Substantial Merit and National Importance
The first of three EB-2 national interest waiver requirements — about your proposed work, not your credentials.
An EB-2 national interest waiver turns on a three-part test, and the first part asks about your work rather than your resume: does the specific endeavor you propose to undertake have both substantial merit and national importance? Merit is the broad half. It can be shown in business, entrepreneurialism, science, technology, culture, health, or education, and no economic showing is required. National importance is where petitions get contested, and it turns on the prospective impact of your endeavor — your occupation and your employer are not the subject.
Who this page is for
Researchers, engineers, clinicians, founders, and other advanced-degree professionals working out whether their work is what the national interest waiver was built for.
It covers the first requirement; the others have their own pages.
Where the requirement comes from
EB-2 ordinarily requires a job offer and a Department of Labor labor certification. The statute lets that be set aside: USCIS may waive the requirement that your services be sought by a U.S. employer when it deems the waiver to be in the national interest. 8 U.S.C. section 1153(b)(2)(B)(i). Because no job offer is needed, you file the petition yourself.
Neither the statute nor the regulations define "national interest." The working test comes from Matter of Dhanasar, 26 I&N Dec. 884 (AAO 2016), which asks three things, each by a preponderance of the evidence: does the endeavor have substantial merit and national importance; is the person well positioned to advance it; and does waiving the job offer benefit the country on balance. The waiver also sits on top of the EB-2 classification, so without qualification as an advanced-degree professional or a person of exceptional ability the petition never reaches these questions. This first prong is about the endeavor; your own qualifications belong to the second.
Substantial merit: a wide door
Merit is deliberately broad. The endeavor's merit may be demonstrated in a range of areas — business, entrepreneurialism, science, technology, culture, health, or education among them — and the list is illustrative; it does not close the field.
There is also no economic test. Merit may be established without immediate or quantifiable economic impact, and endeavors in research, pure science and the furtherance of human knowledge may qualify whether or not their potential accomplishments are likely to translate into economic benefits for the United States. 26 I&N Dec. at 889. In our practice merit is rarely where a petition breaks down.
National importance: prospective impact, not a map
The inquiry is forward-looking. USCIS considers the endeavor's potential prospective impact, and prospective impact is not evaluated solely in geographic terms — the question is what broader implications the work has. 26 I&N Dec. at 889.
So a regional clinic or a single-city startup is not disqualified. Even ventures and undertakings that focus on one geographic area of the United States may properly be considered to have national importance, particularly where the endeavor has significant potential to employ U.S. workers or promises substantial positive economic effects in an economically depressed area.
Your occupation is not your endeavor
This distinction decides more petitions than anything else on this page, and it has a page of its own. The short version: the endeavor is more specific than the occupation it sits inside — engineer was the occupation in Dhanasar, and research and development relating to air and space propulsion was the endeavor. A shortage in your occupation is not enough. Benefit that stops at your employer, even an employer with a national footprint, is not enough. A general claim about the importance of your industry, or of entrepreneurs as a category, is not enough. Each of those argues for a class of people; the prong asks about your work. USCIS Policy Manual, 6 USCIS-PM F.5(D)(3).
How the test got here
Until the end of 2016 these petitions were decided under Matter of New York State Department of Transportation, 22 I&N Dec. 215 (1998), which asked whether the benefit was "national in scope." Dhanasar vacated that framework on December 27, 2016, shifting the prong to "national importance" specifically to avoid overemphasizing the geographic breadth of an endeavor. 26 I&N Dec. at 889. Guidance telling you to prove national scope is quoting a test that no longer exists.
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Schedule a ConsultationThe questions an officer is actually answering
What, concretely, will you do? The officer wants a description that goes past the occupation — one with enough substance to explain and substantiate how working in the proposed endeavor meets the national importance standard.
Is the claim substantiated, or asserted? The recurring failure in the Policy Manual's examples is the unsupported generalization: the importance of a profession, of an industry, or of entrepreneurship as a category. Where a petition leans on labor-market data, the question is whether the record distinguishes your proposed work from the occupation at large.
Where does the benefit stop? For employed professionals this is usually decisive. If value flows only to one employer and its customers, the officer has an express instruction that employer-limited benefit is not sufficiently relevant. Every petition is decided case by case.
What tends to answer those questions
A statement of the proposed endeavor a non-specialist can follow, explained in a straightforward manner with its direct impacts laid out and documentary evidence behind it.
Independent material placing the endeavor in a national frame — governmental, academic, and other authoritative sources.
Evidence that the benefit reaches past the employer: licensing or adoption interest outside the company, a process novel and important in itself, or influence on how others build comparable technology.
For regionally anchored endeavors, evidence of employment or economic effect significant relative to the region's population and economic circumstances.
For STEM endeavors, evidence tying the work to a critical and emerging technology or a STEM area important to U.S. competitiveness or national security — though classroom STEM teaching alone generally does not do it.
How we handle this
Nothing gets collected until the endeavor is defined, because the definition determines which evidence is relevant and which is decoration. An exhibit set assembled around an occupation is an expensive way to file a weak first prong.
We test the draft against the Policy Manual's own insufficiency examples — shortage occupation, industry importance, employer-limited benefit, general entrepreneurial value, classroom teaching. Any argument one of them disposes of gets rewritten or dropped.
We keep the first and second prongs separate. Credentials belong to whether you are well positioned to advance the endeavor; folded into the national-importance argument, they make the petition read as a resume.
And if the endeavor as framed is the weak part of the case, you hear that from us at the start, while there is still time to reframe it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Other EB-2 NIW Resources
By Profession
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The two physician waivers — the three-prong test and the statutory five-year shortage-area route — plus the J-1 layer.
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Processing time, premium processing, priority dates, cost, RFEs, and what happens after approval.
ExploreScenarios
Real situations: an RFE on a self-filed petition, a denial, a pending PERM, a later EB-1A.
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EB-2 NIW measured against EB-1A, employer-sponsored EB-2, EB-1B, and the O-1A.
ExploreTalk through your endeavor with an attorney
We can usually tell you in one meeting whether your work can be framed as an endeavor of national importance, and what that argument would have to rest on.
Immigration counsel to Fortune 500 employers at a national firm · Adjudicated 12,000+ visas at the U.S. Consulate, Mexico · Working in U.S. immigration since 2008
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