- Can you tell us a little about yourself, what is your occupation, what is your job, and what are your professional achievements? What country are you from?
- My name is Elena Milberger, I'm from Uzbekistan. I can say that all my life I have been doing my favorite thing - fashion and art. I am a fashion designer and an artist. My specialty is creating clothes with hand-painted silk. My skills can include not only fashion design but as well as technical modeling clothes, and creating author's drawings for the fabric. I have a great experience in the fashion industry (over 17 years), creating more than 20 original clothing collections. My professional achievements include the creation of my own clothing brand, which is quite famous both in Uzbekistan and abroad, where I have been with fashion shows.
- How long have you wanted to move to another country? And why in the USA? Have you chosen between other countries?
- The main motivation for moving to the USA is the desire to realize myself, and my talents in a big fashion company. I have achieved a lot in my country, I am a well-known person, I have a recognizable clothing brand, but I want to work in a world-class company. Probably many people are aware that there are four fashion capitals in the world: London, Paris, Milan, and New York. It was these four cities that interested me to implement my professional plans.
There was a possibility to go to study in England, I entered the master's program at the University of London. In this case, a work visa is given to both the student and the spouse.
Also, I always have the opportunity to move to Germany under the repatriation program, since I have ethnic German roots.
It just so happens that it was the way with the U.S. that was successful, and I am very happy about that. I was in the USA in 2016 with the show, I had a pleasant impression of the trip. I have friends in the USA and even a commercial partner. This is a wonderful country with great opportunities for visitors to conquer it, especially the multiculturalism of American society attracts.
- Why did you decide to follow the EB-1A path to be legalized in the USA?
- Actually, I have heard about the Talent visa for quite a long time, ever since I was a recommender for one of my acquaintances who applied for this visa. Then her lawyer said that I had a ready-made case. But I began to study all the information in detail only last August and immediately realized that I was not mistaken, this visa was for me! I was very attracted by the opportunity to get a green card not only for myself but also for family members. An important fact was also the relative affordability compared to other options for relocation, when you can, while in your country, fill out all the documents and wait for a response.
- How did you find out about Moovert? And why did you decide to prepare a case with our help?
- You could say that I accidentally found out about Moovert, but at the same time, it was not by chance. We have been monitoring the Internet (YouTube) so much in search of information about this visa that we would certainly have come across this company. Why Moovert? I liked the interview with Alexander Molodin, in which he talked quite simply and competently about his experience of obtaining a visa and convinced me that other people could do it. Alexander's phrase caught me: "What kind of talent are you if you can't get that visa yourself?" It sounds like a challenge, but it's actually true.
- Tell us your history of preparing documents for the case?
- It took me 5 months to write the petition. I work for myself, so I managed to free up my working time, refuse many orders, and get involved in writing a petition.
Collecting documents for applying for an EB1-A visa probably takes the lion's share of time and effort. It took me, for example, a month and a half to trawl the entire web, just to study all the pages, collect all the evidence about myself and the events in which I participated, and save and systematize everything. This is probably the most routine moment of work. Writing letters of recommendation is also a rather time-consuming part of writing a petition.
Writing the body of the petition itself is the most creative process. I wrote and rewrote it several times, each time polishing the result after the expert's comment. As a result, my case turned out to be quite weighty and took up more than 930 pages.
- How many and what criteria were collected and submitted to USCIS? Can you tell us more? What criteria were already prepared? And which ones had to be collected in the process?
- I applied according to six criteria: these are awards, associations, judging, contribution to the industry, media, and exhibitions. I had all of them ready, I finalized only membership in one association in the process.
My strongest criterion was exhibitions, as I have more than 50 fashion shows and exhibitions of applied art of both national and international importance, including participation in Fashion Week in the USA. It took me about 300 pages of Exhibits to describe this criterion alone.
Another fairly strong criterion was the media category, there were a lot of interviews at different times on different resources. The only difficulty was proving the weight of newspapers, TV, and websites, because most of these media are national in scope, and Uzbekistan is a small country. I had to do a comparative analysis of the entire media market of the country and collect references from publishers. Proving the presence of interviews in foreign media turned out to be even more difficult. My archive with screenshots of websites and photos of newspapers helped. Nevertheless, many publications were irretrievably lost, in such cases I attached my photos from the television of foreign countries and tried to confirm the facts of publications with letters of recommendation.
Awards are also a good criterion for me. There were three competitions in my life, and I won first place in all of them. Two of them are international, one is national. I have tried to describe each of them in as much detail as possible. It helped me, that fashion designer competitions are usually very spectacular and widely covered in the press. I additionally accompanied each of the awards with a letter of recommendation from the organizer.
I had an interesting situation when describing the Contribution to the industry criterion. It is quite difficult for a designer to close this criterion, because having own artistic style is a rather subjective issue, and a designer usually does not bother to issue copyright patents. Thanks to the expert's tip, I proved my influence on the fashion industry through plagiarism. There have been plenty of these facts in my career, but how can I prove it? I conducted a visual comparative analysis of my collections and the works of designers who follow in my footsteps. Here I proved that I was a few steps ahead of everyone. I remembered an article by a fashion journalist about the fact of plagiarism in my work and asked for a letter of recommendation from her and other colleagues. In addition to creating my own artistic style, which many designers are trying to adopt, I described my innovative developments in the technique of hand-painting on fabric and the introduction of this technique into the fashion industry. I described the ways through which I share my work with other designers, these are, of course, social networks and the author's educational channels. I applied the opinions of art critics, and professors about the quality of my author's drawings. Here, I think, the wide geography of my referrers helped. Thanks to my foreign shows, I have a lot of specialists from Europe, China, Turkey, and the USA in my contact list, they all wrote letters to me with pleasure. Through their letters, I tried to convey the idea that I have made a great contribution to the development of hand-painted fabric and have done a lot to promote this applied art in fashion.
Judging is one of my weak criteria. I described an international competition where I was lucky enough to be the chairman of the jury, as well as a local design competition. Moreover, I had to compile the winners' lists myself, collecting information from open sources. Each of the competitions was confirmed by certificates from the organizers.
Membership in associations is probably considered my weakest criterion. For everyone who applies for this type of visa, it is no secret that this is the most difficult point to close. Nevertheless, I tried to close it as much as possible with the charter, certificates, etc. For many years I was a member of the handicraft society of Uzbekistan. In addition to this, I made an effort and joined the Creative Union of Artists at the Academy of Arts of the country in the fall.
- What was the most difficult in the process of preparing documents?
- In fact, there are many issues at once that are difficult in the process of preparing documents. The most difficult thing I would call, probably, the need for full immersion in the petition process, finding enough time to write a case. In my case, my free time helped me, with the support of my family I was able to have the freedom to cut myself off from other activities, collect documents and write the petition. Also, the fact that it seems to me that this visa is more suitable for people who are associated with science or education should probably be considered a difficulty. For people, like me, who engaged more in creativity, and art, and for some, probably, who are associated with sports, preparing all the documents for this visa is much more difficult because there are no special skills when working with documents. In my case, my higher engineering education and a bit of a technical mindset probably helped me. And the most important thing, of course, for a positive result is to show character and bring everything to an end.
- You have joined using the “Optimal” tariff plan. Have you had enough feedback and features of this plan? Would you like to upgrade, for example, to "Maximum" and delegate the writing of the case?
- Yes, I think I didn't make a mistake with my choice of plan. One guide to writing a petition would probably not be enough for me. The feedback in the form of eight meetings with the expert was exactly enough so that the expert correctly guided me to the main questions, and checked the main parts of the petition to correct all the mistakes. I must say that the presence of Telegram chat is also very helpful in writing a petition, many questions you can ask the already experienced talents and get a competent answer.
It's great that there is such an option as the Maximum tariff plan. Definitely, it will be useful to those people who lack time and do not have the opportunity to remove themselves from their affairs and write a petition themselves. I have already advised this tariff plan to my busy extraordinary friend.
- What resources of the Support Program were the most useful for you? And what features did you not use (if there was such a thing)?
- In my opinion, the Moovert application has enough of the documents that are currently in the program. I actively used examples of petitions and examples of letters of recommendation. Conveniently, there are both video instructions and duplicate texts. What I didn't use at all, to be honest, was the laws of the United States. I neglected this issue and trusted the information from the Manual.
In general, I think that the course is well-composed. Of course, there is nothing perfect, there is always something that can be further refined. For example, I understand that people are most concerned about examples of petition writing and design issues.
- Were there any difficulties with the translation of documents?
- I had almost no problems with translation. Somehow from the very beginning, I was lucky with a translator from Russian to English. The same person turned out to be a polyglot and also translated an Italian newspaper for me, and also helped me find specialists in translations from Chinese and Turkish. I also had documents with translations from Uzbek. I wrote my letters of recommendation in English myself and had them corrected by my English teacher.
I ordered the final proofreading of the petition from the Moovert translation agency, and I did not regret it. The result was excellent, the entire text of the petition was edited for me on the subject of lawyer slang, American English, and not only.
- Did you have any doubts about the correctness of the chosen path? Did you want to give it all up? If so, what (and maybe who)) helped you get to the end?
- Of course, there were doubts. I think many creative persons are familiar with the impostor syndrome when it seems to you: “Well, why should you be given this visa? Do you really have extraordinary abilities or are you just a local celebrity?” Yes, there were those doubts. The support of my family, husband, and children was very important at these moments, they believed in me from the very beginning. We were also very encouraged by the positive results on visa approval, which were published by the chat participants.
Well, the most important thing is to write this petition and bring the matter to an end, I think you need character, there is no way without it. On the other hand, extraordinary people should have this character, and I definitely have it.
- Which of your expectations were met while working on the case, and which were not?
- The most important expectation is approval and, importantly, we managed to do without requesting additional evidence as soon as possible (I ordered Premium Processing). This is the main expectation, and it has come true!
- Can you give some advice to people who are just going to go this way? If you could pass the advice to yourself in the past (when you first started working on the petition) what would that be?
- The most important advice to all talents who are on the path to getting an EB1-A visa is to believe in yourself, have patience, and courage, and find plenty of time to do it all. And, of course, I wish you all good luck and a good officer at USCIS.
The main advice to myself in the past - Don't doubt yourself and your talent!
- My name is Elena Milberger, I'm from Uzbekistan. I can say that all my life I have been doing my favorite thing - fashion and art. I am a fashion designer and an artist. My specialty is creating clothes with hand-painted silk. My skills can include not only fashion design but as well as technical modeling clothes, and creating author's drawings for the fabric. I have a great experience in the fashion industry (over 17 years), creating more than 20 original clothing collections. My professional achievements include the creation of my own clothing brand, which is quite famous both in Uzbekistan and abroad, where I have been with fashion shows.
- How long have you wanted to move to another country? And why in the USA? Have you chosen between other countries?
- The main motivation for moving to the USA is the desire to realize myself, and my talents in a big fashion company. I have achieved a lot in my country, I am a well-known person, I have a recognizable clothing brand, but I want to work in a world-class company. Probably many people are aware that there are four fashion capitals in the world: London, Paris, Milan, and New York. It was these four cities that interested me to implement my professional plans.
There was a possibility to go to study in England, I entered the master's program at the University of London. In this case, a work visa is given to both the student and the spouse.
Also, I always have the opportunity to move to Germany under the repatriation program, since I have ethnic German roots.
It just so happens that it was the way with the U.S. that was successful, and I am very happy about that. I was in the USA in 2016 with the show, I had a pleasant impression of the trip. I have friends in the USA and even a commercial partner. This is a wonderful country with great opportunities for visitors to conquer it, especially the multiculturalism of American society attracts.
- Why did you decide to follow the EB-1A path to be legalized in the USA?
- Actually, I have heard about the Talent visa for quite a long time, ever since I was a recommender for one of my acquaintances who applied for this visa. Then her lawyer said that I had a ready-made case. But I began to study all the information in detail only last August and immediately realized that I was not mistaken, this visa was for me! I was very attracted by the opportunity to get a green card not only for myself but also for family members. An important fact was also the relative affordability compared to other options for relocation, when you can, while in your country, fill out all the documents and wait for a response.
- How did you find out about Moovert? And why did you decide to prepare a case with our help?
- You could say that I accidentally found out about Moovert, but at the same time, it was not by chance. We have been monitoring the Internet (YouTube) so much in search of information about this visa that we would certainly have come across this company. Why Moovert? I liked the interview with Alexander Molodin, in which he talked quite simply and competently about his experience of obtaining a visa and convinced me that other people could do it. Alexander's phrase caught me: "What kind of talent are you if you can't get that visa yourself?" It sounds like a challenge, but it's actually true.
- Tell us your history of preparing documents for the case?
- It took me 5 months to write the petition. I work for myself, so I managed to free up my working time, refuse many orders, and get involved in writing a petition.
Collecting documents for applying for an EB1-A visa probably takes the lion's share of time and effort. It took me, for example, a month and a half to trawl the entire web, just to study all the pages, collect all the evidence about myself and the events in which I participated, and save and systematize everything. This is probably the most routine moment of work. Writing letters of recommendation is also a rather time-consuming part of writing a petition.
Writing the body of the petition itself is the most creative process. I wrote and rewrote it several times, each time polishing the result after the expert's comment. As a result, my case turned out to be quite weighty and took up more than 930 pages.
- How many and what criteria were collected and submitted to USCIS? Can you tell us more? What criteria were already prepared? And which ones had to be collected in the process?
- I applied according to six criteria: these are awards, associations, judging, contribution to the industry, media, and exhibitions. I had all of them ready, I finalized only membership in one association in the process.
My strongest criterion was exhibitions, as I have more than 50 fashion shows and exhibitions of applied art of both national and international importance, including participation in Fashion Week in the USA. It took me about 300 pages of Exhibits to describe this criterion alone.
Another fairly strong criterion was the media category, there were a lot of interviews at different times on different resources. The only difficulty was proving the weight of newspapers, TV, and websites, because most of these media are national in scope, and Uzbekistan is a small country. I had to do a comparative analysis of the entire media market of the country and collect references from publishers. Proving the presence of interviews in foreign media turned out to be even more difficult. My archive with screenshots of websites and photos of newspapers helped. Nevertheless, many publications were irretrievably lost, in such cases I attached my photos from the television of foreign countries and tried to confirm the facts of publications with letters of recommendation.
Awards are also a good criterion for me. There were three competitions in my life, and I won first place in all of them. Two of them are international, one is national. I have tried to describe each of them in as much detail as possible. It helped me, that fashion designer competitions are usually very spectacular and widely covered in the press. I additionally accompanied each of the awards with a letter of recommendation from the organizer.
I had an interesting situation when describing the Contribution to the industry criterion. It is quite difficult for a designer to close this criterion, because having own artistic style is a rather subjective issue, and a designer usually does not bother to issue copyright patents. Thanks to the expert's tip, I proved my influence on the fashion industry through plagiarism. There have been plenty of these facts in my career, but how can I prove it? I conducted a visual comparative analysis of my collections and the works of designers who follow in my footsteps. Here I proved that I was a few steps ahead of everyone. I remembered an article by a fashion journalist about the fact of plagiarism in my work and asked for a letter of recommendation from her and other colleagues. In addition to creating my own artistic style, which many designers are trying to adopt, I described my innovative developments in the technique of hand-painting on fabric and the introduction of this technique into the fashion industry. I described the ways through which I share my work with other designers, these are, of course, social networks and the author's educational channels. I applied the opinions of art critics, and professors about the quality of my author's drawings. Here, I think, the wide geography of my referrers helped. Thanks to my foreign shows, I have a lot of specialists from Europe, China, Turkey, and the USA in my contact list, they all wrote letters to me with pleasure. Through their letters, I tried to convey the idea that I have made a great contribution to the development of hand-painted fabric and have done a lot to promote this applied art in fashion.
Judging is one of my weak criteria. I described an international competition where I was lucky enough to be the chairman of the jury, as well as a local design competition. Moreover, I had to compile the winners' lists myself, collecting information from open sources. Each of the competitions was confirmed by certificates from the organizers.
Membership in associations is probably considered my weakest criterion. For everyone who applies for this type of visa, it is no secret that this is the most difficult point to close. Nevertheless, I tried to close it as much as possible with the charter, certificates, etc. For many years I was a member of the handicraft society of Uzbekistan. In addition to this, I made an effort and joined the Creative Union of Artists at the Academy of Arts of the country in the fall.
- What was the most difficult in the process of preparing documents?
- In fact, there are many issues at once that are difficult in the process of preparing documents. The most difficult thing I would call, probably, the need for full immersion in the petition process, finding enough time to write a case. In my case, my free time helped me, with the support of my family I was able to have the freedom to cut myself off from other activities, collect documents and write the petition. Also, the fact that it seems to me that this visa is more suitable for people who are associated with science or education should probably be considered a difficulty. For people, like me, who engaged more in creativity, and art, and for some, probably, who are associated with sports, preparing all the documents for this visa is much more difficult because there are no special skills when working with documents. In my case, my higher engineering education and a bit of a technical mindset probably helped me. And the most important thing, of course, for a positive result is to show character and bring everything to an end.
- You have joined using the “Optimal” tariff plan. Have you had enough feedback and features of this plan? Would you like to upgrade, for example, to "Maximum" and delegate the writing of the case?
- Yes, I think I didn't make a mistake with my choice of plan. One guide to writing a petition would probably not be enough for me. The feedback in the form of eight meetings with the expert was exactly enough so that the expert correctly guided me to the main questions, and checked the main parts of the petition to correct all the mistakes. I must say that the presence of Telegram chat is also very helpful in writing a petition, many questions you can ask the already experienced talents and get a competent answer.
It's great that there is such an option as the Maximum tariff plan. Definitely, it will be useful to those people who lack time and do not have the opportunity to remove themselves from their affairs and write a petition themselves. I have already advised this tariff plan to my busy extraordinary friend.
- What resources of the Support Program were the most useful for you? And what features did you not use (if there was such a thing)?
- In my opinion, the Moovert application has enough of the documents that are currently in the program. I actively used examples of petitions and examples of letters of recommendation. Conveniently, there are both video instructions and duplicate texts. What I didn't use at all, to be honest, was the laws of the United States. I neglected this issue and trusted the information from the Manual.
In general, I think that the course is well-composed. Of course, there is nothing perfect, there is always something that can be further refined. For example, I understand that people are most concerned about examples of petition writing and design issues.
- Were there any difficulties with the translation of documents?
- I had almost no problems with translation. Somehow from the very beginning, I was lucky with a translator from Russian to English. The same person turned out to be a polyglot and also translated an Italian newspaper for me, and also helped me find specialists in translations from Chinese and Turkish. I also had documents with translations from Uzbek. I wrote my letters of recommendation in English myself and had them corrected by my English teacher.
I ordered the final proofreading of the petition from the Moovert translation agency, and I did not regret it. The result was excellent, the entire text of the petition was edited for me on the subject of lawyer slang, American English, and not only.
- Did you have any doubts about the correctness of the chosen path? Did you want to give it all up? If so, what (and maybe who)) helped you get to the end?
- Of course, there were doubts. I think many creative persons are familiar with the impostor syndrome when it seems to you: “Well, why should you be given this visa? Do you really have extraordinary abilities or are you just a local celebrity?” Yes, there were those doubts. The support of my family, husband, and children was very important at these moments, they believed in me from the very beginning. We were also very encouraged by the positive results on visa approval, which were published by the chat participants.
Well, the most important thing is to write this petition and bring the matter to an end, I think you need character, there is no way without it. On the other hand, extraordinary people should have this character, and I definitely have it.
- Which of your expectations were met while working on the case, and which were not?
- The most important expectation is approval and, importantly, we managed to do without requesting additional evidence as soon as possible (I ordered Premium Processing). This is the main expectation, and it has come true!
- Can you give some advice to people who are just going to go this way? If you could pass the advice to yourself in the past (when you first started working on the petition) what would that be?
- The most important advice to all talents who are on the path to getting an EB1-A visa is to believe in yourself, have patience, and courage, and find plenty of time to do it all. And, of course, I wish you all good luck and a good officer at USCIS.
The main advice to myself in the past - Don't doubt yourself and your talent!