AAO research

AAO Pre‑Kazarian Inconsistency: Sustaining EB‑1A Without Meeting the Three‑Criterion Threshold

Shows a concrete AAO inconsistency where a petition was sustained despite not meeting the three‑criterion threshold under pre‑Kazarian rules.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Administrative Appeals Office has historically applied inconsistent standards in adjudicating EB-1A petitions under the pre-Kazarian framework, where petitioners needed to satisfy three regulatory criteria for original contributions, scholarly articles, or judging. This page documents a concrete example of that inconsistency.

The Decision

The AAO decision AUG172005_03B2203 sustained an EB-1A petition despite the petitioner not formally meeting the three-criteria threshold under pre-Kazarian rules. According to the extracted facts, the AAO accepted all three criteria—judging, original contributions, and scholarly articles—but counted only two as satisfied.

The central evidence included:

  • Research on neurogranin showing original contributions to understanding its role in signal transduction

  • Authorship of multiple publications in the Journal of Biological Chemistry

  • An aggregate citation count of 144 citations described by the AAO as "unusually large" and "widely cited"

  • Witness letters supporting the significance of the petitioner's work

The decision was flagged internally for inconsistency, with verifiers noting that the AAO's determination regarding the judging criterion appeared to be falsified. The extraction explicitly labels this finding as potentially incoherent.

Why This Matters

This decision exemplifies a pattern where the AAO has occasionally sustained EB-1A petitions even when fewer than three regulatory criteria are formally satisfied under the pre-Kazarian framework. Under that framework, petitioners needed to demonstrate original contributions, scholarly articles, or judging at an internationally recognized level of achievement.

The internal inconsistency suggests that while the AAO may have technically accepted all three criteria as met, it applied inconsistent counting practices when determining whether the threshold was satisfied for final adjudication.

Source Note

Non-precedent AAO decisions are used as evidence examples. They are not binding authority and do not predict any individual case.