EB-2 National Interest Waiver · Self-Petition
Your NIW petition,
start to finish.
Evaluation to filing, in one workspace.
Evaluate your case. Organize the evidence record. Draft petition materials. Prepare for RFE response. Papers supports the full NIW lifecycle — from first assessment to final filing.
Free · No credit card · ~5 min
Prong 1
Merit & Importance
Very Strong
Prong 2
Well-Positioned
Needs Development
Prong 3
Benefit of Waiver
Promising
Summary: Filing today would likely draw an RFE on Prong 2. With ~6 months of preparation, this case can become potentially strong.
Decide
See exactly where your case stands — prong by prong — before you invest time preparing.
Prepare
Organize every exhibit. Papers finds official policy sources that anchor your work's national importance.
Draft
Petition letter and recommendation letters written from your actual evidence record, not placeholder language.
Respond
If USCIS issues an RFE, Papers maps each issue to the criterion being questioned and drafts the response.
Decide
See exactly where your case stands — prong by prong — before you invest time preparing.
Prepare
Organize every exhibit. Papers finds official policy sources that anchor your work's national importance.
Draft
Petition letter and recommendation letters written from your actual evidence record, not placeholder language.
Respond
If USCIS issues an RFE, Papers maps each issue to the criterion being questioned and drafts the response.
01 · Decide
First, see whether NIW is worth pursuing.
Papers turns your background into an NIW case map: the work you want USCIS to evaluate, why it matters nationally, what evidence supports it, and what is still missing.
Define the work clearly
NIW is not just about your resume. It is about the specific work you plan to advance in the United States.
Test the three requirements
Papers checks national importance, whether you are positioned to do the work, and why a job offer should be waived.
Surface likely USCIS questions
The report shows where an adjudicator may ask for more evidence before you spend time drafting.
Proposed Endeavor
"Developing AncestralBERT — a genomic AI framework for rare disease diagnosis across under-represented populations."
Policy Manual sub-factors
PhD Computational Genomics, Stanford. 8 years specialty experience.
47 independent citations across 2 papers. No external adoption letters.
Endeavor narrative articulated; scaling mechanism to third parties needs detail.
Initial model published and open-sourced. No U.S. clinical deployment yet.
No independent interest from U.S. clinical adopters or grant agencies on record.
02 · Prepare
Organize your evidence. Find what you are missing.
The evidence board tracks everything your petition needs — publications, awards, credentials, and national impact evidence. Connect Google Scholar to sync your publications automatically. Papers also helps find official policy sources that anchor your work's national importance.
Google Scholar import
Publications, citation count, and h-index synced automatically. No manual entry needed.
National evidence finder
Live search across OSTP, DOE, NSF, and DHS — finds official policy documents that support your specific work.
AI guidance on what matters
Papers tells you which evidence categories are weak for your profile — academic, industry, or entrepreneur — and what to add.
Three federal sources strengthen your Prong 1 argument:
NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science (2023) — names rare-disease diagnostics as an AI research priority.
NSTC Critical & Emerging Technologies List — AI and Biotechnology designated.
GAO-23-105714 — quantifies the diagnostic burden across 30M Americans.
03 · Draft
Petition letter and recommendation letters, drafted end to end.
Papers drafts each section of the petition letter around your actual evidence — not placeholder language. Recommendation letters are tailored to each recommender's relationship to the work, with guidance on independence and evidentiary value.
Section 3. Dr. Sharma is well-positioned to advance the proposed endeavor.
3.1 Training and expertise.
Dr. Sharma earned her Ph.D. in Computational Genomics from Stanford University in 2019. Over eight years she developed the AncestralBERT framework — a transformer-based approach to variant classification across ancestrally diverse genomes — placing her among a small group of researchers with expertise spanning genomic sequencing, deep learning, and rare disease phenotyping.
3.2 Record of success.
Dr. Sharma has published 14 peer-reviewed articles, with 47 independent citations across two first-author publications in Nature Genetics and Cell. Leading researchers have independently assessed her contributions:
"Dr. Sharma's contributions to ancestral genome modeling are substantial. Her AncestralBERT framework has been adopted in our laboratory research protocols, and her technical depth across genomics and machine learning is exceptional among peers at her career stage."
(Exhibit 14, Letter from Prof. J. Mitchell, MIT CSAIL)"The AncestralBERT framework reduces variant classification error by 23% across under-represented populations — addressing one of the most persistent challenges in rare disease diagnostics. Dr. Sharma is uniquely positioned to extend this work in the United States."
(Exhibit 15, Letter from Dr. S. Liu, Harvard Medical School)3.3 Recognition by the field.
Dr. Sharma was invited to deliver a keynote at NeurIPS 2024 on diagnostic equity in genomic AI (Exhibit 19) and was named an ISCB Fellow in recognition of her contributions to computational biology (Exhibit 20). These distinctions reflect independent expert judgment that her work has advanced the field.
Petition built from your evidence
Every section cites your uploaded exhibits. AI flags which evidence supports which claim in the petition.
Recommender independence matters
Letters from close collaborators carry less weight. Papers tracks the mix and advises who to ask for independent letters.
Profile-specific drafting
Academic, industry, and entrepreneur profiles get different argument structure based on what the evidence record looks like.
04 · Respond
An RFE is a specific challenge. Papers gives a specific answer.
Papers reads the notice, identifies which criterion is being questioned, and turns each issue into a response strategy with the evidence you need to add.
Maps every issue to a criterion
Each paragraph of the RFE is linked to the specific criterion being questioned — so nothing falls through the gaps.
Specific evidence to add, not generic advice
Papers tells you what type of evidence addresses each objection — expert letters, policy citations, adoption data — and why.
Time is limited — act on the right things
USCIS gives a fixed response window. Papers prioritizes the issues by severity so you spend time on what matters most.
Failure to show waiver benefit outweighs labor certification.
No evidence U.S. genomic medicine centers cannot find qualified domestic candidates. Adjudicators commonly cite this gap in Prong 3 denials.
Endeavor — not the field — must show national importance.
Currently framed at field level (AI / genomics). USCIS adjudicates the specific endeavor. No evidence the framework has been adopted by U.S. clinical institutions.
Insufficient record of success in the field.
47 citations across 2 papers is borderline. Additional field-influence evidence is typically requested.
Why Papers is different
Other tools teach AI what good petitions look like. We built ours to reason from the standard they have to meet.
Any tool can prompt AI with sample petitions and call it legal intelligence. A practicing attorney reads the output and immediately sees what's off. A self-petitioner cannot — they can only trust what the AI produced.
"When a professional uses AI and it makes a subtle error, they catch it. When a self-petitioner does, they file it."
Standard approach
Prompt AI with sample petitions and style guidelines
Generate output calibrated to what approved petitions look like
Errors visible to professionals. Not to self-petitioners.
Output: looks right. May not be right.
Papers approach
Define the specific endeavor USCIS will evaluate
Test each criterion from the adjudicator's perspective
Tag every claim: Documented, Inferred, or Unsupported
Draft only what the record actually supports
Output: right because the reasoning is right.
Assist by Attorney
AI prepares the case file. Attorneys apply judgment when you want it.
The serious path is not AI versus attorneys. Papers lets you prepare the case with structure, then bring a licensed immigration attorney into the exact part of the lifecycle where professional judgment matters.
Evaluate & prepare
You + Papers AICase assessment, evidence organization, petition draft built from your record.
Request counsel
Your choice, any stageShare the full case file with a licensed immigration attorney at whatever point you want judgment.
Counsel reviews
Licensed attorneyApplies judgment on evidence gaps, prong theory, and filing strategy. AI prepares; attorneys decide.
The complete case file — evaluation, evidence map, petition draft — transfers to counsel at whatever stage you choose.
Claude plugin and skills
Inspect the reasoning, not just the output.
The NIW evaluation method is available as an open-source Claude plugin and skill. Most applicants will use the hosted product, but making the reasoning inspectable shows how seriously we treat responsible legal AI.
Published plugin, public method
The Claude plugin exposes the reasoning structure behind the evaluation: work definition, evidence basis, NIW criteria, and likely USCIS questions.
Product is still more than a prompt
The hosted workspace adds documents, case state, drafting, evidence organization, RFE planning, and attorney handoff.
thepapers-niw · niw-evaluate
$ claude --plugin-dir ./niw-skills
› /thepapers-niw:niw-evaluate
● Welcome. I evaluate EB-2 NIW cases
against the Dhanasar standard — prong
by prong, with an honest read on
where your record stands today.
Share any of the following:
– A CV or LinkedIn-style summary
– Your field, country of birth, timing
– A proposed endeavor (if any)
▍ What would you like to share?▎
EB-2 National Interest Waiver
Prepare your NIW petition from eligibility to filing.
Start with a free evaluation. Then continue into the case workspace to organize evidence, draft petition materials, prepare for RFE challenges, and bring in attorney review when needed.
Free · No credit card required