NEW YORK (Reuters) - The last thing any international athlete wants to do after a 15-hour flight is spend another three hours stuck in immigration.
When the destination is New York, Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi has little choice but to take the annual inquisition at the airport in his stride as he happens to hail from Pakistan.
The soft-spoken 30-year-old may, however, have finally found a way to secure a fast-track passage through U.S. immigration -- a U.S. Open runners-up trophy.
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Notably, as someone who has made it so far in one of the world's major tennis tournaments, Mr. Qureshi has clearly established himself as one of the world’s elite tennis players. One would think that his accomplishments would easily qualify him as an extraordinary ability alien, under either the O-1 nonimmigrant visa category or the EB-1A green card category standards. However, USCIS has been known to challenge cases presented in these categories, even for those who have made it to the professional ranks of their respective sports. In handling Mr. Qureshi's O-1 or EB-1A case, it would be critical to avoid limiting his field of endeavor to only professional tennis players, which could lead a USCIS officer to determine that he is not as accomplished as the world’s top ranked players and therefore does not occupy a position at the very top of his field of endeavor. Conversely, if Mr. Qureshi's achievements are more appropriately considered next to the millions of tennis players in the world, playing at varying levels, he should clearly be determined to be among the very best in the field and meet the threshold for either the O-1 or EB-1A.
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