BrainFog wrote:
bb wrote:
Welcome to GMAT Club and congratulations on your great admits and esp at your age!
You will be comfy and cushy during the 2 years with a nice internship in the summer, easy one-year work permit, and usually a fairly straightforward H1B work permit after that.
bb you seem very confident that he'll get H1-B but last year only 1 of 3 applicants got it. I would love to read the reasons of your confidence.
My argument was that, the US work permit situation is better than the UK one; not necessarily that the US one was guaranteed. But I think it is right to get specific. Here it goes - my data and evidence are fairly limited in scope only to people I keep in touch via this forum and a few friends in the US who are on H1B. All of them have received visas over the last few years and I have not heard anyone on GMAT Club posting a sorry message they did not (that does not mean they did not face the issue, I just have not heard).
Now, I am not an immigration attorney and I don't keep tabs on the immigration/visa stuff but here are my thoughts. The obvious one is that in addition to the regular CAP that starts filling up on April 1st, there are also 20K slots for advanced degree holders, which is meaningful since re-applicants holding H1B are exempt. Is 1 in 3 advanced applicants or ALL applicants? There is some pain associated with timing of H1B and I can't remember what people do these days to bridge the gap between the end of OPT and Oct 1st date, but that's a tangent. I believe if you are lucky enough to snag a job by April 1st before you graduate, you may be able to apply early and get 2 shots at it (or rather your employer gets to do that) - this is why the internship is very important to make yourself useful and wanted.
Another reason for confidence is that the economy is booking at the moment and unemployment is at pretty low levels, indicating that it will be tough for Google and Amazon to find talent and they will likely lobby to increase the cap for H1B Advanced Degree holders (it has been shrinking and expanding over the last 15 years depending on the political and economic situations). The caps lag a year or two in timing, so usually they will increase them by the time it is too late and they will shrink them again, at the time, they should be expanding. Feast to famine type of situation. Since we are in the "famine" category at the moment, it is likely to be an excess situation in the coming years.
Finally, we are talking about something that is in this case 3 or 4 years away. By that time it may be a situation with abundance of H1B slots as it happened in late 2000's or it may be so tight that no international student can get a job under president Trump. We are speculating at the moment about something we cannot control or have certainty in. We just don't know, and in these cases i prefer the glass-half-full perspective.
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