Article · Employment Immigration

Building an NIW Record: The Endeavor Statement, the Evidence, and the Letters

An NIW record is read as a single argument. Since August 2026, the initial filing is the one that decides the case.

By Lincoln Square Law · 8-minute read

A national interest waiver petition is read as a single argument. The officer is asking whether this person, pursuing this endeavor, should be excused from the labor certification process, and every exhibit is either helping to answer that question or distracting from it. Most weak petitions are not weak because the petitioner lacks accomplishments. They are weak because the record describes the accomplishments without connecting them to the three findings the officer must make under Matter of Dhanasar, 26 I&N Dec. 884 (AAO 2016). This article is about building that connection, and about why the order in which the record is assembled matters more in 2026 than it did before.

Why the initial filing now carries the case

Until recently, many petitioners filed a lean record and expected a request for evidence to show them what was missing. That expectation is no longer safe. Policy Alert PA-2026-05, issued August 5, 2026, restores USCIS officers’ discretion to deny a benefit request without first issuing a request for evidence or a notice of intent to deny when the initial filing does not establish eligibility. When a request is issued, the response period may be shorter than the twelve-week maximum. The practical rule is simple. Assume the petition as filed is the petition that will be decided.

Start with the endeavor statement

Everything in an NIW record depends on how the proposed endeavor is defined, and the January 2025 USCIS guidance (PA-2025-03) directs officers to distinguish the endeavor from the petitioner’s occupation. A useful endeavor statement answers four questions in plain language: what the petitioner will do, for whom, how the work will be carried out over the next several years, and how anyone would know whether it succeeded.

The statement should be narrow enough to evaluate and broad enough to be credible over time. “Continue my career in data science” is an occupation. “Develop and deploy fraud-detection models for rural community banks, starting with the three Midwestern institutions that have signed pilot agreements” is an endeavor. The second version tells the officer exactly what evidence to look for, and it gives the letters and exhibits a common reference point. Once the endeavor is fixed, every other part of the record should describe the same project in the same terms. Inconsistency between the petition letter, the business plan, and the recommendation letters is one of the most common reasons an officer doubts the whole.

Show impact beyond the petitioner’s own employer

National importance is about the endeavor’s prospective impact, not the importance of the field. The guidance is explicit that evidence of a field’s significance does not establish the significance of a particular project within it. The record therefore needs a bridge between the two: evidence that this specific work reaches beyond a single workplace.

Useful bridges include government reports or agency priorities that name the problem the endeavor addresses, citation of the petitioner’s prior work by others who applied it, adoption of a method or tool by organizations outside the petitioner’s institution, and data showing the scale of the population, industry, or system affected. Statistics should be tied to the endeavor, not recited. A page of general figures about health care costs does less than one paragraph showing how the petitioner’s scheduling model reduced missed appointments at two clinics and is being adopted by a third.

Prove the petitioner is positioned with documents

The second Dhanasar prong asks whether the petitioner is well positioned to advance the endeavor. The factors are education and skills, a record of success in related efforts, a plan, progress already made, and interest from users, customers, investors, or institutions. The 2025 guidance emphasizes objective documentary evidence, and it cautions that opinion without support does not replace it.

Each factor should have its own documents. Progress is shown by grants awarded, pilots completed, products shipped, and patents licensed, not by a description of plans. Interest is shown by signed letters of intent, contracts, investment agreements, and correspondence from institutions, not by general statements that the market is large. For founders, a business plan should contain actual figures, identified customers, and a realistic timeline, and it should match the financial documents. Ownership of a company is not enough on its own, and the guidance says so.

Letters that corroborate rather than repeat

Recommendation letters remain important, but their role has narrowed. Officers may give reduced weight to expert opinion that is conclusory or unsupported (Matter of Caron International, 19 I&N Dec. 791 (Comm’r 1988)). Under PA-2026-05, an officer who finds the letters unpersuasive may deny without first asking for more. A letter is strongest when it explains something the documents cannot, such as why a result mattered to the writer’s own work or organization, and when it points to exhibits that prove what it says.

Several practical points follow:

• Independent voices carry weight. Letters from people who know the petitioner’s work only through its influence on their own are more persuasive than letters from supervisors and co-authors, although both have a place.
• Specificity beats praise. A letter should describe a particular contribution, how the writer learned of it, and what changed as a result.
• Government and institutional letters matter. The 2025 guidance recognizes letters from government or quasi-governmental entities with relevant expertise as meaningful support for the second prong.
• Templates are visible. Letters that share phrasing with each other or with the petition letter invite the conclusion that the petitioner wrote them.

Argue the third prong

The third prong is often treated as a formality, and petitions lose on it. It asks why, on balance, the United States benefits from waiving the job offer and labor certification. Dhanasar identifies considerations that can support the answer: that labor certification is impractical given the nature of the work or the petitioner’s situation, that the country would benefit from the contribution even if U.S. workers were available, and that the national interest is urgent. The 2025 guidance adds that a labor shortage in the occupation is not enough by itself.

A founder whose endeavor depends on building a company has a concrete answer, because there is no independent employer to sponsor labor certification. A researcher whose project has a time-sensitive public health or security dimension has another. A petitioner with an advanced STEM degree working on a critical or emerging technology can point to the guidance’s treatment of that combination as a strong positive factor. Whatever the answer, it should be argued with evidence, not asserted.

Assemble the EB-2 foundation first

The waiver cannot be reached unless the petitioner qualifies for EB-2, and officers now decide that question first. Degree evidence, credential evaluations for foreign degrees, and experience letters should be gathered early. Experience letters must come from current or former employers and state the writer’s name, address, and title and a specific description of the duties performed (8 C.F.R. 204.5(g)(1)). Any foreign-language document requires a complete English translation certified by a competent translator (8 C.F.R. 103.2(b)(3)). If the intended work differs from past work, the record should show that the intended occupation itself requires at least a bachelor’s degree.

A record that holds together

Before filing, read the petition as the officer will. Every exhibit should be cited in the petition letter for a specific proposition, every proposition in the letter should rest on an exhibit, and the endeavor should be described identically throughout. Gaps should be closed or explained, not left for a request that may never come. It also helps to have someone who did not assemble the record read it cold and list every claim they could not verify from the exhibits alone. That list is usually a preview of the officer’s concerns. When the record cannot yet support one of the three findings, the stronger choice is often to delay filing while the missing evidence is created, or to consider another category entirely.