in your startup is worth millions:
High Salary
- Your salary + equity has to be above 90% for your job code. You can check at OneStop and the BLS website. You can find a suitable job title to make your case stronger. For example, if 15-1252 Software Developers shows too high a salary for you, you can always try 15-1251 Computer Programmers or any of the other Category 15 Job Codes.
- Venture funding can count towards high salary and USCIS says so too.
- For entrepreneurs or founders of startup businesses, officers consider evidence that the business has received significant funding from government entities, venture capital funds, angel investors, or other such funders in evaluating the credibility of submitted contracts, job offer letters, or other evidence of prospective salary or remuneration for services.”
- You can use equity according to the USCIS too.
- As another example, if the petitioner demonstrates that receipt of a high salary is not readily applicable to the person’s position as an entrepreneur, the petitioner might present evidence that the person’s highly valued equity holdings in the startup are of comparable significance to the high salary criterion.
Get your friends to claim that you're in a critical role at work. Don't have any? Just found your own company and claim whatever you want!
Leading / Critical Role
- This is pretty easy to prove through letters from people who are familiar with your work. Many jobs can count towards this, including
- Senior research position at academic or non academic institutions
- Founder / cofounder of startup with distinguished reputation
- Leading / critical role of a distinguished organization, as explained by a letter from a director / principal investigator of the org.
- Well-funded startups count as distinguished reputation
- The letter should contain
- Intro and background of author
- About the company and its own accomplishments
- Description of your leading role
- Description of your critical role
- How your work impacts the company as a whole
- Why the petitioner is “top” of their field
- When getting letters, I would draft the letters myself and ask them to sign it. Most expert reviewers do not have the time or knowledge to draft a useful letter.
Need to show that you're innovative? Just file a patent. The patent doesn't even have to be granted!
Original Contributions
- Patents help here — both pending or granted!
- Published and cited research can also help here
- Proof that the product you’ve built is commercially used widely.
- Can use published material about the significance of your work.
- Letters from experts talking about the nature and significance of your contribution, with info about the author’s expertise.
Can't get your work published in a scientific journal? Just publish in a pay-to-play one or give a speech to no one at a conference!
Scholarly Articles
- You can get articles published in fairly low quality journals such as IJMRA (International Journals of Multidisciplinary Research Academy). They’ll publish your work for $50-70. Here are some more:
- I worked with Gerri Knilans (gerri@tradepressservices.com) at Trade Press Services to get published in AllBusiness and IEEE Computer Society Tech News. Their firm will help you draft articles in your area of expertise (as if you wrote them) and submit them for publication.
- I wouldn’t recommend them because they’re too expensive. It’s $3500 for 1 article, $6700 for 2 and $9600 for 3. They’re also quite slow — I decided to use them in mid-December and the articles came out in May and June, 6-7 months later. One reason for the delay was the time it takes for the publications themselves to publish an article they receive.
- You can substitute this category for “speaking at conferences” using the Comparable Evidence clause listed below. For engineers, go speak at tech conferences!
Sign up for "prestigious" organizations:
Membership in Associations
- IADAS (International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences) is trivial to apply to and get membership in, but is a well-recognized association that meets the EB-1 criteria. You can get this as a part of the Webby Awards which is used for Judging.
- The criteria for this is open to interpretation. The USCIS uses this example as sufficient:
may include membership as a fellow in a scientific society dedicated to artificial intelligence if the membership is based on recognition of a nominee’s significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, and a panel of current fellows makes the selection of new fellows.
- You should be able to use Y Combinator, certain “hacker” group memberships, company memberships and more.
- You can try to become a member of various open source organizations based on the merit of your contributions.
Write a blog or get your friends to write stuff about you. The law says that published material must exist about you, not that its actually read by anyone:
Published Material
- You can use Trade Press Services, as mentioned above in “Scholarly Articles”, to aim to get articles written not just by you, but about you.
- You can appear on podcasts, try to work with media organizations to get them to write about you, or be written about in a book.
- Being written about even on tech blogs and several lesser known online articles can help, but you will have to cite readership numbers.
Winning a Nobel Prize is too hard? Just claim that your local hackathon's prize is equivalent!
Awards
- While many think this award has to be of “Nobel Prize” level, it does not according to USCIS themselves:
however, there is no specific requirement that an award be open to all members of the field, including the most experienced, in order to meet the requirements of this criterion. While limitations on competitors can be a relevant factor, in some instances the evidence may establish that an award or prize is nationally or internationally recognized despite being limited to youth, amateur competitors, or early-career professionals.” as well as “an award available only to persons within a single locality, employer, or school may have little national or international recognition, while an award open to members of a well-known national institution (including an R1 or R2 doctoral university) or professional organization may be nationally recognized.
- You can count certain kinds of funding or membership to startup incubators like Y Combinator and South Park Commons as “awards”.
- You can definitely use winning hackathons as an award, so long as they’re not “student” hackathons. Here’s a person who did that.
The author brags about getting an EB-1 despite not qualifying for one and lists other Indians who've publicly claimed to have gotten one:
You’re not a “Nobel” prize winner and don’t have the “Extraordinary Ability” to deserve an EB-1A — many people who have successfully gotten an EB-1A, including me, are nowhere close to a “Nobel” prize. The USCIS says the EB-1A requires:
a level of expertise indicating that the individual is one of that small percentage who have risen to the very top of the field of endeavor
Remember, an EB-1A at the end of the day is an objective
legal judgment on whether you fulfil a set of requirements — “small” and “top” and “field of endeavor” are not clearly delineated concepts here. Take a look at the credentials of certain people who have been approved for an EB-1A to benchmark yourself:
- LinkedIn Influencers
- Saiman Shetty — undergrad India, MS at ASU, technical program manager at several tech companies
- Archie Agarwal — undergrad in India, MS at CMU, product manager at Amazon and Microsoft
- Aishwarya Srinivasan — undergrad India, MS at Columbia, data scientist at IBM and Google
- Anu Ramakrishnan — UWash, MS at Dartmouth, product manager Samsung and Genentech
- Aditi Paul — undergrad India, PhD in Communication from US state university, Professor at Pace, total 126 citations
- Aman Chadha — undergrad India, MS UWisconsin, engineer at Qualcomm, Apple and Amazon
- Other
- Prasad Memane (story) — undergrad India, MS Northeastern, engineer at Uber / Facebook
- Alok Sharma (story) — undergrad, masters India, engineer at IT company, “Director” of BI at McGraw
- Asad Memon (story) — undergrad in Pakistan, several startups, Google engineer
- Anonymized Profile Lists by Law Firms
None of them should have qualified for the visa. Data analysts, product/program managers, and low-level engineers are not who this visa is supposed to apply to. I also love how the author acknowledges that the "director" of business intelligence has an embellished title (in reality he's a data analyst).
The whole
guide (archive) is insane and shows how little these people care about following the spirit of our laws and respecting our culture.