Your Proposed Endeavor: What You Plan to Do in the U.S.

An occupation is a category of employment. An endeavor is what you propose to do inside it. USCIS asks a petitioner for details not only about what the occupation normally involves, but about what types of work the person proposes to undertake specifically within that occupation. USCIS Policy Manual, 6 USCIS-PM F.5(D)(3).

The guidance works the point through an example. Engineer is an occupation, so the description should give the specific projects and goals and the area of engineering the person will work in, instead of listing the duties and responsibilities an engineer has. Physician is an occupation; a program to reduce readmissions in rural cardiac care is an endeavor.

This distinction is the frame for the merits. In determining national importance, the officer's analysis focuses on what you will be doing — the job title and the occupational classification are beside the point.

The petitioner has to describe the occupation and the proposed endeavor clearly and in a straightforward manner. USCIS acknowledges that many petitioners work in highly technical fields, and asks that such work be described in a way an average person could understand. USCIS Policy Manual, 6 USCIS-PM F.5(D)(1). The audience is a generalist adjudicator. A description an officer cannot restate in a sentence is one an officer cannot find nationally important.

The instruction continues into content. The petitioner should lay out the potential direct impacts of the endeavor, and say whether it will be furthered through the person's duties at a particular employer or in some other way. That second half matters for employees and founders alike — the officer wants the vehicle through which the work actually happens.

The Policy Manual's insufficiency examples are a catalogue of endeavors defined at the wrong altitude. Each one describes a category where a piece of work should be.

Some are pitched at the occupation. Proposing to work in an occupation with a national shortage, or to consult for others seeking to work in one, is insufficient standing alone — and so is citing the general importance of a profession, the guidance's example being classroom teaching. Others are pitched at the industry: broad assertions about the value of business owners or entrepreneurs for job creation will not alone demonstrate national importance, and evidence about an industry overall, such as car dealerships, does not show that a person seeking to start a dealership qualifies. USCIS Policy Manual, 6 USCIS-PM F.5(D)(3), (D)(6).

The last altitude is the employer, and it is the one that catches well-credentialed professionals. Benefits to a specific employer alone, even an employer with a national footprint, are not sufficiently relevant. USCIS illustrates it with a software engineer who adapts an employer's code for various clients, and who "will have difficulty demonstrating the national importance of that endeavor, absent additional broader impacts supported by specific evidence."

An endeavor can also be specific and still unsupported. The officer asks whether the petition contains substance that explains and substantiates how working in the proposed endeavor meets the national importance standard, and unsubstantiated claims do not meet the petitioner's burden of proof. An endeavor statement is a promise the exhibits have to keep.

What exactly will you be doing? The officer looks past the title for specific projects and goals, and for the area of the field in which you will work.

Through what vehicle? Employment at a named organization, your own company, independent research — the guidance expressly asks whether the endeavor will be furthered through duties at a particular employer or in some other way.

Does the record substantiate the description, or only assert it? This is where detailed endeavor statements still fail, and each petition is decided on its own record.

The endeavor statement comes first, ahead of the exhibit list, because the statement decides which exhibits are relevant and which are ballast.

We test it on a reader outside the field. If they cannot restate what you will do and why it matters, the statement is not finished.

Every draft goes back through the Policy Manual's insufficiency examples — occupation, industry, employer, general entrepreneurial value — and anything that answers to one of them gets rewritten.