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Immigration Options for College
Professors (Faculty Members)
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| There are many immigration
options available to these foreigners who find a job at the 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.
Being a teacher at the college or
university in the United States, these college professors 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, 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 get green card
potentially faster than others. 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, the foreign college professors, particularly for
these who were born in the mainland China or India, will get the U.S.
permanent residence much faster. The drawbacks of this category
are: The first one is, 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, the 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 who have been struggling to impress
the employers with completing the heavy teaching assignments and doing
quality research projects, this has been quite a challenging task
However, most of our college clients have successfully done the
tasks. We have returned them with the result they hired us for!
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- 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 16 month 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 school. This option is
the best immigration option for these teaching faculty members who do not
have many publications or other tangible evidence of achievements or who
are teaching in some fields where it is not easy to have a few or 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 bureaucracies-- 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
green card sooner, EB1B is the first choice; if you are a college
faculty member and you do not want to spend on collecting documents or
writing letters of recommendation, Special Handling or Optional
Special Recruitment is the first choice. Or if possible,
prepare and file your immigration cases under BOTH categories!
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- 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.
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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 |
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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. |
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