u/LoudRevolution9163

If you work in shipbuilding, marine engineering, port logistics, or a related field, this is a good moment to be looking at EB-2 NIW. A federal push earlier this year put maritime work into the "national priority" column in a way it hadn't been framed before, and that changes the starting point for these petitions. This is what I've been seeing in EB-2 NIW filings from the maritime and shipbuilding side.

Quick refresher on EB-2 NIW

The National Interest Waiver lets you self-petition for a green card without an employer sponsor or labor certification, provided your work serves the national interest. Same EB-2 category as the PERM route, but you skip the job-offer requirement. That's what makes it attractive to professionals whose work crosses employers, regions, or industries.

Why the 2025 order matters

The April 2025 executive order on rebuilding U.S. maritime capacity states plainly that domestic shipbuilding, mariner training, and supply-chain resilience are federal priorities. The U.S. builds under 1% of the world's commercial ships while China builds about half, and the order ties that gap directly to national security. For a naval architect, shipyard production engineer, or logistics specialist, that's a solid basis for arguing your field carries national importance under Matter of Dhanasar.

The message worth internalizing

The order establishes why the field matters. Your petition still has to show how your specific record connects to that priority and why the benefit reaches beyond a single employer. Policy context does one job, individual evidence does the other. When both are strong, these cases are very winnable.

Where I see this landing well

Marine engineers and naval architects, obviously. But also shipyard and port managers, supply-chain specialists tied to critical logistics, cybersecurity professionals working on maritime systems, and credentialed mariners with technical leadership backgrounds. Job title isn't the deciding factor. What matters is whether you can show, with evidence, that your work advances a documented U.S. priority.

The takeaway

The 2025 order gives maritime petitions a stronger starting point than they had before. It doesn't carry the case on its own, but paired with a well-built record it's genuinely useful. If your work touches this space, worth taking a serious look at. One question for the thread: for those of you working in maritime or shipbuilding, has your employer or your professional network been talking about the executive order, or is this mostly showing up on the immigration side of things? Curious how visible it is inside the industry.

This constitutes general information only and is not legal advice.

- Attorney Vivian Daher

“That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.” — Ernest Hemingway

Pass it on!

20-year-old rising Italian star Sophia Loren in 1955

TIL that the Cupertino effect occurs when a device spell checker erroneously replaces correctly spelled words that are not in its dictionary. The term comes from the English word "cooperation" often being changed to "Cupertino" by older spell checkers.

August 14, 1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law, surrounded by key lawmakers and Cabinet members like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first female U.S. Cabinet secretary, who played a pivotal role in crafting the legislation

The average car loan is now $785 a month — and lasts for almost 6 years

We love learning about untranslatable words from around the world - especially if they involve love! "Iktsuarpok" is an Inuit word that captures the feeling of anticipation when waiting for someone you love to come home. Please share any others you know!

Is your resume ready for AI agents?

Kennewick Man was a Native American whose skeletal remains were found in 1996, washed out on the bank of the Columbia River near Kennewick, WA. Radiocarbon tests show the man lived about 8,400 to 8,700 years ago, making his skeleton one of the most complete ever found this old in the Americas.

5 simple ways to make PDFs easier to open, share, and store

La Catedral was a personal prison overlooking Medellín, Colombia, built to specifications ordered by Medellín Cartel leader Pablo Escobar, under a 1991 agreement with the Colombian government that he would surrender and serve five years. He escaped in 1992 by an escape route he had built.

TIL that the world's first ever speeding ticket was issued to Walter Arnold on January 1896 in Kent, England. He was caught going 8 MPH, four times the legal speed limit of 2 mph. A bicycle-riding police officer pursued him in a Benz Patent-Motorwagen like this.

Birds in a tree

Spotted while on the lake fishing

OTD: July 15, 1799 - A French soldier in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army discovered the Rosetta Stone in Egypt. Inscribed in Greek, hieroglyphics, and Demotic, its matching texts helped unlock the meaning of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, a language that had been lost for nearly 2,000 years.

Floriography, or communicating secret messages through flowers, was a popular pastime in the Victorian Era. Here is a chart from the Almanac on the historical meaning of popular flowers.

Mariner 4 was designed to conduct close-up scientific observations of Mars and to transmit them back to Earth. It performed the first successful flyby on July 14, 1965, returning the first close-up pictures of Mars and capturing the first images of another planet ever returned from deep space.

On this day: July 14, 1964 - NASA’s Mariner 4 became the first spacecraft to fly by Mars, and captured the first close-up views of another planet. Its "profound" images dispelled centuries-old notions of the Red Planet, and opened the era of Mars Exploration.

Maritime and shipbuilding professionals, the 2025 Executive Order actually matters for your EB-2 NIW