EB2 NIW: Who Is Dhanasar, and Why Does He Decide Your Green Card?

Spend ten minutes in any immigration forum about EB2 NIW and you will run into the same sentence: "My case was denied on Dhanasar prong one."

Prong one of what? And who is Dhanasar?

Here is the short answer. Dhanasar was a real person, an engineer, and in 2016 an appeals office inside the U.S. immigration agency used his case to rewrite the rules for a green card called the EB-2 National Interest Waiver. Ten years later, every one of these cases is still decided by the three part test that came out of his file.

This article explains that test in plain language, so that by the end you can read your own case, or your own denial notice, and understand what it is actually saying.

What the NIW is, in one paragraph

Most employment based green cards need two things: an employer willing to sponsor you, and a long Department of Labor process proving that no qualified American worker is available for the job. That process ties your future to one company.

The National Interest Waiver skips both. You file for yourself. No employer, no job offer, no labor market test. In exchange, you have to convince the government of something harder: that your work matters to the United States enough that it is worth waiving the usual protection for American workers.

That trade is the whole idea. Every rule below is really just a version of the same question: is your work worth the exception?

Meet Dhanasar

Before 2016, these cases were judged under a test from a 1998 decision that was famously harsh. Applicants had to show, among other things, that they would serve the national interest to a substantially greater degree than an available U.S. worker. Almost nobody could prove that in a way officers accepted.

In 2016, the appeals office inside the immigration agency took the case of an engineer working on air and space propulsion research, threw out the old test, and replaced it with a more flexible three part framework. He got his waiver. His name is now on the standard, which is why applicants talk about "Dhanasar prongs" the way tax accountants talk about form numbers.

The 2016 framework is still the law of this category today. Agency guidance has been updated several times since, most significantly in January 2025, but those updates explain how officers apply the three prongs. They did not replace them.

Before the three prongs: the door before the door

This part surprises a lot of applicants, and it became much more explicit in the January 2025 guidance.

Before an officer looks at your national interest argument at all, they check whether you qualify for the underlying EB-2 category. That means one of two things:

• An advanced degree. A master's or higher, or a foreign equivalent. A bachelor's plus five years of progressive post degree experience in the specialty also counts.
• Exceptional ability in the sciences, arts, or business, meaning expertise significantly above what is ordinarily encountered in the field. This is a lower bar than the "extraordinary ability" standard used for the EB-1A, but it is not a low bar, and it has its own evidence rules.

If you do not clear this threshold, the agency can deny your case without ever reaching the interesting part. All the work you put into proving national importance never gets read.

There is a mismatch worth watching for here. Your degree has to actually connect to the work you propose to do. A doctorate in engineering does not qualify you for a waiver to open a bakery.

The single most important word: "endeavor"

If you learn one piece of vocabulary from this article, make it this one.

Your occupation is your general job. Your proposed endeavor is the specific thing you plan to do through that job. The guidance says these are different, and requires you to describe both clearly.

The agency uses Dhanasar's own case as the illustration. His occupation was engineer. His endeavor was research and development in air and space propulsion systems.

Now look at how much work that distinction does:

• Occupation: software engineer. Endeavor: "work as a software engineer at a U.S. company." That is not an endeavor. That is a job description, and it is one of the most reliable ways to get denied.
• Occupation: software engineer. Endeavor: developing open source security tooling for industrial control systems used by regional water utilities. That is an endeavor. It has a shape, a beneficiary, and a stake.

Vague endeavors fail. Not because the person is unqualified, but because a vague endeavor cannot be tested against the three prongs at all.

Prong 1: Substantial merit and national importance

This is where most cases are won or lost, so it gets the most space here.

Substantial merit is usually the easy half

Merit can come from many areas: business, entrepreneurship, science, technology, culture, health, education. And it does not have to be about money. Research and pure science can qualify even where no economic benefit is likely. Most serious professional work has substantial merit.

National importance is where cases die

The key idea, and the one the January 2025 guidance hammers on, is this: benefits to your employer are not benefits to the nation. Even a very large employer with offices across the country.

Your endeavor has to have broader implications, for a field, for a region, or for the public.

Some worked examples, drawn from how the agency itself frames this:

A scientist developing a drug at a pharmaceutical company. The wrong argument is that the drug will be profitable for the company. The right argument is the prospective public health benefit of the drug itself.

An engineer building technology at a private company. Saying the technology helps the company and its customers is not enough. What can work: evidence of widespread interest in adopting or licensing the technology, or that the process itself is a genuine advance, or that the work shapes how other companies develop similar technology.

A software developer deploying the company's product to clients. This is a hard case, and it is where a lot of denials come from. Serving clients well is valuable work, but the benefit runs to the company and the clients, and stops there.

A STEM teacher. Classroom teaching has obvious merit for U.S. educational interests. But teaching in itself does not usually show an impact on STEM education more broadly, so on its own it typically will not clear national importance. Designing a curriculum method being adopted across districts is a different case entirely.

Two more things worth knowing:

It is not a STEM only category. The 2022 guidance leaned heavily on STEM, and the January 2025 update stepped back from that emphasis. Health, education, culture, and business endeavors all remain eligible. What matters is impact, not field.

It is not about geography. People assume "national" means "in many states." It does not. The question is the potential prospective impact of what you are doing. Work concentrated in one economically struggling region can be nationally important precisely because of what it does there.

Prong 2: Are you well positioned to advance it?

Prong one is about the work. Prong two is about you. Not about whether you are impressive in the abstract, but whether you specifically are positioned to move this endeavor forward.

Things that speak to this:

• Your education, skills, and knowledge, tied directly to the endeavor.
• Your record of success in related or similar efforts, which is the strongest evidence most applicants have.
• A model or plan for what you intend to do.
• Progress you have already made toward it.
• Interest from people who would have to be involved for it to work: customers, users, investors, collaborators, institutions.

That last point is the one applicants underuse. A signed pilot agreement, a term sheet, a letter from a hospital system saying they intend to test your method, a grant award, all of these are worth more than three pages describing your ambitions, because they show that someone with their own money and reputation at stake believes you.

The most reassuring sentence in this whole area of law

You are not required to prove that your endeavor will succeed.

The 2016 decision says outright that many innovations and entrepreneurial ventures fail despite an intelligent plan and competent execution, and the agency's guidance repeats it. The test is whether you are well positioned to advance the work, not whether the work is guaranteed to pay off.

If you are a founder, that sentence is your friend. Quote it.

Prong 3: On balance, is the waiver worth it?

The third prong is the one people skip, and it is genuinely a separate question. Prongs one and two established that the work matters and that you can do it. Prong three asks: so why should the United States skip the labor certification process for you?

Three lines of argument, straight from the framework:

It would be impractical to get a job offer or a labor certification. Common for founders of their own companies, for independent researchers, and for people whose work does not map onto any single advertised job.

The country benefits from your contributions even if qualified U.S. workers are available. This is the argument for people whose specific track record, not their job title, is the thing of value.

The national interest is urgent enough that waiting is itself a cost. Time sensitive research, public health needs, critical technology gaps.

For entrepreneurs there is an especially useful passage in the current guidance. Where you are self employed in a way that does not generally harm U.S. workers, or where you have built a business that creates jobs for U.S. workers, there may be little benefit in requiring labor certification at all. Read that carefully. It says the process you are asking to skip would not accomplish much in your situation, which is exactly what prong three wants to hear.

All three, or nothing

You must satisfy all three prongs. Officers who find the first one unmet often stop there and never analyze the rest, which is why so many denial notices feel oddly short.

How this differs from the EB-1A

People often ask about both at once, so a quick contrast.

The EB-1A asks: who are you? It looks backward at what you have already achieved and asks whether you are among the small percentage at the very top of your field.

The NIW asks: what are you going to do, and does it matter to the country? It looks forward at your endeavor. You do not have to be at the top of your field. You have to be well positioned to advance work that is nationally important.

That is why some brilliant researchers fail the NIW while a less decorated founder passes, and vice versa. They are different questions.

What has changed recently

The three prong framework has not changed since 2016. The guidance around it has.

January 2025 brought the most detailed update in years. It applies to petitions filed on or after that date and to those pending on it. The main effects:

• Threshold EB-2 eligibility is checked explicitly and first.
• The occupation and the proposed endeavor must be described separately and clearly.
• The heavy STEM emphasis of the 2022 guidance was toned down.
• Officers got much more detailed instruction on each prong, including the employer benefit point discussed above.

In practice, since that update, practitioners have reported closer scrutiny across the board, especially on prong one, and requests for evidence asking for concrete proof of impact rather than descriptions of a promising field. Petitions written as "my field is important, and I work in my field" have a much harder time now than they did a few years ago.

The lesson for applicants: the case has to be about your specific endeavor and its specific consequences. Not your industry.

Where cases go wrong

1. The endeavor is a job description. "Work as a data scientist in the United States." Nothing to evaluate.
2. The argument proves the field is important, not that the work is. Twenty pages on the future of artificial intelligence, two paragraphs about you.
3. The benefit stops at the employer. Better products, happier clients, higher revenue.
4. Prong three is never argued. The petition establishes that the person is good at valuable work, and simply assumes the waiver follows. It does not.
5. The degree and the endeavor do not match, so the case fails at the threshold before the interesting parts are read.
6. Everything rests on recommendation letters, with no independent documents behind them.
7. All plan, no traction. Nothing showing that any customer, institution, funder, or collaborator has actually engaged.

Practical basics

• You file Form I-140 and you can file it yourself. No employer, no PERM labor certification.
• Faster processing is available for an additional fee. It buys speed, not a better outcome.
• An approved petition is not the green card. Whether you can move to the final step immediately depends on your country of chargeability and the monthly visa availability chart published by the State Department.
• Spouses and unmarried children under 21 can generally be included.
• Fees and processing times change frequently. Check the agency's own site rather than any article, including this one.

Sources

• USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 6, Part F, Chapter 5, which contains the current NIW guidance: uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-6-part-f-chapter-5
• USCIS announcement of the January 2025 update: uscis.gov/newsroom/alerts/uscis-updates-guidance-on-eb-2-national-interest-waiver-petitions
• USCIS overview of the EB-2 category: uscis.gov/employment-based-immigration-second-preference-eb-2
• USCIS policy updates index, to check for newer guidance: uscis.gov/policy-manual/updates

The 2016 decision itself is Matter of Dhanasar, issued by the Administrative Appeals Office. Examples in this article are illustrations, not real cases.

THIS ARTICLE IS GENERAL INFORMATION, NOT LEGAL ADVICE, AND IT DOES NOT CREATE AN ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP. IMMIGRATION GUIDANCE CHANGES OFTEN — CONFIRM THE CURRENT RULES AND SPEAK WITH A QUALIFIED IMMIGRATION ATTORNEY ABOUT YOUR OWN SITUATION.