If you want to work in the US, chances are you need a work visa. As far as I know there are some special rules for Canadian citizens but if you are from other countries you need to apply for a visa.
A lot of the process to get a visa was unclear to me until I experienced it. In this post I am going to explain how the process was for me. There may be other options to get a visa but the one I am going to explain is what friends that relocated to California experienced as well.
Disclaimer
I am not a lawyer. What I write here is what I pulled together from multiple sources on the internet and from my experience during the process. There may be things where I don’t have the full picture or other things that are incorrect. If you want to relocate, speak to a lawyer — usually you will be contacted by one that is working for your company.
I am relocating to the US with an H-1B visa, so this is where I can provide the most information. The notes about other visas in this post are from what I’ve read upfront.
tl;dr
The short story is: if you are doing an internship you will get a J-1, if you are relocating to work in the Bay Area for multiple years you are either applying for an H-1B or an L-1. It takes a while and there is a lot of paperwork to fill out, but a lot of that should be taken over by your employer as they are sponsoring your visa. The steps to an H-1B are as follows:
- Your employer files a petitions for you
- Your petition is drawn in the lottery and marked for processing
- Your petition is approved
- You fill out a DS-160 form to apply for the visa, pay some fees and schedule an appointment at an embassy or consulate near you
- You show up to the appointment and get interviewed
- There may be some additional processing required
- Your visa is granted and mailed to you together with your passport
Different Visa Types
The first major distinction between visas are immigration and non-immigration visas. The first surprise I learned about is that if you move to the US to work there, this is not considered an immigration visa. The regular work visas have an expiration date and you have to leave the US when they expire — usually after a couple of years. If you want to remain in the US you need to get an immigration visa — i.e. a green card — which you can apply for while in the US with your work visa.
There are a lot of different non-immigration visas and at first they all sound very cryptic: J-1, H-1B, H-4, L-1 to name the most common ones in the tech industry. However the name already tells you a lot about what the visa is about:
- J — That’s a visa for students, teachers and other people that want to enter the US for academic reasons. If you want to study or enter the US for an internship, you most likely will apply for a J-1.
- H — The H category is a work visa. The most common one I encountered is the H-1B, which is for ‘specialty occupations in fields requiring highly specialized knowledge’. You need to have a degree from a university (or comparable) but it gives you the freedom to switch your employer, which is a nice plus in case things don’t work out for whatever reason. If your spouse is relocating with you they automatically qualify for an H-4, which entitles them to stay in the US as long as your H-1B is valid. The downside is that an H-4 does not grant permission to work in the US. Right now it is possible to request a work permit, however this may change in 2019. The H-1B visa is very hard to get as each year there are only a very limited number of visas available. You need to apply for it beginning of April and if you happen to get it you can start working in the US on October 1st and are allowed to enter the US a couple of days earlier.
- L — The only visa I know from the L category is the L-1. This is a transfer visa, meaning if you work for a company with its headquarters in the US and you stayed with them for at least a year (+ the time you spend in the US during this year) you qualify for an L-1 visa. So if you would get a job at one of the bigger tech companies they could hire you in the country you currently live in and after a year they could apply for an L-1 for you. The downside of the L-1 is that you can’t switch companies, it is bound to the contract you have with the company that sponsored your visa. The benefit is that your spouse automatically is entitled to work in the US.
There is a full list of all the available visa types over at the US Department of State.
Filing an H-1B Petition
As far as I know you can not apply for an H-1B visa yourself, instead you need to find a visa sponsor, i.e. your employer in the US. As far as I know this is true for all work visa. For other, non-work related visa types a sponsor could also be a family member who is living in the US.
The first thing that got me confused was that technically you are not applying for a visa yet. Instead you — or rather your employer — is actually filing a visa petition which, if granted, gives you the right to apply for a visa.
Filing a visa petition is a very complicated task and if the forms are filled out incorrectly your petition could be denied. Therefore this is usually done by specialised lawyers. Some companies may have lawyers in house that deal with that, others may just hire a law firm to do this for them. The important part here is that your company is the petitioner, not you. So the company needs to file the petition (or the law firm on your company’s behalf).
Your job in this part of the process is to provide them with the relevant information, however even that can take some time. It took me almost two full work days to get all the necessary information. Be prepared to submit infos about your passport, your educational background, your previous employers and many other things, all in a manner that it proves that the information is correct. So it likely will not be enough to just state that you have a degree in computer science or something similar, you also need to submit your bachelor or master certificate and the contact information of your university. I even needed to scan every page of my passport and the passport of my wife, including empty ones.
After you submitted all requested documents, the lawyer responsible for your case will prepare the paperwork and file the petition on behalf of your company. Because the number of H-1B visas granted each year is limited, there will be a lottery if there are more petitions filed than available visas. In practice this means: there will be a lottery, period. As far as I know, it never happened in recent years that there are less petitions filed than visas available.
Fun fact: instead of first sorting out invalid petitions, the lottery is the first thing that happens. To my understanding that means that essentially every invalid petition that got filed reduces your chances of getting picked. On the other side, if you have a masters degree, the odds shift a bit in your favour as a number of visas are reserved for workers with a masters degree.
The petition for an H-1B needs to be filed in early April and it should only take about a month to know whether you won the lottery or not. If you receive a receipt for the visa, you got picked and your petition will be processed. That’s the first and biggest hurdle to take on the road to an H-1B. After that you need to wait.
Processing the petition can take anywhere from a couple of month to half a year and more. Technically you are entitled to start working in the US on October 1st if you get an H-1B, however for example my H-1B only arrived end of October. So don’t make any plans until you actually have your visa.
Usually there is a process called ‘premium processing’. You employer can pay extra for your petition to be processed much faster. However if there are too many old petitions that still haven’t been processed, premium processing is suspended. This is what happened in 2017 and 2018, so I couldn’t get premium processing.
My petition got approved mid October, as far as I can tell without any further questions from the USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services). Once your petition is approved you will get an I-797B notice which proves you are entitled to apply for a visa.
Applying for the Visa
It is important to note that at this point you still don’t have a visa, all you have earned so far is the right to apply for a visa (all your employer did is making a case for why you should get a visa).
From now on you are responsible for actually getting the visa. Your next step is to fill out a DS-160 form. This is a form that contains a lot of information that was already part of your petition but I guess they also want to hear it from you. The form is available online and you need to provide information about which countries you have visited in the last couple of years, your education, your previous employers including contact details of your former managers, a picture of you and a lot of other information. Make sure to fill out these forms correctly. You may not get a visa if any of the information on that form doesn’t match the information on your petition.
You need to fill out one DS-160 for every person accompanying you to the US. So your spouse and your kids need their own form. Once you submitted one DS-160 for every person in your family you need to pay a visa fee. Talk to your recruiter, some companies reimburse you for these kind of fees as they may be part of your relocation package.
After you paid the fees you can apply for your visa interview appointment at an embassy or consulate near you. Here again your spouse and your kids need their own appointments, even though I believe it is possible to file group appointments.
It is worth noting that your spouse and your kids do not have to submit their forms at the same time or go to the same interview. As long as you have a valid I-797B or a valid H-1B visa they can do that whenever they want. For example if your spouse will relocate after you, they can get their H-4 visa even after you started working in the US.
The Visa Interview
Once you paid the fee and have an appointment it is time to gather all the information you need for your interview. I got a big pile of paper mailed from the lawyer responsible for my petition with all the stuff I should take to my appointment. The German I am I also made copies of all kind of original documents I had and also brought my original bachelors degree with me. In the end I did not need any of that.
My expectation was that I would sit in a room with someone and they would interview me for an hour or so. In reality I stood in line for 40 minutes and then walked up to a counter, got asked two or three questions, showed some proof that my employer wanted to hire me and that was it. I think the whole interview took less than 5 minutes, which makes sense given that all the information was already included in the petition.
The person at the counter told me my visa was approved, took my passport and that was it. The embassy / consulate keeps your passport to stamp the visa into it. It can take a couple of weeks to get it back, for me it took less than a week. Be aware of that, you will not be able to travel internationally after your interview for a while because you don’t have a passport. Under some conditions there may be additional processing time which could take up to 90 days, but this did not happen for me.
After 3 or 4 days my passport arrived via mail and that was it. I now have an H-1B visa and am allowed to enter the US for the purpose of working there.
If you have a visa and your experience differs from mine, I would love to hear about yours.