This is an AAO appeal decision — a case denied once and appealed. It shows how the framework is applied; it is not the filing population.
The beneficiary, a senior software engineer, proposed to continue working for his employer leading site-reliability engineering projects to reduce customer incident outages, analyze past live-site issues for management reporting, and expand on-call ticket features for the company's cloud platform.
Field: software engineering · Read the decision (uscis.gov)
EB-2 threshold — addressed
AAO agreed with the Director that the Beneficiary qualifies as an advanced-degree professional based on a foreign bachelor's degree plus more than five years of progressive experience.
Prong 1 — national importancenot established · dispositive
“the Director determined that the Petitioner did not demonstrate the Beneficiary's specific proposed endeavor activities extend beyond the Petitioner to impact the field more broadly”
“the Petitioner has not demonstrated his work as a software engineer for the Petitioner and its I !platform has the potential to impact his field more broadly rising to the level of national importance”
“Stating that the profession of software engineering is of importance...is not sufficient to meet the "national importance" requirement under the Dhanasar framework since it fails to address the potential prospective impact of the Beneficiary's specific endeavor”
“The economic benefits that the Petitioner claims are supported by the Beneficiary's endeavor depend on numerous factors and the Petitioner did not offer a sufficiently direct evidentiary tie”
AAO decision text
How the evidence was treated
- recommendation letter · discounted
“the content of these letters mainly relates to the second prong of the Dhanasar framework, instead of speaking to the national importance of the Beneficiary's proposed endeavor”
AAO decision text - media · discounted
“this evidence does not mention the Beneficiary's specific work with I I and its site reliability engineering team”
AAO decision text - other · discounted
“the evaluation's focus on the importance and need for software engineers does not demonstrate that the instant specific endeavor would have a prospective impact in the field”
AAO decision text - degree · credited
- resume experience · credited
Where this case turned
- Economic claims unsupported · p1 — job/revenue projections with no corroborating basis
- Employer-specific benefit · p1 — "work furthers my company's product" — value accrues to one firm
- Field importance conflated with endeavor · p1 — argues the field matters, not the specific endeavor
Notable
AAO explicitly separated evidence types by prong, finding that detailed recommendation letters describing the beneficiary's specific project work were relevant to prong 2 (well-positioned) rather than prong 1 (national importance), and criticized an expert evaluation for addressing the importance of the software engineering profession generally rather than the specific endeavor's prospective impact.
Authorities this decision leans on
From the doctrinal survivor set — 187 authority tests across 47 distinct authorities cleared the differential-lift gates. Only those appear here.
- Flores v. Garland
- Matter of L-A-C-
What this case teaches
Analyst reading of the decision text.
Evidence showed beneficiary's endeavor benefited employer and its clients but failed to show broader impact on the field, U.S. workers, or economy at a nationally important scale.
Tie recommendation letters and expert opinions directly to the beneficiary's specific endeavor's field-wide or economic impact, not just employer benefit or general field importance.
moderate
critical_emerging_tech · economic_growth_generic · us_competitiveness · field_advancement
person_focused
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