Sunday, July 31, 2011

Day 2 - A Lesson in Immigration Law and The Truth About Non-Immigrant Visas

If it was not already clear for some, I am leaving  the US against my will.

To sum it up for whomever is not familiar with Immigration laws in the US: One can only be in the US for an extended period of time, for a clear REASON. Either you are a student, an employee, someone's wife/husband, on a mission, doing research, or visiting. If you don't fall in any of these categories you better have a Green Card past 90 days, or you will become an "Illegal Alien". My immigration trajectory has been somewhat unusual and very much illustrates how I usually go about doing things in general... I am determined (or stubborn, depending on how you look at it!!!)- I rarely take No for an answer and tend to make things happen even when nothing indicates they can! Or at least that's how I used to operate...

I came here on September 29, 1999 as student. I went to school full time including in the Summer and graduated at the end of the year 2000. As a foreign student who graduates from college in America, you are granted 12 months of "Practical training" which allows you to work in your field for a year. After which, if you intend to stay, you better be super motivated because obtaining and working on an H1B visa is as easy as swimming across The Channel! And that was prior to Sept. 11!!!!

As I finished my practical training and realized I may want to try to "make it happen" here, I learned about what was involved in obtaining and being on a H1B visa: 1-You need to be offered a job by employer in the field of studies in which you graduated (Marketing), 2-the employer needs to prove to the Department of Labor that they have not found any American citizen that could do the job better than you (in other words that your skills are unique) and finally 3-they have to want to foot the bill; at the time, upward of $3,000 (as opposed to hiring a headache-free American citizen). 4-There is also a yearly quota of how many of those visas can be granted and an exact date on which you have to submit your file. 5-When you do get your H1B visa, it is given to you 3 years at a time "for a maximum of 6 years". Finally, the most important and key factor, 6- an H1B visa allows you to work for one, and only one specific employer. Should anyone end this relationship, you of course cannot work for anyone else in the country, you just cannot work-period-.
All of this describes the process at a time when it was somewhat possible to obtain an H1B visa: Pre 2001, Pre economic downfall.

2001: Is when things become interesting.... The towers fall and I immediately lose my first job. Looking for another job means going through the process described above, all over again. So I did.
2002-2003: I entered the corporate world in America- (I have my own considerations about it that I will not cover here). The impact of the Sept 11 attacks on the US created an economic uncertainty for a country that was technically already in the midst of a recession, so guess what happened?
I lost my job.

The next 8 years are pretty much a continued quest to make a living, which means reactivating my H1B visa or trying to figure out situations which can satisfy my livelihood, my immigration status and the development of my career, simultaneously. That was my original quest.
But the reality of things was that the rare job offers that were made to me were implicitly "in exchange for a visa"...Usually, pretty far off from what I wanted/needed to do, grossly underpaying me year after year and quite honestly often with Management and Managers that would be taking advantage of me and of the situation, since my being in the country and livelihood depended solely on them.

For my immigration law educated readers, here is a list of the visas I have been on, since I first came:
  1. F1
  2. Practical Training
  3. H1-B (3 years)
  4. B2
  5. E2
  6. H1-B (last 3 years)
  7. B2
As an answer to a lot of my friends and acquaintances to:
"How come you were always able to figure something out so why not this time?"

As you know now, an H1B visa is for a maximum of 6 years. As you can see above, I have used up all of my time... ....And quite honestly, all of my energy.