Think Immigration: What the New NIW RFEs Are Really Asking For

Every immigration lawyer knows the feeling of opening an envelope from a service center and finding a Request for Evidence where an approval should have been. In the EB-2 National Interest Waiver space, those envelopes have arrived more often since USCIS updated its Policy Manual in January 2025, and the requests inside them read differently than they did two years ago. The category is not closed. But the room it once left for a loosely framed petition has narrowed, and the RFEs show us exactly where.

Three patterns stand out in the cases crossing my desk.

The first thing most of these RFEs do is go straight to the proposed endeavor. Not the petitioner's degrees, not the support letters, the endeavor itself. Officers want to read, in a few precise sentences, what the person actually proposes to do, and they are far less willing to supply the missing detail on their own. A petition that describes an occupation, a data scientist, a researcher, a founder, rather than a specific endeavor tends to draw the request that follows. The lesson is almost editorial. The strongest petitions now open with an endeavor a non-specialist could restate in a single sentence, tied to a concrete problem and a concrete plan. The vagueness that once slipped through is now the first thing questioned.

Second, the national importance and substantial merit analysis is getting a harder look. It is no longer enough to point to an important field, or to show that the work benefits an employer, even a large and well-known one. Officers are asking how this particular person's endeavor reaches past the company to a field, an industry, or the public at large. For founders whose case rests on job creation, the bar has effectively risen: projected jobs are now weighed against the population and economy of the relevant region, which makes raw headcount, standing alone, a weak argument. The petitions that hold up pair any economic case with something qualitative, a public-health benefit, a technology positioned for wider adoption, an advance others in the field can build on.

Third, the well-positioned prong has quietly become the place where strong-looking cases stumble. Credentials and a polished plan no longer carry it by themselves. Officers want a record of success and visible progress, not an argument that the person could advance the endeavor, but evidence that they already have, in the form of results others have used, adopted, funded, or cited. Expert letters still matter, but only when they come from people with first-hand knowledge and are backed by independent proof. A business plan is useful; a business plan on its own is not. The shift rewards documentation over description.

Underneath all three sits a structural change that is easy to miss. USCIS now expects petitioners to clear the underlying EB-2 classification before it reaches the waiver analysis at all. The occupation behind the endeavor has to be one that genuinely requires an advanced degree, and where the case rests on a bachelor's degree plus progressive experience, that experience now has to connect to both the degree and the endeavor. It is a nexus requirement familiar from the PERM world, newly applied here. A petition can be denied at this front door before an officer ever weighs the merits of the waiver.

None of this makes the National Interest Waiver a lost cause. Well-documented petitions are still being approved, and for the right candidate it remains one of the most flexible routes to a green card. What has changed is the cost of imprecision. The January 2025 update did not rewrite the Dhanasar framework. It signaled that officers will read it strictly and expect petitioners to connect every piece, the person, the endeavor, and the national interest, with evidence rather than adjectives. For those of us advising clients, the most valuable conversation now happens before filing: an honest assessment of whether the record belongs in the NIW lane, and if it does, whether the endeavor has been defined sharply enough to survive the first read.