How to Get a Visa to Live and Work in the US
Disclaimer: I currently live in the Czech Republic. I moved back to Prague 9 months ago. But I have always been asked about how I got to the US and I am now more frequently asked about how I got my Visa to legally live and work there. So this blog post will be focused mostly on that rather than on me sharing reasons for my move back to my home country.
So, with no further delay, here we go:
2014: I graduated from Masters in June 2014 and because all journalism and PR internships that I got offered back in the UK were unpaid, I decided to look further. I moved back to Prague and continued searching. In August, I randomly hear from someone from LA who owns a PR agency. Turns out, my uncle in the US was helping me (in the background) with my internship hunt and mentioned my name to a friend who recommended me to this person - who later became my mentor and boss of 7 years!
Anyway, so I got the internship offer but the question was - what VISA do I need to get and work there? The best type of visa for this is J1. To get J1, you have to have an offer on the table (I had that) and then you and the sponsor (aka your future employer) have to fill in bunch of paperwork which you later submit at the US embassy that actually approves your visa. I did not do all of this by myself though - someone recommended that I use services of Intrax. It’s an agency that basically served as a middle entity between us (me and my future employer) and the US immigration. For a fee of course. They knew all the legalities and were the ones to tell us what is needed from us. By the way, they would be able to help me find an employer if I did not come to them with an existing offer.
Needless to say that I started this process in August 2014 and I was supposed to have my visa approved in two months. Unfortunately they lost my paperwork and we had to submit everything again so that of course delayed the entire process. At the end, my visa was approved in December 2014 and I moved to Los Angeles in January 2015.
Early 2015: My visa was originally valid for 6 months only but I quickly felt like I wanted to stay longer to get more experience from my internship. Working together with Intrax, I found out that my visa can be extended for additional year. We had to pay some fee again and submit more documents but I believe that the paperwork was approved within a month (or maybe two this time).
Late 2015: I knew my visa was to expire in June 2016. And I knew at that time that I really want to stay in Los Angeles and continue working for the agency because I was learning a lot. After talking with my boss (an immigrant herself) at the end of 2015, she agreed to sponsor a work visa for me: H1-B. Let me tell you, this is possibly one of the hardest visas to get. There is multiple hoops to “jump” through and it requires a lot of time and mental energy. This visa is for what they call “skilled workers” which basically means that you have to provide the US immigration with hundreds of pages of evidence to “explain” why you qualify to be a “skilled worker”, despite the fact that many of the applicants have multiple university degrees. This is apparently to protect the American workforce. Unfortunately, the extensive paper work is not the end. It’s actually just the beginning because you have to be actually first selected in a work visa lottery. And this is where it gets tricky. Because annually, there is much more “skilled workers” applying for the H1-B visa and the computerized lottery randomly selects only a small fraction of these applications. When I applied, there were over 250,000 applications and they only selected 60,000 out of these (I was one of them!). According to USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), there were 308,613 applications in 2022 and 131,970 selected.
It’s only when you are selected that they start reviewing the paperwork that you submitted. And even then, in 90% of the cases they decide that you have not provided them with “enough evidence” and request RFE (Request for Evidence) which moves the date of your potential approval months in the future … unless your (potential) employer is willing to pay extra money to get a decision in a month. I should also point out that by law, your (potential) employer is required to pay all the fees - lawyers and the application fees - this comes at thousands of dollars per applicant. By the way, even with RFE, there is still a chance that your application will be declined.
Yes, I won the lottery :) And having described the hoops that we went through pre and after me winning it, let me give you a realistic idea of the timeframe this all was taking place in:
Nov / Dec 2015 - I decided to apply for the visa and started collecting necessary documents with the help of an immigration lawyer
March 2016 - deadline for USCIS to receive your paperwork
April 2016 - lottery took place
May 2016 - decision time + I received RFE + we worked and submitted my paperwork + paid for premium processing to get an expedited decision (you technically have 3 months I believe to provide them with the paperwork but we needed to act quickly because my other visa was expiring soon
June 27, 2016 - my H1-B visa was FINALLY approved
June 30 - my last day at work on my current visa
July 2016 - technically unemployed in Los Angeles + my visa expired at the end of July
August 2016-Sept 2016 - in Prague waiting to be officially able to enter the US on the H1-B visa and start working at the agency again
*when you get the H1-B visa, you can only start working with it as of Oct 1st that year
End of Sept - return to LA
Oct 3 - Back to work!
It is at this point that I should point out that the H1-B visa has a validity for 3 years. And you are able to have it extended for another 3 years. Since you have already gone through the lottery at that point, you do not have to do that again. But other than that, the process remains the same. Even though they have already approved you once.
2019: At this point, my visa was expiring at the end of Sept 2019. What I have not said previously is that once the paperwork is submitted, you cannot travel internationally. So we had to be strategic about when to submit it because I was supposed to travel to Europe in July. We worked on the paperwork in Spring 2019 and then submitted it in July as soon as I came back from Europe. We paid for the premium processing to have the decision sooner again but it was cutting it really close to the expiration day of the one I was on at that point. Which was pretty stressful because if they were to decline the visa for whatever reason, I would have a month to pack my life in the US after 5 years and would be forced to leave. At the end it all worked out and I got it and was able to stay in the U.S. for most of the next 3 years that the extension guaranteed me. My H1-B visa technically only expired now in Sept 2022 but I had since moved back to Europe in March 2022.
I know this seems like a lot of information but believe me, this is still the condensed version :) But because I truly do understand what it takes to go through this process, both administratively but mostly emotionally, I wanted to provide you with the most realistic and understandable account of my experience. I am super grateful that my former employer was willing to sponsor my visa for all those years. But I think it’s also fair that people understand that this takes lot of time and mental energy while you are waiting for someone (or a computer) to make a decision about your future.