Converting Your Salary to Dollars Proves Nothing: An EB-1A RFE on Benchmarking Pay Earned Outside the U.S.

The applicant was a senior AI architect at one of China's largest internet companies, self-petitioning for EB-1A classification as an individual of extraordinary ability in technology. The initial filing put forward evidence under several of the ten regulatory criteria, including awards, original contributions of major significance, a leading or critical role at a distinguished organization, and high salary. USCIS challenged four of them in a single RFE.

On awards, the objection was the same one that recurs across EB-1A RFEs in this dataset: several of the honors submitted — an industry technology award, an innovation award, and a set of project grants — had been issued to the employer and, in the officer's words, made "no reference to you." An award that names the company is evidence about the company. This is the second independent case in our sample where an otherwise strong filing lost the awards criterion purely on whose name appears on the certificate.

On original contributions, the RFE contains an unusually clean statement of the two-part test. The officer expressly acknowledged that the submitted patent applications did support that the applicant had made original scientific contributions — then held that "having your ideas or inventions patented does not establish how these same contributions are considered to be of major significance in the field." Originality was conceded; significance was not. Petitioners routinely submit more patents in response to this objection, which answers the half of the test that was never in dispute.

On critical role, the split was equally clean and equally easy to misread. USCIS found the background materials about the employer sufficient to establish that the organization itself had a distinguished reputation — that half of the criterion was met. What failed was the evidence about the applicant's role within it. Two support letters came from senior figures at the employer; the officer found that one identified the applicant's title but gave no duties matching it, and the other described involvement in various innovations without explaining how any of them were of significant importance to the organization or a division of it. The officer went further and quoted the Policy Manual's own guidance on what would help: for a leading role, a title with appropriate matching duties; for a critical role, an explanation of how the person contributed in a way of significant importance to the outcome of the organization.

The salary objection is the one worth reading carefully, because it invalidates the approach most China-based applicants take by default. The filing included employment verification letters, tax records, a currency conversion chart, and U.S. salary data for comparable senior architect roles. USCIS gave the conversion chart and the U.S. salary data "no relevant value," quoting the Policy Manual instruction that officers evaluate persons working outside the United States "based on the wage statistics or comparable evidence relevant to the applicable work location, rather than by simply converting the salary to U.S. dollars and then viewing whether that salary would be considered high in the United States." In other words, the comparison set is other people doing the same job in the applicant's own country and city — not the U.S. market. A compensation package that looks extraordinary after conversion to dollars can still fail this criterion, and one that looks modest in dollars can still pass it.

The case was approved after the RFE response.