How to Land a Work Visa and a Green Card in the United States

I came to the US this time on an L1b visa. L1 is a short-term work visa, valid for a maximum of five years (L1b — specialized knowledge workers) or seven years (L1a — managers): three years to start, renewable once for two more; and if you’re a manager, renewable once again for another two. The spouse and children under 21 of an L1 holder may reside in the US on an L2 visa.

L1 is a non-immigrant visa, but it permits immigrant intent. That is to say, a consular officer cannot refuse to issue an L1 on the grounds of immigrant intent, and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) cannot deny you entry for the same reason. As long as the company is willing and eligible (say, it hasn’t had a sizable round of layoffs in the past seven months), it can petition for a green card on behalf of the L1 holder. Along the way you go through adjustment of status, receive a priority date, and then just sit quietly and wait for your number to come up. Because green cards are allocated by country of chargeability, the queues for heavy senders like India and China are extremely long — right now, for L1b (EB2), it looks like at least five years.

To get an L1, you need to satisfy the following:

1. The parent company’s US entity is itself able to file an L1 individual petition or a blanket petition;

2. The applicant has worked continuously for more than one year at a Chinese company (or any non-US company) belonging to the same corporate group;

3. The applicant is a manager/executive (L1a) or a qualified specialized knowledge worker (L1b).

For a software engineer, joining a foreign company headquartered in the US (Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Juniper, Cisco, Symantec, EMC/VMware, Broadcom, and so on), or a domestic company with an R&D presence in the US (Huawei, for instance), gives you a shot at an L1b — but it depends entirely on the company and on your own cultivation, so it’s hard to put a probability on it.

For founders and small-business owners: open a branch office in the US, build up a decent hiring record (it can’t be a shell company — you need to employ at least a handful of people) and tax record (the company needs real revenue) for a year or more (ask a lawyer for the specifics), and then apply for a blanket petition or an individual petition, thereby acquiring the ability to relocate employees of the Chinese company to the US. The younger the US entity, the shorter the term of the petition granted — and that petition term is exactly how long the employee’s L1 visa will let them work. So entrepreneurs who intend to take the L1 road to a green card should plan ahead (assuming, of course, that the business itself is doing well). Once the company’s petition is approved, in principle it can apply for L1 visas on behalf of its employees. And for the business owner (the founder himself), what’s usually available is an L1a.

As an engineer, if for whatever reason you don’t want to (or can’t) use L1 to obtain the right to work and reside in the US, there are two other options: H-1B and O1.

Like L1, H-1B is a visa that requires employer support. You can be working at any company in China; so long as you find a job in the US and the employer can sponsor you for an H-1B, you can apply for one and work short-term. Unlike L1, H-1B has an annual quota, with a lottery in April — in the last couple of years the selection rate has been around 40–50%. Winners can only start working on H-1B in October of that year. If a US company gives you an offer but you don’t win the lottery, the company will usually park you at an R&D site in another country; after a year there, you can keep entering the lottery, or take the L1 route.

O1 (alien of extraordinary ability) is not a work visa; it needs no employer sponsor, and you can apply on your own. Back when I was working out my relocation last year, I looked into the O1 requirements and discussed with a lawyer how far off my profile at the time (four US patents) was from qualifying. The lawyer smiled and said, tactfully, don’t bother thinking that way — you’d be better off looking at NIW (National Interest Waiver). The O1 bar is very high. Unless you’re a winner of some international prize (a Nobel, say), or a leader in your field (Jet Li in film, Deng Yaping in sports, etc.), there’s really only one path to an O1: publish enough papers of international caliber. Generally speaking, people who publish such papers are rarely master’s students; they’re mostly PhDs and postdocs. So if you have no particular talent and are just an undergraduate, or hold a non-research master’s, don’t head in that direction. Of course, if you work at a place like Microsoft Research Asia, doing the most cutting-edge work and producing high-caliber papers yourself, O1 is absolutely a fine choice.

L1/H-1B holders both need employer sponsorship, and if you lose your job you’re basically out (H-1B holders who find a new employer within the grace window, and whose new employer is willing to sponsor the H-1B, are fine). O1 has no such constraint. L1/H-1B applicants for a green card have to wait in a queue; O1 doesn’t. So O1 is a very flexible (and, let’s be honest, GAODASHANG — fancy-schmancy) visa. It has its shortcomings, of course: the biggest flaw is that it’s single-entry; once you leave the country you have to apply for the visa all over again — and although O1 renewals are visa-interview-waived, it’s still a hassle and costs extra money. This arrangement exists because China isn’t willing to grant multiple-entry visas to the US for the equivalent category, and by the principle of reciprocity between nations, O1 is single-entry only. On top of that, O1 holders are so rare, such a tiny population, that even though local banks have dedicated loan programs for newcomers with no credit history who want to put down roots, those programs are aimed at “mass-market” visas like H-1B and L1 — when they encounter an obscure O1, they have no idea what to do with you.

If you don’t work at a foreign company (no L1 opportunity), can’t find a job at a US company directly (no H-1B), and are as mediocre as your humble programmer here (not O1 material), there’s one road left: spend a year or two getting a master’s in CS in the US. Note that even if you’re admitted to an EE program, once you arrive you should do everything you can to switch to CS — every friend of mine who went to study EE in the last couple of years has switched to CS; you can’t find a job with EE. After graduating, students enter the H-1B lottery once in the student pool, and if they don’t win, once more in the general pool; and if you’re unlucky and still don’t win, you can make full use of your year of OPT (apparently now extended to four years) to try twice more the following year. If you still don’t win after all that, then go home dutifully — and trust that the good Lord has his reasons for doing things this way. Besides, if this place won’t have you, there’s always somewhere that will.

After I left Tuke Circle, I drifted for a while, unable to find my next direction. But my past dealings with people in Silicon Valley had made me fall in love with the place. LP (my wife) saw what was on my mind and said: if you’re that drawn to the technology and the startup atmosphere of Silicon Valley, why not look into the chance of working in the US? So I asked my family for two years to make a go of it — and if nothing came of it, so be it. After hitting a wall with H-1B, I turned to L1, while keeping an eye on O1 and on the possibility of going back to school. Fortunately I found a good boss, and after a great deal of effort, within two years it actually came together. The only reason I’m writing this is to give friends with the same dream something to go on. All roads lead to Rome; working in the US is not as far out of reach as it seems. Silicon Valley is a good place, very well suited to engineers: engineers don’t have that many twists and turns, life here is far removed from the bright lights and the buzz, so you never find it dull; and there are brilliant people everywhere — from San Jose, heading west then north along the 101, you could kowtow at every step and make a pilgrimage all the way to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco.