How to Secure Your H-1B Visa

In accessible and succinct language, How to Nail Your H-1B Visa guides foreign IT and other skilled workers through the steps they must take in tandem with their employers to secure H-1B, H1-B treaty substitute, or L-1 visas. These are the visas that enable foreign professionals to work in high-paying jobs in the US for up to six years without a green card. The process of applying for non-immigrant specialty occupation work status in the US is fraught with shifting quotas, filing deadlines, system overload, arcane provisions, bureaucratic unpredictability, black-box triggers, and historically high rates of requests for evidence and denials. Silicon Valley immigration lawyers James Bach and Robert Werner demystify the process and lay out the road map for making your visa application succeed. Bach and Werner deliver the up-to-the-minute procedural and inside information, tips, and tricks you need to know to nail your H-1B visa. They start even before the beginning, showing prospective H-1B employees how to craft their job resumes preemptively to avoid snags in the H-1B process. They cover the aftermath of successful applications, too: how to secure H-4 visas for your family, how to collaborate with your sponsor to ensure compliance and renewal, and how to leverage your non-immigrant status to immigrant status if you so choose. But primarily they focus on teaching you about the process itself, including how to ace your consular interview and how to answer an RFE. Whether you are a foreign skilled worker desiring to work in the US for the first time, a foreign student in the US wishing to remain after graduation, or an HR manager or strategic planner for a sponsoring entity, this handbook will provide you invaluable practical guidance on: Eligibility The duration, benefits, and costs of H-1B status The petition process and documentation How to interact with officers at US embassies and consulates, especially in India and China Compliance with government regulations What you’ll learnAs a result of reading How to Nail Your H-1B Visa, foreign professionals will learn: How to optimize the outcome of your non-immigrant skilled worker visa petition How to ace your interview at a US embassy or consulate and answer an RFE How to maintain or change your and your family’s status in the US Managers of US companies with skilled worker needs will learn: How to include international professionals in the development of your HR strategies How to coach your foreign hires to cooperate in the petition process and avoid pitfalls How to avoid fines, penalties, and other hazards Who this book is for This is a practical, accessible, and affordable short book for both individual foreign professionals (especially IT workers) who want or already have an H1-B non-immigrant specialty occupation work visa (or a treaty-substitute or alternative visa to the H1-B) and also for their US corporate sponsors (especially small-to-medium enterprises and startups in the IT sector), showing foreign employees and US employers how to work in perfect sync to nail that H1-B visa, hang on to it, and leverage it.