Immigration Options for College Professors (Faculty Members)

There are many immigration options available to these foreigners who find a job at a colleges or universities as a faculty member. If you do not have a teaching assignment and you have a job title like "Assistant Research Professor", you should read the "Immigration Options for Researchers" on this website.

College professors in the United States enjoy the unparalleled advantages over others in getting the permanent residence in the United States safely and quickly. Unlike other foreigners who are working in the industry, college professors generally do not worry about being laid off, being fired, or being out of job as a result of the sponsoring employer's out of business during the pending period of your I-140 petition or I-485 applications. Moreover, the immigration law has provided special clauses for college professors to potentially get their green card faster than applicants. As a former college teacher myself before coming to the United States, I am particularly fond of handling green card cases for foreign teachers and have devoted much of my time and interest in exploring the options for college professors' immigration. As a matter of fact, I have obtained 100% approval rate on every single case for a college teacher!

• The first and best option for a college professor is through the "Outstanding Researcher/Professor" category. This category requires a permanent job offer and it is generally not a problem to a college professor because most of college teaching positions are tenure-track permanent positions. If you have a "visiting" teaching position, you do not qualify for this category. This category is the immigration option of first preference and it is generally called "EB1B".
  
  Through this option, foreign college professors, particularly for these who were born in mainland China or India, will get U.S. permanent residence much faster. The drawbacks of this category are: First, the documentation of the college professors' professional achievements are needed. Therefore, the applicants must collect and send us all evidence of their publications, awards, memberships, etc. Second, this option is not a viable one for these teachers who are working in some fields in which it is extremely difficult to publish papers. Third, to successfully get the case approved, foreign college professors have to ask other professors to write or sign letters of recommendation/support to substantiate their claims of professional achievements. To some newly hired foreign born college professors, impressing an employer while completing the heavy teaching assignments and quality research projects, has been quite a challenging task.
  
  However, most of our college clients have successfully fulfilled this rigorous tasks. We have returned them with the result they hired us for!

• The second and easiest option is "Special Handling" (now called "Optional Special Recruitment"), a fast track labor certification for teaching faculty. There are two very important requirements: (1) the employer (college or university) must advertise the position in a national professional journal; (2) the faculty member must contact us no later than within 16 months of hiring (counted from the date on the job offer letter so that we can have the paperwork ready and filed with US Department of Labor with 18 months of your hiring. Otherwise you cannot take advantage of this option. This option is good for any one who was hired to do actual classroom teaching at an institution of higher learning, including four-year colleges, two-year community colleges and all other special occupational training schools. This option is the best immigration option for those teaching faculty members who do not have many publications or other tangible evidence of their achievements, or for those who are teaching in some fields where it is not easy to have a many publications. Most college professors of social sciences and some natural sciences take this immigration options. Click here to see in what fields our firm has successfully done the green card process for college professors through the special handling process.
  
  Compared with "EB1B", this option can save the applicants tremendous amount of time on collecting and preparing the evidence of professional achievements. This option requires the applicants to provide only one key document: a copy of the ad placed in a national professional journal. We will take care of the rest! However, through this option it will take a longer time to get the US permanent residence because we have to go though an additional governmental bureaucracy-- the United States Department of Labor--before we can file the I-140 immigrant petition and the cases filed this category belong to the second preference (EB-2).
  
  Therefore, if you are a college faculty member and you want to get a green card sooner, EB1B is the best choice; if you are a college faculty member and you do not want to spend time collecting documents or writing letters of recommendation, Special Handling or Optional Special Recruitment is the best choice for you. Or if possible, you can prepare and file your immigration cases under BOTH categories!
• If you are hired as a college professor, and you have extraordinary achievements, you may qualify for a person of "extraordinary ability" (in English) or "extraordinary ability" (in Chinese).
• It is possible that you can apply under the national interest waiver category as a college professor.
• If you do not belong to any of these who qualify for any of categories listed above (you do not have any publications, your employer did not advertise your position in a national journal, etc, but your employer is willing to sponsor the green card process for you, you can still your green card case under the regular PERM process, which is slightly different from the specially designated "Special Handling"or "Optional Special Recruitment explained above.

If you can read Chinese language, you should read the following excellent discussion of the special handling process for college professors:

* "只要你保住工作，我就能为你拿到绿卡！"
* 再谈"只要你保住工作，我就能为你拿到绿卡！"
* 三谈"只要你保住工作，我就能为你拿到绿卡！"
* 申请Special Handling的关键
* 大学教师申请PERM劳工纸的广告要求

We suggest you contact us as soon as you receive the professorship job offer or email us your resume and a brief introduction of your current work and let us do the evaluation work for your green card options.

For our other sample approved immigration cases, click here.