Becoming a permanent resident through the EB-1 category is an option you may know of.
There are reasons that the EB-1 category is an attractive option, a preferred option. Foreign national workers and their employers prefer the EB-1 category over some other categories because there is rarely a shortage of EB-1 visas and because the category requires no labor certification.
But beyond being aware of the EB-1 category and attracted to it, many employers and employees who stand to benefit from the category cannot claim they understand it. And who can blame them?
The category is not easy to understand: after all, the single category is, for all intents and purposes, three categories. To be more precise, the EB-1 category contains three large sub-categories.
Here, in this blog post, we’ll look at the general requirements for one of these subcategories–the subcategory for outstanding researchers or professors.
Inclusion in the EB-1B subcategory, which belongs to outstanding researchers or professors, requires that
- the foreign national have recognition internationally as outstanding in a specific academic field; and
- the foreign national have at least three years of teaching or research in the field (research or teaching experience gained while working on an advanced degree, under some circumstances, counts toward the three-year requirement).
Additionally, inclusion in the EB-1B subcategory requires one of the following:
- the foreign national has received an offer of a tenured or tenure-track teaching position or an offer of a comparable research position;
- the foreign national has received an offer of a research position having no fixed term and in which an employee would ordinarily have an expectation of permanent employment;
- the foreign national has received an offer of a comparable research position with a private employer, so long as the employer has at least three full-time researchers and documented accomplishments in the research field.